President Barack Obama chose his words carefully when asked in an interview with Dawn earlier this week why the United States has been silent on Kashmir in recent months:

“I don’t think that we’ve been silent on the fact that India is a great friend of the United States and Pakistan is a great friend of the United States, and it always grieves us to see friends fighting. And we can’t dictate to Pakistan or India how they should resolve their differences, but we know that both countries would prosper if those differences are resolved,” the newspaper quoted him as saying.

“And I believe that there are opportunities, maybe not starting with Kashmir but starting with other issues, that Pakistan and India can be in a dialogue together and over time to try to reduce tensions and find areas of common interest,” he said. ”And we want to be helpful in that process, but I don’t think it’s appropriate for us to be the mediators in that process. I think that this is something that the Pakistanis and Indians can take leadership on.”

During his election campaign, Obama said the United States should try to help resolve the Kashmir dispute so that Pakistan could focus on tackling militants on its western border with Afghanistan. “We should probably try to facilitate a better understanding between Pakistan and India and try to resolve the Kashmir crisis so that they can stay focused not on India, but on the situation with those militants,” he said in an interview with MSNBC in October 2008, shortly before the presidential election.

The U.S. public position changed after the November 2008 attacks on Mumbai, blamed by India on the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group.  Under pressure from India, which argued that any talk of resolving the Kashmir dispute would be rewarding terrorism, the Obama administration quietly dropped any reference to Kashmir.

But has the U.S. position on India, Pakistan and Kashmir really changed, or just gone underground?

It’s hard to believe that the U.S. position has changed dramatically. As I discussed in this analysis, the Lashkar-e-Taiba – once nurtured by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency to fight India in Kashmir – is increasingly being seen as a potential threat to the West comparable to al Qaeda (scroll down on this pdf document from CTC Sentinel to see a detailed background report on the LeT and its Jamat ud-Dawa charitable wing).

Neither the United States nor Britain can afford to turn a blind eye to the Lashkar-e-Taiba when its training camps can be used by disaffected Pakistanis from the diaspora. And that suggests that the old “hands-off” approach in which the West tended to view the Kashmir dispute as a bilateral issue between India and Pakistan no longer works. It needs to convince the Pakistan Army to turn its sights on the LeT while also nudging India to resume a peace process that might — over the long term — help reduce tensions over Kashmir.

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President Asif Ali Zardari met at a regional conference in Yekaterinburg in Russia this month. But they remain a long way off from resuming a formal peace process broken off by India after the Mumbai attacks. While the Pakistan government has said it wants to resume the peace process — a position supported in detail in Pakistani op-eds, including by former Pakistan ambassador Maleeha Lodhi and by retired Lieutenant-General Talat Masood – India wants Pakistan to take action against the Lashkar-e-Taiba first before it will resume formal talks.

In the meantime, the Pakistan Army is engaged in what looks as though it will be a very protracted and difficult battle against the Pakistani Taliban in Waziristan. So even if it were determined to target the Lashkar-e-Taiba, it would be unlikely to do so until it has defeated the Pakistani Taliban. Yet without a reduction in tensions with India, it is also unlikely to move significant numbers of troops from the eastern border with India to use against the Pakistani Taliban on the western border with Afghanistan.

So how does the United States break the logjam?

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visits India in July, and while she is likely to choose her words in public as carefully as Obama, privately she is expected to try to enlist Indian support for U.S. policies in Afghanistan and Pakistan — including by moving forward on peace talks. In advance of her trip, she has promised to “create a new era” in the relationship between the United States and India.  Given India’s reluctance to respond — or be seen to respond — to American pressure on talks with Pakistan, that’s probably the kind of language New Delhi needs to hear if it is to be won over.

The challenge for Clinton, and U.S. administration as a whole, will be in winning over India without offending Pakistan, where people are intensely wary of a U.S.-India relationship that would squeeze the country from both sides, from Afghanistan and from India.

When President Barack Obama unveiled his plans for Afghanistan and Pakistan in March, he promised to involve other countries with a stake in the region, including the Central Asian states, the Gulf nations and Iran; Russia, India and China. But a major sticking point in enlisting regional support has been distrust over the United States’ long-term intentions for Afghanistan.  Washington has never been able to shake off suspicions that it is using its battle against the Taliban and al Qaeda to establish a permanent military presence in the region. 

In that context, Obama’s statement during his speech in Cairo that the United States is not seeking to set up permanent military bases in Afghanistan is rather interesting:

“Make no mistake: we do not want to keep our troops in Afghanistan. We seek no military bases there. It is agonizing for America to lose our young men and women. It is costly and politically difficult to continue this conflict. We would gladly bring every single one of our troops home if we could be confident that there were not violent extremists in Afghanistan and Pakistan determined to kill as many Americans as they possibly can. But that is not yet the case.”

It will be worth watching to see whether the Obama administration is able to build on this to win more regional support for its policies in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  But at the same time, it has to avoid feeding Pakistani fears that the United States might one day abruptly leave the region, just as it did when the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989. 

(Photo: Obama speaks at Cairo University/Goran Tomasevic)

(For Reuters analyses of Obama’s speech in relation to the Middle East, please see here and here).

With President Hamid Karzai now looking all but unassailable in Afghanistan’s August election, two articles out this week - one from Washington and the other from India - offer mirror-image analyses of President Barack Obama’s handling of the Afghan leader. They should really be read as companion pieces since both offer insights into the workings of the Obama administration and the complexities of Afghan politics.  Reading both together also highlights how different the world looks depending on your perspective, whether writing from America or Asia.

According to this article in the Washington Post by Rajiv Chandrasekaran (highlighted by Joshua Foust at Registan.net) the Obama administration had decided to keep Karzai at arm’s length. It says Obama’s advisers faulted former President George W. Bush for forging too personal a relationship with Karzai through bi-weekly video conferences and as a result creating such cosiness that it became hard for his administration to put pressure on the Afghan government.

“It was a conversation. It was a dialogue. It was a lot of ‘How are you doing? How is your son?’” it quotes a senior U.S. government official who attended some of the sessions as saying. “Karzai sometimes placed his infant son on his lap during the conversations.”

“Obama’s advisers have crafted a two-pronged strategy that amounts to a fundamental break from the avuncular way President George W. Bush dealt with the Afghan leader,” the report said.  ”Obama intends to maintain an arm’s-length relationship with Karzai in the hope that it will lead him to address issues of concern to the United States, according to senior U.S. government officials. The administration will also seek to bypass Karzai by working more closely with other members of his cabinet and by funnelling more money to local governors.”

Retired Indian diplomat M.K. Bhadrakumar, a former ambassador to Afghanistan, has a rather different reading on the wisdom of the Obama administration’s approach. In this article in the Asia Times Online, headlined What Obama could learn from Karzai, (highlighted by Marie-France Calle on her French-language blog), he says the Americans allowed themselves to be outmanoeuvred by the Afghan President by keeping him at arms-length.

“In retrospect, United States President Barack Obama did a great favour to Afghan President Hamid Karzai by excluding him from his charmed circle of movers and shakers who would wield clout with the new administration in Washington,” he writes. “Obama was uncharacteristically rude to Karzai by not even conversing with him by telephone for weeks after he was sworn in, even though Afghanistan was the number one policy priority of his presidency.”

But Karzai, he says, had the last laugh, as the opprobrium heaped upon him by the west raised his standing in Afghan eyes. Karzai had been able to manoeuvre himself into a strong position through weeks of Afghan-style backroom negotiations, capped by a decision by a popular candidate to pull out of the election race.

“The Afghan experience with democracy offers a good lesson for Obama: it is best to keep a discreet distance and leave the Afghans to broker power-sharing on their own terms, according to their own ethos and tradition,” he writes. “However, Obama has a long way to go in imbibing the lessons of democracy in the Hindu Kush …”

(Reuters photos: President Karzai, and Karzai with President Obama and Vice President Biden. Photos by Yuri Gripas and Jonathan Ernst)

Some readers have suggested that Pakistan’s politicians close ranks to beat back the Taliban advance, and that former prime minister Nawaz Sharif’s party re-unites with the ruling coalition as a first step.

It is an idea that seems to be gaining traction, going by a spate of media reports  The Financial Times said that Sharif could consider joining a unity coalition led by President Asif Ali Zardari, citing a senior member of Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League (Muslim).

It quoted the politician as saying that Sharif wanted to reassure foreign powers, especially the United States, he had no intention of trying to de-stabilise the year-old  government.

The reports come just before President Barack Obama sits down with Zardari and Afghan President Hamid Karzai in Washington for security talks and at a time when concern over Pakistan’s stability in the face of the Taliban gains has reached fever-pitch.

Pakistan’s Dawn said key western capitals seemed to be pushing, or at least, hoping for a reunion between Zardari’s Pakistan People’s Party and Sharif’s group. The two could form a formidable alliance and send a powerful signal of a united face against the militancy, it said. The PML (N)’s popularity in the key province of Punjab - where many expect the next wave of militancy - and Sharif’s right-of-centre conservative credentials could help bolster the PPP in its battle with the militants.

But is Sharif going to take the bait? Dawn says it perhaps makes more sense politically for his party to watch from the sidelines while the Zardari government struggles with the militancy, deploys the military option and further loses public support.

And what of Sharif? Even if western capitals have discovered virtues in him in this hour of Pakistatan’s battle with militants, can the former premier long accused of sympathies for hardline Islamist groups really be seen as the choice of the West? Wouldn’ t that be the kiss of death even before he started out in the prevailing climate in Pakistan?

“Once in a position of authority or high office, Nawaz is certain to disavow U.S. support because identification with the U.S. in the present political climate is tantamount to political, and possibly actual, suicide for a Pakistani politician,” argues Nightwatch, an intelligence analysis website.

President Barack Obama’s statement on Pakistan at a news conference on Wednesday appeared to be more measured than the spate of alarmist comments about the country in the past week or so.  It is worth reading in full:

“Q    Thank you, Mr. President.  I want to move to Pakistan. Pakistan appears to be at war with the Taliban inside their own country.  Can you reassure the American people that, if necessary, America could secure Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal and keep it from getting into the Taliban’s hands or, worst-case scenario, even al Qaeda’s hands?

THE PRESIDENT:  I’m confident that we can make sure that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is secure — primarily, initially, because the Pakistani army, I think, recognises the hazards of those weapons falling into the wrong hands.  We’ve got strong military-to-military consultation and cooperation.  I am gravely concerned about the situation in Pakistan, not because I think that they’re immediately going to be overrun and the Taliban would take over in Pakistan; more concerned that the civilian government there right now is very fragile and don’t seem to have the capacity to deliver basic services — schools, health care, rule of law, a judicial system that works for the majority of people.  And so as a consequence, it is very difficult for them to gain the support and the loyalty of their people.

So we need to help Pakistan help Pakistanis.  And I think that there’s a recognition increasingly on the part of both the civilian government there and the army that that is their biggest weakness.

On the military side, you’re starting to see some recognition just in the last few days, that the obsession with India as the mortal threat to Pakistan has been misguided, and that their biggest threat right now comes internally.  And you’re starting to see the Pakistan military take much more seriously the armed threat from militant extremists.

We want to continue to encourage Pakistan to move in that direction and we will provide them all the cooperation that we can.  We want to respect their sovereignty, but we also recognise that we have huge strategic interests, huge national security interests in making sure that Pakistan is stable and that you don’t end up having a nuclear armed militant state.

Q    But in a worst-case scenario –

THE PRESIDENT:  I’m not going to engage –

Q    — military, U.S. military could secure this nuclear –

THE PRESIDENT:  I’m not going to engage in hypotheticals of that sort.  I feel confident that that nuclear arsenal will remain out of militant hands.  Okay?”

 

Obama’s acknowledgement that he was alarmed about Pakistan, and his reference to the military’s “misguided” obsession with India, have been widely reported.  But personally, I was struck by his comments that the real cause for concern was the fragility of the civilian government and its inability to deliver basic services — because, if nothing else, they seemed to echo more closely views written from inside the country.

Pakistani newspapers ran a couple of excellent news analyses earlier this week.  In this editorial in Dawn newspaperMohammad Waseem explains why there is such a cacophony of views about Pakistan, by comparing those expounding on it to the blind men who tried to make sense of an elephant by touching different parts of its body and reaching different conclusions about the nature of the beast. In the News International, Asif Ezdi picks up on what has become a recurring theme — that the struggle under way within Pakistan is not just between religious obscurantists and secularists, but between the great mass of the poor and the feudalandmilitary elite which dominates the country.  Unless the elite moves quickly to deliver social justice (the basic services mentioned by Obama), he says, the poor will continue to see the Taliban, with their speedy Islamic law and free schools, as a viable alternative

Do Obama’s comments, therefore, suggest a shift in U.S. thinking about Pakistan? The United States has traditionally been criticised by Pakistanis for heavy-handedness, buying Pakistan’s loyalty with heavy doses of aid while simultaneously bombing its territory with missile strikes from unmanned drone aircraft. Or are these merely reassuring words, offering style rather than substance?

There is clearly an intense debate under way within the Obama administration over how to handle Pakistan.

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Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper reports from Washington that the United States is seeking fundamental change in Pakistan: it wants Pakistan, presumably the military most of all,  to stop thinking of India as the enemy.

And linked with this, it wants Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, accused of sponsoring militant groups to advance its security interests in the region, brought under effective civilian control.

Dawn says the Americans are offering Pakistan a new enemy as replacement : the militants operating along the border with Afghanistan who are increasingly striking deeper within Pakistan.

On Sunday a suicide bomber struck in a religious centre in Punjab kiling 22 people, continuing an expansion of the militant campaign into the heartland which seems to have gathered momentum over the past month.

Can it work? India as no longer the existential threat to its very identity as many in Pakistan believe?

U.S. envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke has begun a fresh trip to the region  this week that will also take him to New Delhi, and a report released by the Asia Society just before that trip suggests ways through which America can begin reshaping perceptions in Pakistan so that it feels less threatened by its bigger neighbour.

Holbrooke and National Security Adviser General James Jones were part of the task force that worked on the report “Back from the Brink: A strategy for stabilising Afghanistan and Pakistan” before they stepped down following their appointment in the Obama administration. A PDF of the report is here.

Very broadly it calls for addressing Pakistan’s security concerns on Afghanistan, Kashmir and nuclear weapons so that “it no longer requires the use of covertly supported guerrilla forces against neighbours.” 

The recommendations of the task force are: support dialogue between India and Paklstan so that they find a lasting solution to Kashmir, address Afghan-Pakistan disputes so that Afghanistan recognizes the Durand Line as the border between the two countries, and finally begin a dialogue with Pakistan over its nuclear  programme including perhaps recognising the reality of  its nuclear weapons.

But what about the mood over the border in India? Since the attacks in Mumbai blamed on the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba, India has set its face against a resumption of dialogue that was in any case making fitful progress.

It is now in election mode, and if you follow the debate the mood has clearly hardened with the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party promising a more muscular Pakistan policy.

But by making Pakistan the overarching element of its security strategy and expecting India to play its part, is the United States  running the risk of ignoring the interests of New Delhi which not long ago was being celebrated as a strategic partner? Is it back to re-hyphenating india and Pakistan, as an Indian analyst here suggests?

[Reuters photo of protest in Lahore against a suicide bombing and U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke with Afghan President Hamid Karzai]

Barely had President Barack Obama outlined a new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan meant to narrow the focus to eliminating the threat from al Qaeda and its Islamist allies, before the U.S.-led campaign ran into what was always going to be one of its biggest problems in limiting its goals. What does it do about the rights of women in the region?

The treatment of women has dominated the headlines this week after Afghan President Hamid Karzai signed a new law for the minority Shi’ite population which both the United States and the United Nations said could undermine women’s rights. Karzai has promised a review of the law, while also complaining it was misinterpreted by Western journalists. 

In Pakistan, video footage has been circulated of Taliban militants flogging a teenage girl in the Swat valley, where the government concluded a peace deal with the Taliban in February. The graphic and disturbing video, which has been posted on YouTube, has outraged many Pakistanis and the flogging was condemned by Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani as shameful. There have been contradictory reports of exactly when and why the girl was punished, although Dawn newspaper quoted a witness as saying she was flogged two weeks ago for refusing a marriage proposal.

But where do women’s rights fit into the new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan?

The New York Times quoted Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as saying in response to a question on the Afghan law that “women’s rights are a central part of the foreign policy of the Obama administration”.

Mark Malloch Brown, Britain’s foreign office minister for Africa, Asia and the U.N., was quoted by the Guardian as expressing dismay over the Afghan law’s impact on women’s rights. “We are caught in the Catch-22 that the Afghans obviously have the right to write their own laws,” he said. “But there is dismay. The rights of women was one of the reasons the UK and many in the west threw ourselves into the struggle in Afghanistan. It matters greatly to us and our public opinion.”

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Read President Barack Obama’s speech on his new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan and compare it to what he said a year ago and it’s hard to see how much further forward we are in understanding exactly how he intends to uproot Islamist militants inside Pakistan.

Last year, Obama said that ”If we have actionable intelligence about high-level al Qaeda targets in Pakistan’s border region, we must act if Pakistan will not or cannot.” Last week, he said that, ”Pakistan must demonstrate its commitment to rooting out al Qaeda and the violent extremists within its borders.  And we will insist that action be taken — one way or another — when we have intelligence about high-level terrorist targets.”

The United States has already stepped up attacks by drone missiles on suspected militant targets in Pakistan’s tribal areas since Obama took office, despite official protests by Pakistan, which says they are counterproductive since they cause civilian casualties and encourage people to support the insurgents.

The Pakistani protests began to look rather hollow after media reports that the drones were taking off from a base inside Pakistan. But that may have missed the point. The question of where the drones are based is perhaps less important than the distrust between the U.S. and Pakistani militaries on sharing intelligence about militant targets.

General Ashfaq Kayani, now head of the Pakistan Army, tells a rather revealing story about this. He is quoted in Brian Cloughley’s book “War, Coups and Terror” as describing the case of a tribesman with a performing monkey who gathered an audience of turban-clad, rifle-bearing men around him in a village in 2005. The U.S. controllers of the drone mistook the event for a weapons-training session or military briefing and dropped a missile, killing many in the audience (he doesn’t say what happened to the monkey). “This, said the General, was an example of lack of cultural understanding,” writes Cloughley.

“The monkey incident, and other attacks by the U.S. within Pakistan,” adds Cloughley, “have convinced the population of North West Frontier Province and a disturbing number of other citizens, including many in uniform, that there is nothing to be gained by supporting the United States, which they consider to be overbearing and imperceptive in its engagement with the country.”

So has intelligence-sharing moved on since then?  If the United States wanted to be sure of hitting the right targets, it could ask the Pakistani military to help it guide the drones and then assess, on looking through the remote camera, whether they were on course.  Or as Foreign Minister Mahmood  Qureshi said last month, it could give Pakistan drones to carry out the task itself.

But intelligence-sharing is not easy at the best of times between different national armies. It’s particularly tough when you don’t trust your allies. Senior U.S. military officers say they believe elements in Pakistan’s Inter-Services intelligence, or ISI, provide support to Taliban or al Qaeda militants. Has Obama worked out how to square that circle? As yet, we don’t know.

The other big question is over where the United States intends to target the Islamists. U.S. officials have begun saying publicly that the Afghan Taliban are based in Quetta in the Pakistani province of Baluchistan — quite different from the tribal areas where both the Pakistan Army and the U.S. drone missiles have been concentrated until now.  “Quetta appears to be the headquarters for the leaders of the Taliban and some of the worst people in the world,” special envoy Richard Holbrooke said in an interview with the BBC.

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U.S. President Barack Obama set out his strategy to fight the war in Afghanistan on Friday, committing 4,000 military trainers and many more civillian personnel to the country, increasing military and financial aid to stabilise Pakistan and signalling that the door for reconciliation was open in Afghanistan for those who had taken to arms because of coercion or for a price.

He said the situation was increasingly perilous, with 2008 the bloodiest year for American forces in Afghanistan. But the United States  was determined to “disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan”, he said, warning that attacks on the United States were being plotted even now.

But it is the emphasis on Pakistan that seems to be the most significant shift in the U.S. strategy since it went into Afghanistan more than seven years ago, with an avowedly aggressive carrot and stick approach. Time columnist Joe Klein said the most important aspect of the security review was a refocusing on the situation in Pakistan. “The terrorist safe havens in the tribal areas is the heart of the problem.”

Obama left little doubt that Pakistan was going to be front and centre of the war in Afghanistan, declaring this is where the top al Qaeda leadership was based.  And that their presence there posed a threat to not just America, but countries around the world from Europe to Africa and above all to Pakistan itself.

Here are some excerpts from his speech relating to Pakistan.

“In the nearly eight years since 9/11, al-Qaida and its extremist allies have moved across the border to the remote areas of the Pakistani frontier. This almost certainly includes al-Qaida’s leadership: Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. They have used this mountainous terrain as a safe haven to hide, to train terrorists, to communicate with followers, to plot attacks and to send fighters to support the insurgency in Afghanistan. For the American people, this border region has become the most dangerous place in the world.”

“But this is not simply an American problem — far from it. It is, instead, an international security challenge of the highest order. Terrorist attacks in London and Bali were tied to al-Qaida and its allies in Pakistan, as were attacks in North Africa and the Middle East, in Islamabad and in Kabul. If there is a major attack on an Asian, European or African city, it, too, is likely to have ties to al-Qaida’s leadership in Pakistan. The safety of people around the world is at stake.”

America, he said, wanted results from both Pakistan and Afghanistan.

“And after years of mixed results, we will not, and cannot, provide a blank check. Pakistan must demonstrate its commitment to rooting out al-Qaida and the violent extremists within its borders. And we will insist that action be taken — one way or another — when we have intelligence about high-level terrorist targets.”

Will Obama’s stratetgy work? If Pakistan played ball,  it would get an unprecedented amount of military and financial aid, several experts said. “President Obama understands to get the support of the Pakistani people, which will make it easier to get the help we need from the Pakistani government, it takes carrots. And his plan focuses squarely on that,” wrote Jon Soltz, a former U.S. army captain in Iraq, in the Huffington Post.

Soltz said an even more striking part of Obama’s strategy was his willingness to deal with those who were not hard core Taliban.

“There is an uncompromising core of the Taliban. They must be met with force, and they must be defeated. But there are also those who have taken up arms because of coercion, or simply for a price. These Afghans must have the option to choose a different course. That is why we will work with local leaders, the Afghan government, and international partners to have a reconciliation process in every province,” Obama said.

In so doing and by signalling that he was ready to become partners with those who the United States was fighting today,  Obama had “given up the pipe dream of setting up a European-style democracy in Afghanistan, and instead has refocused our goals on a more urgent mission - protecting America and the world from terrorism” Soltz said.

But what about Pakistanis themselves? The popular All Things Pakistan blog noted that Obama had spoken to the Pakistani people and so invited them to comment on his remarks. Some of the early comments were generally positive, with one reader saying he was glad the United States had realised the high cost Pakistan was paying. “It is the Pakistanis who have been doing all the dying.”  .

(Reuters photos: President Barack Obama; Afghan women in Taloqan; Pakistani soldiers in Wana)

“

The debate about whether the United States should open talks with Afghan insurgents appears to be gathering momentum — so much so that it is beginning to acquire an air of inevitability, without there ever being a specific policy announcement.

The U.N. special envoy to Afghanistan, Kai Eide, became the latest to call for talks when he told France’s Le Monde newspaper that reconciliation was an essential element.  “But it is important to talk to the people who count,” he said. ”A fragmented approach to the insurgency will not work. You need to be ambitious and include all the Taliban movement.”

His remarks follow much more guarded comments by President Barack Obama who said in an interview with the New York Times that Washington might look for “comparable opportunities in Afghanistan and in the Pakistani region” as it did in Iraq, involving “reaching out to people that we would consider to be Islamic fundamentalists, but who were willing to work with us.”

Vice President Joe Biden has also said that U.S. assessments were that only five percent of the Taliban were “incorrigible”.  He told a news conference in Brussels that whatever happened would have to be initiated by the Afghan government. “But I do think it is worth engaging and determining whether or not there are those who are willing to participate in a secure and stable Afghan state.”

According to the New York Times, the Afghan government has already begun exploring the potential for negotiations with the Taliban leadership council of Mullah Omar and with mujahideen leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Al Jazeera has also reported that the Afghan government has begun talks with Hekmatyar, while the Christian Science Monitor said Kabul had opened preliminary negotiations with the network of mujahideen commander Jalaluddin Haqqani.

I have just written an analysis on what any U.S. dialogue with Afghan insurgents would mean for India and Pakistan, two countries with a major stake in any political settlement, and am still trying to pin down the implications for other major regional players, including Russia, Iran and China.

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