America is Talking to the Taliban

This is likely to shake things up. Steve Coll, who tends to be pretty impeccably sourced, reports in the New Yorker that Washington has begun to talk to the Taliban:

Last year, however, as the U.S.-led Afghan ground war passed its ninth anniversary, and Mullah Omar remained in hiding, presumably in Pakistan, a small number of officials in the Obama Administration—among them the late Richard Holbrooke, the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan—argued that it was time to try talking to the Taliban again.

Holbrooke’s final diplomatic achievement, it turns out, was to see this advice accepted.