The conference set in motion the British and American plan for the reintegration of elements of the Taliban into the political process. The erstwhile enemies of the central government will be encouraged to become respectable and integrate themselves into the jobs market with the aid of a $500 million fund while the planned elections have been postponed from May till September.

It appears that the war and the argument have come full circle and the parallels with Vietnam grow ever stronger and more poignant.

As the involved national leaders prepared to meet under the stewardship of Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister, the Commander of allied forces in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, the Nato Commander, raised the notion that the planned surge of some 30,000 troops would pave the way for a negotiated peace settlement and said that he thought all Afghans would be permitted to play a role in the future government provided they looked to the future and not the past.

General McChrystal told the Financial Times: 'As a soldier, my personal feeling is that there's been enough fighting. What I think we do is try to shape conditions which allow people to come to a truly equitable solution as to how the Afghan people are governed.'

The general said he thought the next year would see 'very demonstrably positive' progress. Well it had better because President Obama has boxed his commander into a tight schedule by announcing that he intends to start drawing down the number of U.S. troops in 2011. And there lies the rub: by signalling such a specific date in advance he has given the opposition the encouraging news that all they have to do is sit tight and wait the Americans out.

The clincher is, of course, that responsibility for security will increasingly pass to the Afghans themselves. And so far efforts to build up that capability have brought less than stellar results not least because of the ability of the Taliban and Al Qaeda to infiltrate and influence the ranks of army and police. Those concerns must surely now be exacerbated by the recent bombings in the heart of Kabul, which spoke of an ability by the opposition to get right to the heart of the Afghan security apparatus undetected and carry out devastating attacks. 

The rules for involvement in the central government are classically black and white and Western in concept and therefore impracticable: those signing up for the new adventure must not have any connexions with Al Qaeda. It's as if they can, and will, walk into the nearest Al Qaeda branch office and renounce their membership.

British Foreign Secretary David Miliband has termed Al Qaeda membership and the failure to renounce violence the 'red line' which will place any potential crossovers outside the pale. 

That there should be a severing of ties between the two organisations when faced with the overwhelming foreign military presence is not only fanciful but quite the reverse is about to happen if reports from the region are to be believed.

According to those reports, Obama's announcement of a start date for the commencement of a troop drawdown occasioned a rare meeting in Afghanistan between Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, with the reportedly frail bin Laden making the dangerous trip from the Pakistan tribal areas to keep the appointment. The first time the two had met for a long time, perhaps since the early stages of intervention in Afghanistan after 2001.
Up to this point this writer and many others had been of the opinion that the two elements of the anti-Western drive in western Asia would be too ideologically different to make common cause. That appears to be about to change if these latest reports of cooperation are true. And that makes extremely depressing news for the coalition and its allies.

Reports from the region suggest that the Taliban leadership sees the allies' new approach and the suggestion of talks with the coalition allies as a Western trap. It's hard not to see the validity of that interpretation. Why would the West be suing for peace at this juncture when there has been no sign from the new U.S. administration that they saw any fundamental flaw in the approach to Afghanistan as initiated by the Bush administration? Indeed, the Obama administration is replicating the Bush surge into Iraq which Washington appears to believe was so successful.

But there are fundamental differences between the two. In order for the U.S. to succeed in Iraq it was able to draw on the resources and influence of a relatively well-established government, which had strong Sunni tribal support.
In Afghanistan not only is the government ramshackle but there is precious little tribal support for the U.S. to call upon that can be expected to stay the course with Washington without the handsome financial inducements to which they are now accustomed.

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