[Peace-discuss] The Taliban Might Negotiate, Even If They Think They're Winning

[Robert Naiman]

You can't follow U.S. print media coverage of the war in Afghanistan
for any length of time without running into some variation of the
following assertion:

   "The Taliban Will Never Negotiate, As Long As They Think They're Winning."

No serious effort is usually made to substantiate this claim, which is
asserted as if it were a self-evident truth. What you generally don't
see, reading the newspapers, is a sentence that looks like this:

   "The Taliban will never negotiate, as long as they think they're
winning, and the reason that we know this is...."

Yet, if you look back over the course of the last year, the assertion
that "the Taliban will never negotiate, as long as they think they're
winning" is a very important claim. Why did the U.S. send 30,000 more
troops to Afghanistan last year? Because "the Taliban will never
negotiate, as long as they think they're winning." Why are we killing
innocents today in Kandahar? "Because the Taliban will never
negotiate, as long as they think they're winning."

A claim that is a key buttress of life and death decisions about
people we have never met and know little about and who have no say in
our decisions, and yet which has never been substantiated, is a claim
that deserves sustained scrutiny.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naiman/the-taliban-might-negotia_b_774147.html


--
Robert Naiman
Policy Director
Just Foreign Policy
www.justforeignpolicy.org
naiman at justforeignpolicy.org

Urge Congress to Support a Timetable for Military Withdrawal from Afghanistan
http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/act/feingold-mcgovern