How to talk to the Taliban

It’s easy to despair over the steady stream of bad news coming out of Afghanistan. President-elect Barack Obama has promised more troops and more focus on fighting the Taliban. But how? So far, the insurgents seem only to grow bolder. Foreign Policy offers a guide to trying to turn things around. It highlights the need to avoid trying to merely import the Iraq surge policy to Afghanistan, without recognizing the stark differences between the two conflicts. "The Iraq war has been mostly urban, largely sectarian, and contained within Iraq’s borders,” Nathaniel C. Fick and John A. Nagl write. “The Afghan war has been intrinsically rural, mostly confined to the Pashtun belt across the country’s south and east, and inextricably linked to Pakistan."

Foreign Policy