While the international intervention in Afghanistan has entered its seventh year, few would deny that the NATO's maiden operation outside Europe has run into deep trouble. The US-led coalition's combat-cum-reconstruction efforts evidently suffered from a perilous drift; the lack of strategic coherence and coordination became palpable and growing dissonance over a series of issues between the US on one hand and its European NATO partners on the other came into open during the last two years. In this backdrop, the move on the part of the President Karzai to open a dialogue with the resurgent Taliban and supported by several European states, especially Britain, which many perceived as an act of frustration and desperation if not abject surrender, further underlined the perceptional differences between Washington and its European allies on the seeming stalemate in Afghanistan. This paper first brings out the cracks within the international coalition; next the arguments of the supporters of engaging the Taliban in a dialogue are recounted; thirdly, the hazardous implications of this course of action are examined. The concluding section suggests that the proposed talks were a premature move; indeed, any step on the part of the international community to leave the war-torn country to its fate at this juncture would amount to a breach of trust.

While the international intervention in Afghanistan has entered its seventh year, few would deny that the NATO's maiden operation outside Europe has run into deep trouble. Despite constant escalation in force levels, the situation on the ground has steadily deteriorated with resurgence of the Taliban in the southern and eastern regions, spiralling violence pushing up the casualty figures, and steady rise in opium production and trafficking that went into financing insurgency. For the Afghans, six years after they were supposed to have been `liberated', living conditions have been progressively down-sliding. The US-led coalition's war efforts, it appeared, suffered from a perilous drift and the lack of strategic coherence and coordination became palpable. The cracks within the coalition recently showed over the question of involving the `moderate' elements of the Taliban in a peace dialogue. President Karzai made the offer in September 2007—expressing willingness in a press conference even of meeting the Taliban chief Mollah Omar and the Hezb-e-Islami supremo Gulbuddin Hekmatyar—and it was difficult to believe that the olive branch was extended without tacit US approval. However, when the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown floated the idea of opening peace talks with the saner elements of the Taliban, the following December, the Bush administration expressed its strong reservations. The whole issue was dramatized over the expulsion of two UN and EU officials from Afghanistan by the Karzai administration in late December. The confusion was worse confounded when it was reported that the US army and the State Department did not exactly see eye to eye on this issue and that the Bush administration together with the NATO ordered a thorough review of mission Afghanistan. While focusing on the contentions over peace overtures towards the Taliban, this paper first seeks to place these moves in the backdrop of the discord between the US and its NATO allies unfolding especially since 2005-2006; next, the positive gains likely to be derived from these talks as projected by its proponents are reviewed; thirdly, its wider implications for Afghanistan as well as the region as a whole including India are analyzed; and the final section attempts an interpretation followed by concluding observations.

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