The US is back talking to the Taliban

Trump said that peace talks with the Taliban were dead, but now the top American official dealing with the insurgents and representatives of the militant organisation have met again. Not to negotiate it seems but just to try and reinstate the political settlement process. Special envoy for Afganistan Zalmay Khalilzad is a tough cookie and must have realised that even though Trump had scrapped the peace negotiations which he had so painfully maintained over a period of months, the president would eventually change his mind. There is no other way after all. Meanwhile Trump has taken a leaf out of the Taliban's book and has ordered military commanders in Afghanistan to step up airstrikes against the Taliban. I don't know how many Taliban fighters have been killed in the last 18 years but it is probably three times the number of American soldiers killed in the war, around 2,400. Do the Taliban care about the attrition rate? Or do they just regard these dead fighters as martyrs for the cause? They don't seem to have any trouble getting more recruits. But do the constant US airstrikes, now redoubled, eventually get to them? Is this why the Taliban seem keen to continue pursuing dialogue with the Americans? They always claim they will fight on for eternity but there must come a time when even the most hardened insurgent commander wants a different life, one that does not include daily slaughter. I hope that's true. If so, the renewed possibility of negotiations might just work this time. The most staggering statistic of the war is the number of Afghan soldiers and police killed. The Afghan president Ashraf Ghani claimed in January that since 2014 45,000 Afghan military and police personnnel had been killed. Since 2014!!! So you can add another 10,000 at least for the period between 2001 and 2013. It does make you wonder why young Afgan men enlist for such slaughter, even though they get paid a decent wage. But for how long? Anyway Khalilzad and Abdul Ghani Baradar, co-founder of the Taliban, are back talking. Trump scrapped the earlier talks when an American soldier was killed by a suicide bomber as the negotiations were going on in Qatar. He cancelled the talks out of sheer anger. Now after a few weeks he is once again hoping that a deal can be reached before the 2020 election. It is the only way forward but the non-stop killing by both sides to engineer peace is, well, sickening!