The Beginning Of The End Of The War On Afghanistan

'Reformed' Taliban will include 'reformed' Al Qaeda, and whoever else has to paid off to stop killing NATO troops :

Backing Afghan President Hamid Karzai's efforts to 'reach out' to the Taliban through the peace jirga, President Obama's Special Envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke has said that Washington accepts that the final political solution in the war ravaged country could involve 'reformed' Taliban in the government if certain "red lines" are respected.

"The door is open...." he said.

"Let me be clear on one thing, everybody understands that this war will not end in a clear-cut military victory. It's not going to end on the deck of a battleship like World War II, or Dayton, Ohio, like the Bosnian war."

He also noted that while it was impossible to negotiate with Al-Qaeda, the case was different with the Taliban.

"It's going to have some different ending from that, some form of political settlements are necessary ... you can't have a settlement with Al Qaeda, you can't talk to them, you can't negotiate with them, it's out of the question. But it is possible to talk to the Taliban leaders," Holbrooke said.

Read The Full Story Here

The Big 'War On Terror' Backdown Begins

Expect more Western-allied foreign ministers and foreign secretaries to bail out on not only the terminology but the Bush ideology of the 'War On Terror' in the coming weeks and months :

The foreign secretary, David Miliband, today argues that the use of the "war on terror" as a western rallying cry since the September 11 attacks has been a mistake that may have caused "more harm than good".

(he said) war on terror was misconceived and that the west cannot "kill its way" out of the threats it faces.

British officials quietly stopped using the phrase "war on terror" in 2006, but this is the first time it has been comprehensively discarded in the most outspoken remarks on US counterterrorism strategy to date by a British minister.

In remarks that were also made in a speech today in Mumbai, in one of the hotels that was a target of terrorist attacks in November, the foreign secretary says the concept of a war on terror is "misleading and mistaken".

"Historians will judge whether it has done more harm than good," Miliband says, adding that, in his opinion, the whole strategy has been dangerously counterproductive, helping otherwise disparate groups find common cause against the west.

"The more we lump terrorist groups together and draw the battle lines as a simple binary struggle between moderates and extremists or good and evil, the more we play into the hands of those seeking to unify groups with little in common," Miliband argues, in a clear reference to the signature rhetoric of the Bush era. "We should expose their claim to a compelling and overarching explanation and narrative as the lie that it is."

"Terrorism is a deadly tactic, not an institution or an ideology," he says.

He argues that "the war on terror implied a belief that the correct response to the terrorist threat was primarily a military one - to track down and kill a hardcore of extremists". But he quotes an American commander, General David Petraeus, saying the western coalition in Iraq "could not kill its way out of the problems of insurgency and civil strife".

Instead of trying to build western solidarity against a shared enemy, Miliband argues it should be constructed instead on the "idea of who we are and the values we share".

He goes on to say that "democracies must respond to terrorism by championing the rule of law, not subordinating."

This kind of hard talk and critique of Bush's War On Terror, that has led to the death of more than a million people, and displaced many millions more, all just seems far too many years too late, doesn't it?