Friend and Ally Update: Pakistani officials are urging NATO to accept and work with the Taliban. “Accept defeat by Taliban, Pakistan tells Nato,” by Ahmed Rashid in the Telegraph, :
Senior Pakistani officials are urging Nato countries to accept the Taliban and work towards a new coalition government in Kabul that might exclude the Afghan president Hamid Karzai.
Pakistan’s foreign minister, Khurshid Kasuri, has said in private briefings to foreign ministers of some Nato member states that the Taliban are winning the war in Afghanistan and Nato is bound to fail. He has advised against sending more troops.
Western ministers have been stunned. “Kasuri is basically asking Nato to surrender and to negotiate with the Taliban,” said one Western official who met the minister recently.
The remarks were made on the eve of Nato’s critical summit in Latvia. Lt Gen David Richards, the British general and Nato’s force commander in Afghanistan, and the Dutch ambassador Daan Everts, its chief diplomat there, have spent five days in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, urging the Pakistani military to do more to reign in the Taliban. But they have received mixed messages.
What a surprise.