(Via MSNBC, Asia Times, and Iran’s Press TV)

When will it be time to talk to the Taliban? How about sometime next week?

While I think most would rather see NATO get its act together and surge up in Afghanistan so as to be able to negotiate any settlement from a position of immense strength, the question that is currently being bandied about – of sitting down at the table and talking – isn’t as ridiculous as Team Neocon has repeatedly tried and failed to have us believe. The stupidity of “you’re either with us or against us” has been shown to be so much adolescent, geo-strategic masturbation, and folks much smarter than you or I have signaled that it’s high time we grew up and moved on.

With U.S. and NATO forces suffering their deadliest year so far in Afghanistan, a rising chorus of voices, including Defense Secretary Robert Gates and the incoming head of U.S. Central Command, have endorsed efforts to reach out to members of the Taliban considered willing to seek an accommodation with President Hamid Karzai’s government.

“That is one of the key long-term solutions in Afghanistan, just as it has been in Iraq,” Gates told reporters Monday. “Part of the solution is reconciliation with people who are willing to work with the Afghan government going forward.”

Gen. David Petraeus, who will become responsible for U.S. military operations in Afghanistan as head of U.S. Central Command on Oct. 31, agreed.

“I do think you have to talk to enemies,” Petraeus said Wednesday at an appearance at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, when asked about potential dialogue with the Taliban.

How’s that for going off the McCain/Bush message reservation? Even the Brits seem eager:

Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith of the British command in Afghanistan enthusiastically welcomed such talks. He was quoted by The Sunday Times of London as saying, “We want to change the nature of the debate from one where disputes are settled through the barrel of the gun to one where it is done through negotiations.”

If the Taliban were prepared to talk about a political settlement, said Carleton-Smith, “that’s precisely the sort of the progress that concludes insurgencies like this.”

The George W Bush administration, however, was evidently taken by surprise by news of the Afghan peace talks and decidedly cool toward them. One US official told The Washington Times that it was unclear that the meetings in Saudi Arabia presage government peace talks with the Taliban. The implication was that the administration would not welcome such talks.

Though the Taliban aren’t big buddies with the world view of the East or the West (remember the Bhudda!), I doubt their thinking is so stunted as to make them believe that they can really win this thing. They can’t and they won’t. They’re not stupid. They must know the dimensions of the box they’re in.

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A couple things to remember from a Canadian perspective: we’re committed to the country until 2011. It will have cost us an estimated 20.7 billion in national treasure by then, and we will have seen more of our soldiers taken from us. For certain and in every respect from money to blood, talking is far more affordable than fighting, especially when we appear to have slipped into an economic abyss. So why not negotiate? We’re talkers, remember?

Peace talks are a good thing as long as items for discussion don’t constitute a waste of time or provide your adversary a breathing space to regroup and refit. And since modern wars are no longer defined by victories that include ticker tape and marble arches, peace talks force us to accept an important but sad fact that continues to elude us: any secured peace will have to include the Taliban. That sucks, I know. But there it is.

The Taliban will always be a force in Afghan politics (if you can call it that), and no spasm of smart bombs or hellfire missiles upchucked from Predators will change that. Their ideas might not gel with ours, but just as racism or far-right evangelism can’t be wished away at home as cloistered facets of thoughts past, it follows that the myriad extremisms beyond our shores are going to be even harder nuts to crack. I’m not saying why bother. I’m saying face facts. They aren’t going to fade away and there aren’t enough oblivions to accommodate them. The tricky thing is how to involve them in a secular national government without handing them a majority (as per Hamas). Reconciliation is a tough beat, to be sure, but if South Africa did it post-apartheid with their Truth & Reconciliation Commission and their new Constitution (read it here – it’s a gorgeous document), then who knows? But to keep on bombing and fighting and killing is to only hamstring the inevitable peace.

Once we get our heads around the fact that there isn’t a magic number of people we have to kill in order to have our way, I think it’ll be easier to bring ourselves to the table with open eyes instead of with the bullheaded hangover of 9/11 still stinging our frontal lobes. Is it defeat? Not at all. It’s pragmatism, and by no means an invitation to the Taliban to rule or an exit strategy to allow for a complete NATO withdrawal. We’ll be there for a while, because Pakistan’s nukes say so (chapter 2 comes in the form of a mushroom cloud, too).

I haven’t been even a lukewarm supporter of this war since it began (before both my kids were born!), but if Canada can have a hand in ending it rather than prolonging it, then in the words of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, you betcha. If Canadians have been casting about for over seven years looking for a mission beyond running a blocking play for the Bush administration, perhaps we’ve finally found one.

Come Mr Taliban, tally me banana. Daylight come and me want to go home.