Azam Ahmed

Afghanistan — Months after President Obama formally declared that the United States’ long war against the Taliban was over in Afghanistan, the American military is regularly conducting airstrikes against low-level insurgent forces and sending Special Operations troops directly into harm’s way under the guise of “training and advising.”

This is no longer an American war, regardless of how many United States Special Operations forces continue to sweep the mountains for insurgents or how many American warplanes fire missiles into remote desert camps. That war, by most accounts, has been lost. In the face of endless violence, the Taliban have not been killed off. The nation is not pacified, the political future remains deeply uncertain and the death toll has never been higher. For the central government in Kabul, the real fight is to persuade the population, not to kill insurgents. And the police, local and national, are the only ones who can win it.

Pakistan’s top military and intelligence officials have begun pressing the Taliban to sit down for face-to-face discussions with the Afghan government, potentially opening a path for direct peace talks for the first time since the start of the American-led invasion in 2001, according to Western and Afghan officials briefed on the discussions.