This is a fantastic piece about how the process of insurgent reconciliation in Afghanistan will actually work. It sort of covers a lot of territory that (to be a stickler) isn’t well-captured by the lede, but such is life when you’ve got to cram a ton of wonderful, significant and somewhat dissonant information into a format as restrictive as a newspaper story. You get your Ballad Of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, with his maybe-I’m-ready-to-cut-a-deal-with-the-government-and-maybe-I’m-not stance. But this is what strikes me as the most important portion of the piece:

Senior American commanders in eastern Afghanistan have made attempts to reach out to Hekmatyar’s commanders through letters. But they have been hindered by a lack of clear instructions on what they can offer militants willing to lay down their weapons and support the Afghan government.

This summer, U.S. military officials drafted a paper meant to clarify the rules on reconciliation. It placed the responsibility for such negotiations on the Afghan government. The U.S.-led military command “has no authority to negotiate with the insurgents independent” of the Afghan government, according to the six-page document obtained by The Washington Post. American commanders can, however, remove individuals from target lists and reward communities with aid projects, the draft paper read. A U.S. official said a rewrite of the document will give American commanders more latitude.

This reads like the U.S. is wading a toe out into cutting separate peaces. That’s not entirely inappropriate: while I am not saying that what worked in Iraq will work in Afghanistan, there is both precedent and intuition that brief, tactical truces can create space for ultimate reconciliation with a national government. If the U.S. is to break what Alex Rossmiller calls a stalemate, then some degree of forward-on-the-skis creativity is called for.

Speaking of, at some point, this condition for reconciliation is really going to have to be addressed:

“We urge the U.S. to publicly announce its exit plan, and then we will fully cooperate with it in execution of the plan,” said the spokesman, who called himself Haji Sahib. The Afghan government has made sporadic attempts at negotiation with insurgents but to little avail.

Yglesias commented that it’s “hard to know what a verifiable Taliban turn against al-Qaeda would look like,” and that’s true enough. But this is a problem that it’s better to have than not have. Basically you’d need to come up with some kind of confidence building measures over time. And you know who I’d put in charge of that? An Army officer named Mark Ulrich. Ulrich ran a counterinsurgency leadership seminar I attended last year at Leavenworth’s COIN Center that dissected the varieties of insurgent involvement with a government ranging from capitulation to infiltration. It was stunningly detailed and I’m kicking myself that I can’t find my notes right now, but suffice it to say, he’s a guy who’s thought a lot about precisely that question.