So, quite a morning: Gen. Petraeus and Undersecretary Flournoy cited progress in training and equipping Afghan security forces to a Senate panel. Then Petraeus briefly passed out and, halfway around the world, insurgents murdered a Kandahar district governor.

Something else worth highlighting from the Petraeus/Flournoy testimony are some rather supportive statements about reconciliation with the Taliban. The Obama administration backed President Karzai’s peace jirga explicitly last month at the White House. And there’s an effort underway at the U.N. to ease some international restrictions on Taliban travel in advance of prospective peace talks between Karzai and the Taliban. “All parties to the conflict recognize that there is a limit to what military activities alone can accomplish,” Flournoy said in her opening statement. “In the end, some political resolution will be required to bring the conflict to a close.” (In response to the peace jirga, Flournoy said, senior Pentagon leaders have authorized the use of an unspecified amount of cash to “fund DOD reintegration activities in support of this Afghan government initiative.” That’s for lower-level Taliban fighters, though, not for peace negotiations.)

Petraeus went further in his opening statement, saying the same process of soliciting buy-in for the Kandahar “rising tide” of security helped build momentum for top-level Taliban reconciliation:

The National Consultative Peace Jirga held in Kabul earlier this month was a constructive step in this effort, providing an opportunity for President Karzai to build consensus, to address some of the political tensions that fuel the insurgency, and to promote reconciliation and local reintegration as means that can contribute to a political resolution of some of the issues that exist. The Shura Council that he conducted on Sunday in Kandahar furthered this process and the effort to set up the political conditions for progress in Kandahar.

You can also check out this Richard Holbrooke interview with Dawn from last week, in which he says the only thing the U.S. would reject is Taliban who retain al-Qaeda affiliation joining the Afghan government. (That and continued violence.)

Gilles Dorronsoro thinks it’s time to go further and initiate direct U.S. talks with the Taliban. (h/t to Michael Cohen on that.) That makes sense: if the U.S. means what it says about “some political resolution” being necessary to end the conflict, then it also makes sense to pursue what the Taliban’s terms are.

But it’s harder to understand the Taliban’s interest in negotiations are. We’re not the ones rejecting talks with the Taliban; the Taliban rejects talks with Karzai, at least “while the foreign forces are here,” according to the district commander cited in this al-Jazeera report. If that condition remains in place, there’s nothing to talk about, since the U.S. can’t very well withdraw from Afghanistan without achieving any of its political objectives. (Or, to put it differently, total defeat is an option to avoid as long as other alternatives exist.) If the Taliban feel like they’re winning, they have no reason to abandon their condition. Should their calculation change, then talks should begin. It’s one of the reasons I’m concerned about eastern Afghanistan, where the last few months of U.S. retrenchment while we focus on the south have apparently been viewed by the Taliban as strategic success.

Dorronsoro has lots of good arguments for reconciliation, but he doesn’t have much of a programmatic sense of what it will take to get the Taliban to come to terms:

[N]egotiations with Taliban leaders can be undertaken only if the Pakistani army agrees to act as a broker. Without Pakistan, there will be no solution in Afghanistan. Official negotiations must also include the Karzai regime and international guarantees preventing the return of radical groups to Afghanistan.

Nice work if you can get it. I thought that the arrest of Mullah Baradar was a place-setting on the Pakistanis’ part for an essentially quadripartite negotiation for a post-war Afghanistan. But, alas, that hasn’t materialized yet. So to strip everything else away — Afghan governance that’s glacial in pace; the training of Afghan security forces; near-term development projects —  that leaves us with fighting while seeking to negotiate.