Ann Gearan reports that the U.S. has been conducting secret negotiations with the Taliban, but they've fallen apart. Joshua Foust isn't surprised:

The entire negotiations track the U.S. took never made any sense. The American negotiating strategy with the Taliban seems to revolve around somehow providing sufficient incentives for the Taliban to give up their opposition to foreign forces in the country, their opposition to the Karzai government, and their opposition to the supposed anti-Islamic bent of both. In other words, it is focused on figuring out how best to bribe the Taliban to abandon their ideals and their reason for being. A real negotiated framework for defusing an insurgency involves creating the structures and institutions of a government so that an insurgency is unnecessary—so that the Taliban, in this case, can pursue their goals of removing foreigners and making the central government more Islamic and less corrupt without resorting to violence to do so.

Ahmed Rashid, by contrast, reads a recent speech by Mullah Omar as evidence that there may be some hope for a negotiated settlement.