Talking to the Taliban

When Liam Fox piles into an argument, it is usually sensible to take the opposite side. Yesterday the shadow defense secretary was full of outrage over reports that MI6 agents, as well as UN and EU officials, have been talking to Taliban leaders. "We cannot negotiate with people who are killing our troops," he said. Presumably Mr Fox opposes his own party's role in the Northern Ireland peace process, which involved just these kinds of talks. He is also wrong about Afghanistan, although nothing about that country's politics is straightforward, as yesterday's expulsion of two British and Irish diplomats shows.

The men, Michael Semple, acting European Union mission head, and Mervyn Patterson, a senior UN official, both have great experience of Afghanistan. On the face of it they have been threatened with deportation for talking to Taliban leaders in Musa Qala, the town retaken by British and Afghan troops just before Christmas. The suspicion is that they have actually become caught in a political battle, perhaps involving the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai. Faced with the probable arrival of Paddy Ashdown as a UN envoy, the president may have wanted to show he retains sovereign authority by expelling officials from the bodies Lord Ashdown is supposed to oversee, the UN and the EU. The Afghan president is unlikely to have been shocked by the fact that the men were in contact with Taliban leaders, since he has done the same thing. Nor is Lord Ashdown opposed. Writing in the Guardian in July, he argued that "success is not measured in dead Taliban ... modern war is fought among the people ... the battle for public opinion is the crucial battle".

Indeed, the idea of an opposition force that can clearly be identified as the Taliban, and which should either be attacked or talked to, according to preference, is misguided. In a country fragmented along tribal, regional and religious lines, and with no history of central command, concepts such as government and insurgency are only partly helpful. British forces in Helmand province have been fighting Taliban soldiers, but the difference between them and local leaders is not always large.

The Taliban is at times as much a way of mind as it is a coordinated force, and to overcome it will need more than military might. It will require local negotiation and reassurance of just the kind the Secret Intelligence Service is said to have been carrying out. British politicians, from Gordon Brown down, are still wary about admitting as much. The prime minister may have pulled back from a more explicit statement when he returned from the country a fortnight ago. But it remains a fact that the war cannot be won by weapons alone.