The American point of view on this matter is that the US can talk to the Taliban and broker a peace with them, however Pakistan should not make peace with the Taliban. This spells hypocracy as identified by this Guardian editorial.

Seven years after the war in Afghanistan began, a consensus is building among British diplomats and military commanders that the campaign against the Taliban, as it is now being waged, is unwinnable. The latest to add his voice to widespread calls for a root-and-branch rethink is the US general John Craddock, Nato’s supreme allied commander Europe. Even America’s defence secretary, Robert Gates, has acknowledged the need for a political engagement with “reconcilable” elements of the Taliban, without defining what that means. The comment followed a meeting hosted in Saudi Arabia last month between Hamid Karzai’s brother and senior Taliban figures.

One of the many questions this raises is where Pakistan fits in. Why is it right to engage in talks with the Taliban on the Afghan side of the border and wrong for the Pakistan government to engage with same people on their side? The question has undermined attempts by President Asif Ali Zardari to forge a political consensus for the all-out war his army is now waging against the Pakistani Taliban in the tribal areas. The attempt to get parliamentary backing for the war in Bajaur and Swat ended yesterday in a classic fudge.

The resolution produced by the joint session of parliament had comforting words for both sides of the debate. But it had been defanged long before it went to the printers. It called for both talks and war. It said Pakistan must have a foreign policy independent of America’s, but also stated that Pakistan would not allow its soil to be used for terrorist attacks elsewhere – which is exactly America’s position. The government spun the resolution as a political success, an acknowledgment that parliament realised it was fighting its own war against militants, not an American one. But the reality is that most Pakistanis still think the opposite. Within hours of the resolution being passed, US missiles hit a madrasa in north-western Pakistan. Whoever was inside at the time, the strike was another reminder that Pakistan’s sovereignty was neither here nor there, if US Central Command thought it had a target in its sights.

The glaring contradictions in US policy and in Pakistan’s domestic debate will not disappear. The leadership of the Taliban will have to be faced over the negotiating table on both sides of the border, and those conducting the negotiations need a joined-up diplomatic and military strategy. Washington, Kabul and Islamabad do not have a common approach, or anything approaching one at the moment. For all their growing realism, coalition commanders still believe they can bomb the militants to the negotiating table. As long as they do, they risk the conflict spreading deeper into Pakistan. The Guardian, October 24th, 2008-Editorial

If Obama had “listened” he could have learned something

Many in Pakistan believe that the United States has deceived Pakistan into conniving with Washington to bring about its own destruction: India and U.S.-supported Afghanistan will form a pincer around Pakistan to dismember the world’s only Muslim nuclear power. And some Iranians speculate that in preparation for the coming of the Mahdi, God has blinded the Great Satan to its own interests so that it would eliminate both of Iran’s Sunni-ruled regional rivals, Afghanistan and Iraq, thus unwittingly paving the way for the long-awaited Shiite restoration. Burnett R. Ruben, Ahmed Rashid in CFR October 2008.

no government in the region around Afghanistan supports a long-term U.S. or NATO presence there. Pakistan sees even the current deployment as strengthening an India-allied regime in Kabul; Iran is concerned that the United States will use Afghanistan as a base for launching “regime change” in Tehran; and China, India, and Russia all have reservations about a NATO base within their spheres of influence and believe they must balance the threats from al Qaeda and the Taliban against those posed by the United States and NATO. Securing Afghanistan and its region will require an international presence for many years, but only a regional diplomatic initiative that creates a consensus to place stabilizing Afghanistan ahead of other objectives could make a long-term international deployment possible.

More fundamentally, the concept of “pressuring” Pakistan is flawed. No state can be successfully pressured into acts it considers suicidal. The Pakistani security establishment believes that it faces both a U.S.-Indian-Afghan alliance and a separate Iranian-Russian alliance, each aimed at undermining Pakistani influence in Afghanistan and even dismembering the Pakistani state. Some (but not all) in the establishment see armed militants within Pakistan as a threat — but they largely consider it one that is ultimately controllable, and in any case secondary to the threat posed by their nuclear-armed enemies.  Burnett R. Ruben, Ahmed Rashid in CFR October 2008.