Resident Fellow David Frum

Talk to the Taliban? That's the big policy question everybody asks about Afghanistan. After an eight-day NATO-sponsored tour of the country, I can report that the best minds at work on the country all give the same answer: "Maybe later. Not now."

Here's why: 1. The current push to talk to the Taliban comes from Afghanistan's Karzai government for short-term electioneering advantage.

The Taliban are most active in Pashtun areas of Afghanistan. If the Taliban are still fighting, the Pashtun may not be able (or willing) to come out to vote in the presidential elections scheduled for 2009. President Karzai comes from a leading Pashtun family, and low Pashtun turnout would threaten Karzai's re-election hopes.

Karzai's government is not well liked in the other areas of Pakistan, where it is perceived as corrupt and incompetent. So Karzai badly needs a deal that will allow voting to proceed in the Pashtun areas.

Last weekend, the New York Times published a thickly sourced story in which half a dozen current and former U.S. officials accused Karzai's brother, Ahmad Wali Karzai, of massive involvement in Afghanistan's huge heroin industry. This accusation represents a devastating challenge for the Karzai government. (I was in the presidential palace to meet Karzai's official spokesman on the day the story broke. He arrived looking as if a bomb had just gone off in the building.)

Obviously, Karzai cannot sustain the war without American backing. Threatened with the loss of American support, he may be seeking to try to end the war--transferring his base of support from the ethically fussy Americans to the more understanding Pashtun tribes. You can see why he'd want to do that. Harder to see why the Western world should endorse it.

2. Right now, the Taliban are looking strong; the West is looking weak. But 2009 will see substantially more NATO forces in the country than at any time since the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001. Up to four U.S. combat brigades will be arriving. The Germans are sending 1,000 more troops. Other NATO forces have reached peak strength.

Meanwhile, the Taliban faces trouble ahead. Those big spectacular Taliban attacks on well-trained NATO troops armed with automatic weapons are very, very costly to the attackers. Enemy insurgents suffered upwards of 4,000 dead in 2007. And the insurgents face internal political problems of their own. Many of their foot soldiers are Pashtun villagers who fight only because they are paid or because they are afraid of retaliation against their families. Morale on the enemy side is not always high. And the same xenophobia that leads Pashtun villagers to shoot at NATO forces has also led them to shoot at Arabicspeaking al-Qaeda when they show up in their villages.

The insurgent forces in Afghanistan are a coalition of ideological Taliban, local warlords and drug traffickers. Over the next 12 months, our coalition will enjoy growing power, while theirs may experience useful fragmentation. Better to talk when we hold the advantage--and elements of their coalition are rethinking their loyalties.

3. The most important thing to understand about Afghanistan is that it is not a civil war. As one British officer put it, maybe a little over-enthusiastically, "If Afghanistan were an island, this war would be easy." Or as a high civilian official put it: "Imagine you are a Taliban fighter. You have a wife in Quetta, maybe a brother or mother. If you say you want to quit fighting, somebody in a Pakistani army uniform will come to see them--and warn them of bad consequences. And if you do quit, those bad consequences will follow."

Sound policy in Afghanistan begins by waking up to the reality that the Taliban would be at worst a local nuisance without the support of the Pakistani military and intelligence services. Pakistan enjoys the legal status of a "major non-NATO ally" of the United States, the same status held by Japan and Australia. And yet at the same time, Pakistan--or important forces within Pakistan--is waging a proxy war against the United States and NATO.

Before talking to the Taliban, the U.S. and NATO must first talk to Pakistan--and talk more firmly and clearly than anybody has up until now. Until now, the West has always had higher priorities. Britain wants Pakistan to help hunt down Pakistani-born terrorists operating inside the U.K. The U.S. wants Pakistan to stop proliferating nuclear materials. For both leaders of the NATO mission, pressuring Pakistan to end support to the Taliban was a secondary priority.

That may be changing. If it does, the Taliban will suddenly find themselves isolated and vulnerable. That's where we want them. That's when to talk to them.

David Frum is a resident fellow at AEI.