Beating the Taliban into submission

“The argument within the Taliban is about resolving the conflict,” says the military official, citing prisoner interrogations and other intelligence. “They want to figure out what the conditions would be,” he explained, including: “How do we do it? Will we be part of the [Afghan] government? Will we fear for our lives?”

Taliban prisoners have told U.S. interrogators that this pounding in Afghanistan — coupled with attacks by Predator drones on their havens in Pakistan — has taken a psychological toll. According to the senior military official, lower-level fighters complain, “Hey, we’re doing all the dying out here,” and ask their commanders, “How much longer can we put up with this?”…

For now, those demands have produced an impasse. But some U.S. advocates of reconciliation see signs that Omar may be ready to distance the Taliban from al-Qaeda. One official cites an interview, conducted in March by Pakistani journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad that appeared in Asia Times Online, in which an anonymous Taliban official describes Osama bin Laden as “just an individual” and said the United States was using him as an excuse to avoid real talks.