Small groups of Taliban fighters — sometimes a dozen with a leader — are approaching local Afghan government officials, asking what kind of deal they might get. “First, they want to be taken off any list, so they are not targeted,” explains a NATO official in Afghanistan. “Second, they want protection from the insurgency. Third, some kind of economic opportunity.”

In counterinsurgency doctrine, this is known as “reintegration.” The official admits it is “spotty” in Afghanistan but spreading in all regions. “It is happening in small numbers — drip, drip, drip. It has not yet changed the battle space. . . . It is not a tipping point, at this point.” The goal is to push these numbers much higher, with more insurgents driven to negotiation and exhaustion, so they “put down their weapons and go home.”…

Political reconciliation is the objective. But it is conceivable only if momentum toward reintegration continues and gathers — and this, in large part, is a military task. Many have argued that an acceptable outcome in Afghanistan will not be achieved by military force alone. True. But an acceptable outcome is enabled by military pressure.

That pressure is being undermined by a Taliban argument. President Obama’s July 2011 deadline for the beginning of American troop withdrawals from Afghanistan is being used, according to the NATO official, as “an opportunity for propaganda.”