Lesson of Afghanistan? That you can, after all, bomb your way to the negotiating table

It’s not just soldiers who risk their lives in Afghanistan. Anyone who enters the country’s judicial service becomes an assassination target. Only last week, six Afghan judges were killed by a suicide bomb outside Kabul’s Supreme Court. A Taleban spokesman said they had been ‘sentenced to death’ for playing an ‘important role’ in ‘legalising the infidels’. Such attacks have killed over 3,000 civilians in Afghanistan so far this year, according to the United Nations. Of these, some 600 were children.

Barack Obama’s administration invites us this week to welcome the prospect of peace talks between the Taleban and Hamid Karzai’s government as a sign of progress. It is hard to be optimistic when you consider how the Taleban still operates. Its murder rate is soaring; assassinations by insurgents are up 40 per cent so far this year. It has seen off the Americans and British, whose troops handed over control security to the under-equipped Afghan military on Tuesday.