Commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan “Gen. David H. Petraeus, in a meeting with reporters after a tour of the Detention Facility in Parwan, where American forces detain Afghans they suspect of supporting the insurgency, said there were efforts by Taliban to establish contact with senior members of the Afghan government. ‘There are very high-level Taliban leaders who have sought to reach out to the highest levels of the Afghan government, and they have done that,’ General Petraeus said. ‘Now President [Hamid] Karzai’s conditions are very clear, very established, and, certainly, we support them as we did in Iraq, as the British did in Northern Ireland,’ he said. ‘This is the way you end insurgencies.’ A spokesman for President Karzai confirmed that there had been contacts at every level, but he cautioned that they still could not be characterized as even the beginning of negotiations.”
– Alissa J. Rubin, “Petraeus Says Taliban Have Reached Out to Karzai,” The New York Times, Sep. 27, 2010