Pakistan advises Nato to accept defeat in Afghanistan

It's not just Iraq that's unravelling now:

Senior Pakistani officials are urging Nato countries to accept the Taliban and work towards a new coalition government in Kabul that might exclude the Afghan president Hamid Karzai.

Pakistan's foreign minister, Khurshid Kasuri, has said in private briefings to foreign ministers of some Nato member states that the Taliban are winning the war in Afghanistan and Nato is bound to fail. He has advised against sending more troops.

Western ministers have been stunned. "Kasuri is basically asking Nato to surrender and to negotiate with the Taliban," said one Western official who met the minister recently.

It doesn't get us very far to mourn what might have been, but the missed opportunities are painful. I wonder if America will ever recover from the effects of the past six years. And, God help us, we have two more years to go. Publius worries that they may be the worst yet, since Bush has no vested interest in political popularity at this point. He may just decide to screw things up for spite.