Now why would Pakistan, an ostensible U.S. ally on the proverbial “war on terror,” provide health care for the one-eyed Taliban leader who is wanted for acts of terrorism?

The report, says Husain Haqqani, Pakistan’s ambassador to Washington, has “no basis whatsoever.”  Haqqani, a career diplomat and a democrat, is a credible man, perhaps more credible than the original source of the story, an organization called the Eclipse Group.

This is a shadowy consulting business run by Dewey Clarridge, a career CIA official whose loyalty to democratic norms has been questioned. Clarridge served as director of the CIA’s Latin American division of the CIA in the 1980s. In the 1980s, Clarridge was part of a CIA network that sought to evade congressional restrictions that forbade the CIA from waging covert war against the government of Nicaragua. Since then, he has toiled in the gray zone between public service and private enterprise. So let’s be clear on the dueling sources. Back then, Dewey Clarridge sought to evade the rule of law. Today, Husain Haqqani seeks to respect it.

On the other hand, Haqqani may not know what his own government is doing. There is no dispute that Pakistani intelligence service–our ally in defending the country’s nuclear arsenal–cultivates and funds its owns allies in the vastness of Afghanistan–including sworn and lethal enemies of United States.

Pakistani intelligence officials live and breathe the reality that the American public and the U.S. Congress have not quite grasped. The U.S. military–like every other Western expeditionary force in the region since Alexander the Great–will eventually leave Afghanistan. And when they do, Pakistan will still be there.

So: Nothing would be less surprising than Pakistan helping Mullah Omar in his hour of need.

If Mr Karzai and most Afghans really do want peace talks with the Taliban then that should be Nato’s focus.

Talk of negotiation is ramping up because the Obama administration thinks it necessary to draw up a feasible plan to exit with dignity, this given the electoral “shellacking” it recently received with barely a flexed muscle.  A sullen defeat, stretched out over time, tanks rolling on into adjacent border, replaying the recent Soviet past, will not do– especially with an opposition ascendant waiting by the sidelines for news of stubborn, drowning failure.

maybe we have to change things. And look around. You’ve seen al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula now; al-Qaeda in Maghreb. We’re fighting a difficult and flat organization. Given that we have a weak partner in the Karzai government and only a partial partner in Pakistan, we can’t keep doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome.

Armitage was clearly anchoring the left-wing of the panel. Eight dissenters called for staying the course showing that the policymaking consensus and in the South Asia press the story is playing as U.S. troops will fight Until 2014

That’s not the only problem with talking to the Taliban  but it is true that the world’s biggest secular democracy is a forgotten factor in Afpak politics.

Obama in Pakistan.

“…stop the fighting by offering the Quetta Shura, the Taliban HQ, a ceasefire. Progress should not be contingent on a ceasefire. The Shura have said they will only stop fighting when the foreigners leave. But this is a matter of sequencing, if a ceasefire entails, as it must, a commitment to leave.”