The Real News Network has the interview with Larry Wilkerson, Karzai Justified In Refusal of Bilateral Security Agreement.

DESVARIEUX: So, Larry, let’s talk about the role of the Taliban, ’cause you have a spokesperson for Karzai actually saying that they’ve been in negotiations with the Afghan Taliban. What do you foresee their role being?

WILKERSON: Well, everybody’s been in negotiations with the Taliban. That’s an amorphous term. As I said, there is an extreme there. On the one extreme, you’ve got a farmer who’s angry that we stepped on his opium crop, poppy crop, and so forth. He’s a Taliban. He’s fighting. He shoots at U.S. soldiers. On the other extreme, you’ve got the people like Mullah Omar and so forth who are dedicated Taliban. In between lies a wide range of people.

They are going to have to be a part of any political solution in Afghanistan. So all these negotiations, whether it’s the Pakistanis, whether it’s the Afghans themselves or ISAF or NATO or the United States, all looking at the Taliban, they’re going to have to incorporate a body of that group that we call Taliban into whatever political solution occurs. And I don’t see that as being that–difficult, but not being impossible.

One of my interlocutors in Afghanistan has told me that there’s no way the Afghan people are going to allow the Taliban version that we associate with the word Taliban, hat is to say, the people who brought about the kind of coercion and oppression on Afghanistan during their reign, though they might have eliminated drugs to a certain extent and so forth. They’re not coming back. Those people are not coming back and going to control Afghanistan.

I think he’s probably right about that. But there are a lot of people, as I suggested, in that title, Taliban. And since there are a lot of people, some of them are going ta have to be incorporated somehow in the political solution.

Is it just possible that everyone, including us, would be better off if we just got out of Afghanistan the way we finally got out of Iraq?

Should we take the chance that Wilkerson is right that the Taliban as we think we know them would not come back to power in the form that they were in when we threw them out? If they don’t, then haven’t we already accomplished our mission in Afghanistan? Why can’t we accept our success, and just get out?

The more we try to make absolutely sure the Taliban won’t return in their previous form, the longer it will take for us to find out if we have already succeeded. The risk may be bigger if we stay there than if we leave.