By DEXTER FILKINS

KABUL, Afghanistan - After nine years of war, the endgame here has finally begun. But exactly when the endgame itself will end seems anyone’s guess.

The war in Afghanistan entered a new and possibly decisive stage in October, following statements by American officials encouraging Afghanistan’s elected leaders and the Taliban’s military commanders to reach a settlement to end the war.

The Americans said they had gone as far as to help some insurgent leaders travel to Kabul to talk. That, combined with a fierce escalation of American and NATO attacks on Taliban fighters, suggested that American commanders are trying to force insurgent leaders to make a deal - and in as diminished and shrunken a form as they can be reduced to.


What will work? Peace
talks with the Taliban?
Or military escalation?


For the moment, though, most signs still point in the Taliban’s favor. America’s strategy in Afghanistan, which is still unfolding, has yet to prove itself in crucial respects. No one knows, for instance, whether the Taliban’s entire senior leadership might be persuaded to make a deal with the Afghan government, or whether the Americans and Afghanistan’s leaders might succeed in chopping up the Taliban piecemeal by making deals with individual commanders.

It’s possible, too, in the darker scenarios, that both of those efforts will fail, and that the Americans, having lost patience with this long and exhausting fight, will begin drawing down next year with fewer prospects for a successful end. “We’re not ready to make any judgments about whether or not any of this will bear fruit,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said about making deals with the Taliban.

Indeed, the biggest change in October seemed to be the heightened sense of urgency among American officials to accelerate the pace of events ? not just on the ground and in the calculations of the Taliban’s leaders, but also in the minds of the American people, whose patience, by the lights of public opinion polls, is rapidly draining away. Since early last year, when President Obama took office, the overriding objective of American policy has been to persuade the Taliban to abandon any hope of victory.

It was to make that point that 30,000 additional troops were sent here. Then President Obama declared that he would start withdrawing those troops beginning July 11. That’s not a lot of time to defeat an enemy as tenacious as the Taliban have shown themselves to be.

But no one - not General Stanley A. McChrystal, who commanded NATO forces until June, nor General David Petraeus, who succeeded him ? has ever declared that he expected to. Rather, the strategy has been to break the Taliban’s will, to break up the movement, and to settle with as many leaders as are willing to deal.

In the past several months, General Petraeus has loosed an extraordinary amount of firepower on the Taliban insurgency. Special operations forces are now operating at a tempo five times that of a year ago, killing and capturing hundreds of insurgents each month.

The number of bombs and missiles aimed at insurgents has grown by half. And General Petraeus has launched a series of operations to clear insurgents from the southern city of Kandahar. The hope, as General Petraeus has said repeatedly, is that the military operations will push the Taliban, or some of them, to reach an accommodation with Afghan leaders.

So far, attempts to engage the Taliban leadership haven’t come to much. In part, this is because they and Afghanistan’s government stand far apart: The Taliban represent a premodern Islamist movement; the other is a Western-backed democracy.

In previous discussions, President Hamid Karzai has insisted that talks cannot begin until the Taliban agree to accept the Afghan Constitution and disarm. The Taliban have insisted that negotiations can’t start until Western forces leave the country. Pakistan has loomed ominously over previous attempts to reconcile.

The Pakistani Army and its spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence, continue, by most accounts, to support the Taliban, despite receiving billions of dollars in American aid. Most of the Taliban’s senior leaders, including Mullah Muhammad Omar, are living there.

And most Afghan and American officials believe that no deal between the Taliban and the Afghan government can last without Pakistani support.

Small groups of insurgents have been surrendering since the war began in 2001, but never in great numbers. An ambitious Western-backed program to lure the fighters away with job training and guarantees of security lies virtually dormant - the result, American officials say, of the failure of Afghan officials to carry it out.

Which brings us back to the battlefield. The high season for fighting typically winds down in December and picks up again in the spring. NATO officers say one measure of the effectiveness of their military operations will come when the winter ends; if the Taliban leaders have difficulty replenishing their ranks, they may be more inclined to make a deal.

And if they come back as strong as before? “Then we’ll know,” the NATO officer said, “that it didn’t work.”