Updated on
Summary
British Foreign Secretary David Miliband urged Afghans on Wednesday to push energetically for a peace settlement with Taliban insurgents and said Afghanistan's neighbours must support such an agreement. Miliband's conciliatory comments, in a speech to be given in the United States later on Wednesday, reflect growing acceptance in the West that Taliban fighters who break ties to al Qaeda have a role to play in the country's future. Now is the time for the Afghans to pursue a political settlement with as much vigor and energy as we are pursuing the military and civilian effort, Miliband said in excerpts published in advance of a speech he is to give at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In a separate appearance in Boston on Tuesday night, Miliband said there was no longer a military solution for Afghanistan. The truth about an insurgency and a counterinsurgency is that it's never ended militarily, it's only ended politically, he said at a Kennedy Library foreign affairs forum. Eight years after the US-led invasion, it is not enough to explain to people why the war started, Miliband will say in Wednesday's speech. We need to set out how it will be ended, he will say. Afghanistan will never achieve a sustainable peace unless many more Afghans are inside the political system, and the neighbors are onside with the political settlement.
