Peace Talks with Taliban Leaders?

Ok, the news is all nuts with talk about "Peace Talks with Senior Taliban Leadership".

Listen.

There is NO senior Taliban leadership.

We killed off the Taliban a while back.

There is no real senior leadership of anything LEFT.

There are a LOT of grass-roots groups of young, unemployed

hoodlums, who are out to make a name for themselves like their Grandfathers

who fought the Russians.

They are NOT Taliban

And they don't HAVE leaders.

We've been here for nine years. We've killed every senior leader of every organized group that opposed us. Some of these guys don't last two weeks when they come here from Pakistan.

The closest thing there are to leaders are

local warlords, who have a couple hundred at most gunmen,

drug lords, who again, have a couple hundred men at most,

Al Qaeda, who are not local to this area, but ship in troops and weapons, and

there is no peace with them,

smugglers who bring in weapons,

mullahs who preach violence, usually from outside the area,

and fucking secret agents from certain "friendly" and certain "unfriendly"

powers who use these poor fools as pawns on the Afghanistan chess board.

There is NO leadership to have peace talks with.

As to reintegration, or re-assimilation, or any form of these armed bands declaring peace,

that happens on a very regular basis. When the legitimate governement of afghanistan

sets up shop in an area, puts in place ministers of education and finance and health and agriculture,

when the outsiders get pushed out, local warlords sign up with the government. It happens

on a regular basis as the stabilized parts of the country slowly grow, and progress is made,

and people begin to see that the government won't collapse tomorrow.

Half the population of the country is under 18. There is no organized structure to oppose us. What there is is a constant flow of young footmen, willing to fight if there's nothing better to offer them.

I had a big thing I was going to type in that is ISAF policy on reintegration, but it's long. Here it is in short: they can stop fighting whenever they like, but mostly they'll need jobs and security and a more functional government before they will want to.

Sorry, not my most poetic post, but I figured this misunderstanding needed to be addressed.