Taliban flag
Joshua Foust’s analysis of the fake Taliban scam that duped the U.S. Army and NATO is spot on, for The AfPak Channel at Foreign Policy:
Remember last month, when all the news was atwitter about the prospect of meaningful negotiations with the Taliban in Kabul?
The story was moderately shocking: a senior Taliban figure was being flown around the region, talking directly with General Petraeus, President Karzai, and other senior figures in the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and the Afghan government. The driving force behind coverage of those negotiations was New York Times reporter Dexter Filkins, who wrote that NATO had provided air transportation and secure road travel for Taliban leaders to visit Kabul for the negotiations.
Almost precisely one month later, Filkins and Carlotta Gall are writing the exact opposite:
In an episode that could have been lifted from a spy novel, United States and Afghan officials now say the Afghan man was an impostor, and high-level discussions conducted with the assistance of NATO appear to have achieved little. ”It’s not him,” said a Western diplomat in Kabul intimately involved in the discussions.
AFP reports, via 
Can an army make war on a concept? Tyler Hicks’ photography exhibit 
By Max Fisher for 
All hail Wikileaks and the Internet for giving us a glimpse of what’s really happening in the can’t-win war. The Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel have published a huge cache of secret military files from the whistleblowing website Wikileaks, detailing the war in Afghanistan. Here’s a summary from the 
I’d suggest taking this report with a pinch of salt as it comes from the notorious Murdoch-owned British tabloid 