Afghan President Hamid Karzai announced two weeks ago, that the United States is engaging in peace negotiations with the Taliban. From a western point of view, the Taliban is an ethnic group, which practices one of the strictest interpretations of Islam, denounce women their most basic rights. They also harbored al Qaeda and made sure that Osama bin Laden had a place to establish terror camps and plan the 9/11 attacks.

It is obvious, that after archiving the main objective in Afghanistan, which was killing bin Laden, the Obama administration now seeks a clean way out of Afghanistan. A peace treaty would be the easiest one, because nobody expects the Taliban to be defeated anytime soon. But what would such a treaty look like?

Afghanistan has a new constitution since 2004, which sets the legal framework for a democratic system, gives the Afghan people basic rights like freedom of speech and assembly.
The Taliban would have to agree to uphold the constitution and to support and protect other achievements like education for girls. Expecting them to do this is naive, because all of these rights were non-existent or even banned under the Taliban rule. Some even contradict their basic belief system.

Even if they agree to such terms, and the NATO force will leave Afghanistan, who prevents them form re-conquering at least part of the country afterwards? There is no way Congress or even the American people will approve of going back into Afghanistan within, at least, the next ten years.
And in the long run this probably means that we can expect the establishment of oppressive rule by the Taliban and probably even terrorist safe heavens.

Whereas the war on terror broke up al Qaeda into less powerful and less influential regional organizations, leaving Afghanistan might reverse this trend and provide al Qaeda the means to reunite all these groups.

Source: Sky News