After the initial US invasion Taliban recognising defeat wanted to talk peace: a formal surrender, the transfer of vehicles and weapons, an end to fighting in Kandahar, all in return for assurances their leaders could be able to return to their villages. That night Obaidullah sent bread for Karzai, in a gesture of conciliation. In retrospect, it was a tantalising opportunity for a smooth post-Taliban transition and, perhaps, a novel political dispensation. But it wasn't to be. Furious after the 9/11 attacks, the US war machine pursued the Taliban hard. Karzai, the new leader, acquiesced. And the Taliban leadership slunk across the border into Pakistan to lick their wounds and plan the resurgence that is racking the country today.

IT was on a Sunday morning, June 13, 1971, that The Times published its first installment of the Pentagon Papers. Few readers may have been more excited than a circle of aspiring undergraduate journalists who d worked at The Harvard Crimson. Though the identity of The Times s source wouldn t eke out for several days, we knew the whistle-blower had to be Daniel Ellsberg, an intense research fellow at M.I.T. and former Robert McNamara acolyte who d become an antiwar activist around Boston. We recognized the papers contents, as reported in The Times, because we d heard the war stories from the loquacious Ellsberg himself.

RAWALPINDI, PAKISTAN -- From the deluge of leaked military documents published Sunday, a former Pakistani spy chief emerged as a chilling personification of his nation's alleged duplicity in the Afghan war -- an erstwhile U.S. ally turned Taliban tutor. Now planted squarely in the cross hairs, retired Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul seems little short of delighted. In an interview Tuesday, Gul dismissed the accusations against him as "fiction" and described the documents' release as the start of a White House plot. It will end, he posited, with an early U.S. pullout from Afghanistan -- thus proving Gul, an unabashed advocate of the Afghan insurgency, right. President Obama "is a very good chess player. . . . He says, 'I don't want to carry the historic blame of having orchestrated the defeat of America, their humiliation in Afghanistan,' " said Gul, 74, adding that the plot incorporates a troop surge that Obama knows will fail. "It doesn't sell to a professional man like me."

Leaked US military records on the war in Afghanistan, which were posted on the Wikileaks website as the Afghan War Diary, are a classified - and previously unreported - daily rundown of incidents of violence and criminality in Afghanistan. The documents offer a snapshot of the grim reality of conditions on the ground in Afghanistan and the challenges facing troops operating there.