The key condition is for the government to "implement the constitution, which has been violated," according to famous maulana Samiul Haq, whose madrassa near Peshawar -- dubbed "the Taliban Harvard' -- has been educating them since the early 1990s.
Haq insists Sharif should renounce "the foreign war" -- as in no more collaboration with the Americans. And Sharia law should be enforced immediately.
So negotiating with the Pakistani Taliban may result in Islamabad coping with significantly less, or even no, bombings. At the same time that implies the Pakistani Taliban further being able to project soft power right inside the Pakistani mainstream. For the Sharif government, it's a risk worth taking.
As Sharif is about to talk to the TTP while Karzai is already talking to the Afghan chapter, Washington risks being left talking to itself. And ruminating on those long gone days of the second Clinton administration, when all that it took to mollify the Taliban was to give them a cut of that perennial pipe dream, the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan (TAP) gas pipeline.
No deal was cut, and the rest was, is and will remain the ultimate, lethal Hindu Kush tragicomedy.
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