OVER a dish of rice and greasy goat-meat in a backstreet Kabul restaurant, a pair of mid-level Taliban commanders were happy to chew the fat. The more senior, a humorous, middle-aged fellow with a pistol tucked slyly into his bulky coat, leads an insurgent force in Marja. That is an area of southern Helmand province which, with much trumpet-blast, American marines claimed to have captured earlier this year.

Over the past two decades, this militant has been almost constantly in arms. The Taliban, an Islamist group dominated by southern Pushtuns, was launched in the early 1990s to end a bitter civil war. With Pakistani backing, it almost succeeded, controlling most of the country between 1996 and 2001. When America then bombed them from power in 9/11's feverish aftermath, they reconvened either side of Afghanistan's rugged border with Pakistan, and started a new holy war. In spite of NATO's 130,000 peacekeepers in Afghanistan, the Taliban now control large parts of southern and eastern Afghanistan.

The commander in Marja said he had fought in many places. The Taliban move their officers often, to prevent them getting greedy and preying on local people. This means he doesn't get to see much of his family, he lamented—“maybe for just a day a month, if God wills it.”

He and his comrade, a commander from Gereshk, another town in Helmand, said they were committed to ridding Afghanistan of foreign troops and regaining power. They said they were well-supplied with money and arms by their leaders holed up in Pakistan. Like most Afghans, they seethed at the killing of civilians by NATO air strikes—though many more are killed by the Taliban's roadside bombs.

Predictably, both were dismissive of a recent step-up in NATO's campaign, a surge of 30,000 extra American troops into southern Afghanistan. In response to claims that the surge has had some success, including a stronger government grip on Gereshk, the younger commander offered a fierce rebuttal. “Outside the town is a war zone,” he said.

Though courteous and hospitable, the commanders expressed ugly views. Asked about an Islamist acid attack on schoolgirls in Kandahar, one said: “What else do they deserve? A good woman needs only Islam, not school.” With justification, they also slammed the failure of President Hamid Karzai's government to control Afghanistan's runaway crime. Yet their response to this problem was of the well-advertised Taliban kind. “Under Hamid Karzai, not one murderer has been executed in public!” exclaimed the more senior man in wide-eyed amazement. “No robbers have had their hands cut off!”

In many Taliban-held areas, the threat of such punishments is said to have banished crime. And local people, sick of the lawlessness, seem glad of this. Even some living in government-controlled cities are reported to journey to Taliban sharia courts for justice, spurning the corrupt government alternative.

Apparently sure of victory, the commanders said the Taliban would not negotiate with Mr Karzai. “Everyone is against the government because it is led by foreigners,” one said. “That is not a problem that can be settled by talks, only by the foreigners leaving Afghanistan.” Then they left the restaurant, brushed past two unwitting policemen on its stairway, and went looking for a taxi back to the fight.

It is hard to know how representative of the Taliban they were, or how senior. Yet their views, and those of two other Taliban commanders interviewed in Kabul, are a useful counterpoint to recent hopes that Afghan peace talks are in the offing.

Talk about talks

Those hopes have been buoyed in recent weeks by three developments. Mr Karzai has appointed a body known as the High Peace Council, charged with opening negotiations with the Taliban at every level. Afghanistan's president also claims to have had “personal meetings with some Taliban leaders”. And America's commanding general in Afghanistan, David Petraeus, has said that NATO has given safe passage to senior insurgents, allowing them to travel to Kabul for talks with the government.

The Taliban have denied that. Whoever crafts their well-written statements in English described it as “mind-boggling lies” intended to make it “appear as though Mujahideen of the Islamic Emirate were ready for negotiations and that they have made progress in that regard”. Afghan officials and Western diplomats in Kabul also say the recent hopes are overblown.

They note that the peace council was announced in January. It has taken much longer to form than Mr Karzai's Western allies wanted. And its members, announced by Mr Karzai, include many longtime enemies of the Taliban with whom they may refuse to parley. Of 70 members, 53 are linked to factions in the civil war; 12 worked for the Taliban government.

Nor is it remarkable that senior members of the government, including Mr Karzai, a Pushtun, should speak with the insurgents. “It's been official government policy since 2002,” says Baryalai Helali, an official at the High Peace Council. The policy has spawned several initiatives: for example, a convivial round of “Iftar” talks in Saudi Arabia during the holy month of Ramadan in 2008. Nothing much was achieved by this.

By contrast, NATO's active support for the talks—which reportedly includes flying a senior insurgent to Kabul—is new. Ahmed Rashid, a veteran Afghanistan hand, considers it a “shift” in American policy, which was until recently to have no truck with the insurgents. “The US is still not willing to negotiate directly with the Taliban, as the Taliban want,” he says. “But this reflects a change that could go further still.”

It is hard to know how significant that is. Nor is it clear which Taliban have been talking, or whether they are backed by Mullah Omar, the group's one-eyed foremost leader. Wahid Mujda, a political analyst and former official in the Taliban government, also thinks something interesting is afoot—but not the start of a serious peace process. He suspects one of the Taliban interlocutors was Maulavi Abdul Kabir, a member of the group's leadership council reportedly arrested in Pakistan in February. “Once you are arrested you have no authority to talk on behalf of the Taliban,” he said. “The Taliban have been very consistent that they will never talk to what they regard as a puppet government and will only talk to the Americans.”

Michael Semple, a former EU diplomat who was expelled from Afghanistan in 2007 after holding secret talks with insurgents and is now at Harvard University, is even more dismissive of the recent reports. They are “basically information warfare,” he says. Yet if a negotiated endgame has not begun in Afghanistan, there is a growing desire for one. According to Mr Rashid, a longtime acquaintance of Afghanistan's president, Mr Karzai is now anxious for a peace deal “as a way to be forgiven for all his other failings”.

Karzai awaits his dear brothers

Mr Karzai has started calling insurgent leaders “dear brothers”, and has announced the release of important Taliban prisoners. It is unclear how earnest he is in these approaches, which have surprised many. The main beneficiary of America's invasion, Mr Karzai would seem to lose whatever the Taliban might gain from a peace deal. And they have not reciprocated his show of goodwill.

Indeed, there are big obstacles in the way of serious talks—let alone of a negotiated settlement. The government and its allies say the Taliban must denounce international terrorism, accept the constitution and lay down their arms. The Taliban say all foreign troops must quit the country. Compromises will no doubt be made; perhaps not soon. According to Mullah Wakil Ahmad Mutawakkil, a former Taliban foreign minister who now sits on the High Peace Council, “both sides are making the same mistake with these conditions. No benefit will come from them.”

The government and its allies meanwhile struggle to understand their enemy. Most insurgents appear to be local to the battlefield. That suggests that government incompetence or the presence of foreign troops is driving the insurgency. Yet Taliban commanders are often not local and are fiercely ideological. And the group clearly maintains a loose central command. Pakistan is said to have some influence on it; to what extent is a matter of rumour. According to Davood Moradian, a policy adviser at the foreign ministry: “As long as there is no consensus on who our enemy is it is almost impossible to come to any sort of reconciliation.”

Who are they fighting?

All four insurgents interviewed in Kabul said they most wanted to chase out the foreign troops and install an honest government under Islamic law. “We are not fighting to bring Mullah Omar back or for any individual,” said a mid-ranking commander from Dand, in Kandahar province. “We are fighting for an Islamic regime. If the current government brings us Islamic law, we will stop fighting.” This bearded commander, who is 27, was educated in madrassas in Kandahar and Quetta, in Pakistan, and has fought for the Taliban for four years. Interestingly, he said he was impressed by the often-derided Afghan army, predicting that the Taliban would lose ground as it continued to grow.

General Petraeus says that, after years of being on the back foot, NATO and its Afghan allies are pressing forwards. Areas of Helmand and Kandahar have recently been secured. And there has been a fivefold increase in night raids by allied special forces against Taliban commanders. The insurgents interviewed in Kabul admitted that this had caused them problems, though they claimed to be adept at fleeing their beds the instant helicopters were heard. They also claimed that replacing Taliban casualties was easy. “Every day we are getting fresh, keen young people from the madrassas,” one said. “There are a lot of people on standby to join the Taliban and fight these Christian foreigners.”

It is impossible to judge these claims. But most analysts, even if impressed by General Petraeus's progress, are gloomy about Afghanistan. The government appears unsalvageably corrupt. Pakistan shows no interest in driving the Afghan militants from its territory. And their strength may be growing. A report by the Afghanistan NGO Security Office pointed to a 59% increase in Taliban attacks in the third quarter compared with the same period in 2009, and said the surge had “failed to degrade [the Taliban's] ability to fight.”

The government may share that view. One of Mr Karzai's ministers said that, so long as the Taliban were “winning”, reconciliation would be “an empty phrase”. He added: “If I am Taliban, why should I accept a reconciliation proposal of the Afghan government? I know the government is in bad situation, it has lost the support of the Afghan people and the international community is ready for exit.”