No Pasaran.

Taliban gunmen have killed the head teacher of a girls' school near the Afghan capital after he ignored warnings to stop teaching girls, government officials have said. Khan Mohammad, the head of the Porak girls' school in Logar province, was shot dead near his home on Tuesday. Said Deen Mohammad Darwish, a spokesman for the Logar governor: "He was killed because he wanted to run the school."

Peter Bergen, author of The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict between America and Al Qaida, lays out nine reasons why notions of an "exit strategy" from Afghanistan based on reconciliation with the Taliban are based in fantasy, here. Any one of his reasons expose the folly of it. His understated summary: "Negotiations with religious fanatics who have delusions of grandeur generally do not go well."

There's only one way forward. Masood Aziz: "Injustice and the exercise of illegitimate power are now key reasons for a disaffected and disenchanted population. This is precisely where the Taliban find the space within which they thrive and where they seek and obtain support. Closing this gap by restoring a sense of justice and legitimacy will not only make the Taliban an irrelevant entity in Afghanistan, but will also serve as a model for Pakistan where their use as a geopolitical instrument of asymmetric warfare would no longer be viable or justifiable."