At the recent London conference on Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai declared he would begin negotiations with top leaders of the Taliban, whom he called his “disenchanted brothers”.

“We must reach out to all of our countrymen,” he said, “who are not part of al-Qaeda, or other terrorist networks.”

Karzai’s proposal has received cautious support from many members of the occupying coalition in Afghanistan. Even the US, which prefers a scheme in which the western coalition pays  rank-and-file Taliban fighters to lay down their arms, did not publicly criticise Karzai’s invitation to the Taliban leadership to attend a “grand peace jirga [council]”.

“You don’t make peace with your friends,” explained US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. “You have to be willing to engage with your enemies.”

Now, it’s by no means clear that the Taliban want to negotiate. After all, they currently seem to be winning.

Still, a few days ago, the Guardian reported that Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Afghan Taliban leader himself, was prepared to break with al-Qaeda in return for peace. That claim came from a former Pakistani intelligence officer who had trained Omar during the civil war in the 1990s. Brigadier Sultan Amir Tarar explained: “The moment [Omar] gets control the first target will be the al-Qaeda people. He wants peace in the country, he doesn’t want adventure. He has enough of that.”

Furthermore, in December, the Wall Street Journal noted a Taliban communiqué that seemed to promise that the group would forswear al-Qaeda in return for the withdrawal of foreign troops.

These hints at a schism between the pan-Islamist terror group al-Qaeda and the Pashtun-based Taliban make Karzai’s negotiations seem far more plausible. Imagine, for instance, if Mullah Omar handed Osama bin Laden over to the international community! What a breakthrough that would be!

Well, here’s the thing: the Taliban offered precisely that. Nine years ago.

In 2001, before the ground invasion began, the Taliban deputy prime minister, Haji Abdul Kabir, proposed to give up bin Laden. He made only three conditions: the bombing would have to stop, the US would need to show evidence of bin Laden’s responsibility for the September 11 attacks, and bin Laden would have to receive a trial in a third country.

How serious was the offer? According to the Washington Post, before 9/11 the Taliban had met with US officials more than 20 times, repeatedly suggesting they would hand over bin Laden. After 9/11, the Taliban leaders were, Jeremy R. Hammond at the Foreign Policy Journal suggests, furious at the al-Qaeda leader for what they saw as his adventurism.

But the US rejected talks out of hand. A few days later, the Taliban repeated the proposal — and this time dropped the demand for evidence. Once more, Bush refused.

At the time, the US reaction generated very little comment. After all, those were days in which the Afghan mission was presented as part of a clash of civilisations, extending far beyond bin Laden. The overthrow of the Taliban was, it was said, necessary to liberate women, to protect human rights, to restore democracy. One could not negotiate with such people.

Today, however, that’s all changed.

These days, when it comes to women, the warlords of the Karzai regime and the warlords of Mullah Omar seem increasingly similar. Last year, for instance, Karzai himself backed a law that criminalised married women refusing s-x to their husbands, and banned them from leaving the house, seeking work, schooling or visiting doctor without their husbands’ permission.

The human rights situation remains uniformly grim, with the Afghan security forces routinely torturing detainees, and Karzai running in the last election alongside Mohamed Fahim, a man accused by Amnesty International of some of the worst abuses in the country.

As for democracy, again, Karzai set the tone. His own electoral legitimacy rests on a 2009 poll, which he won only through ballot stuffing, voter intimidation and other (well-documented) chicanery.

It’s true that the negotiations proposed in London were predicated on Taliban acceptance of the Afghan constitution. Yet few people realise that that document, cobbled together by Karzai’s warlord allies, declares Afghanistan to be “an Islamic Republic” and states that “no law can be contrary to the beliefs and provisions of the sacred religion of Islam”.

Could the Taliban accept such a constitution? It’s hard to see why they couldn’t.

As Winston Churchill said, to jaw–jaw is always better than to war–war, especially in Afghanistan where the people have endured decades of continuous conflict.

But it’s odd there hasn’t been more discussion of how, nine years into the occupation, we’re countenancing negotiations on terms significantly worse than those offered before the war actually began.

That is, in 2001, a deal with the Taliban would have meant accepting a repressive and authoritarian government in return for the capture of bin Laden. Negotiations at that point would have spared tens of thousands of lives, and saved the $172 billion the war is currently estimated to have cost. Had that extraordinary amount of money gone to, say, alleviate Afghan poverty and promote development rather than funding an occupation, it might even have spurred a civil society capable of challenging the Taliban from within.

Instead, however, bin Laden’s still free and Afghanistan remains as impoverished and miserable as ever, even as we accept (in fact, fund) a repressive and authoritarian government in the form of Karzai and his gang. And now the Taliban, whether by negotiation or military success, seem almost certain to play some role in a future Afghan government.

So nine years of bloodshed and death, and billions upon billions of dollars spent. What was it all for?