It has been known for some time that the Afghan government of President Ashraf Ghani has been in talks with elements of the Taliban. The question has always been who among the insurgents were doing the talking and whether they would be able to deliver on any agreement that might ultimately emerge.

Even when they constituted the country’s government under their first leader Mullah Omar, the Taliban were rarely united. By no means all of them welcomed the arrival of Osama Bin Laden and his group of international terrorists. Indeed, a fundamental dislike of foreigners is one of the key sentiments that unites the insurgents, as it has all Afghans throughout their long and often violent history.

Since the Taliban’s 2001 US-led ouster from Kabul, there have been occasional efforts to talk to them. In 2008, the British appeared to be making the biggest headway in Helmand province when they were seeking to persuade hundreds of the insurgents to quit the fight. But to his extreme discredit, the then president Hamid Karzai threw out the two diplomats who had been leading the talks, based on their considerable knowledge of the country, its people and their languages. Karzai protested that he was outraged the talks had been happening behind his back. Nevertheless, a number of Afghans as well as foreign diplomats maintained the president was perfectly well aware of the negotiations. It was never clear why he chose to bring them to an end.

But then it was never entirely clear why the Afghan victors who met in Bonn in December 2001 after the Taliban had been driven from power chose to ignore them altogether. As they made their plans for the reconstruction of the country, they wrote the Taliban out of any role. Such foolishness had all the hallmarks of President George W. Bush’s bovine world vision. There were doubtless some Afghans at that meeting who considered the exclusion of the Taliban to be unwise. But it was not just that Washington was busy hustling the participants toward an early triumphant conclusion; foreign powers were making eye-wateringly large pledges of aid and support not simply to rebuild shattered infrastructure but to put Afghanistan firmly on the path toward modern statehood.

In the event those promises were largely honored in the breach for the simple reason that Bush thought he had sorted out the problems of the country and went on to settle his father’s unfinished business with Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Security in the country was never absolute and the collapse began as the Taliban regrouped along with their Al-Qaeda allies. The great international plans to transform the country and put it on the path to long-overdue prosperity were scrapped as contractors and aid organizations began to take more and more casualties along with Afghan and international security forces.

The tragic truth is that the country never recovered from the fundamental error of excluding the Taliban from the Bonn conference and the Loya Jurga that followed it. President Ghani is seeking to make amends. Much will depend on the power and status of the Taliban who are involved in the new talks. But there is surely now one desire that is uniting all Afghans, which is the fervent hope for an end to the bloodshed and the return of peace.