Editor 's note : Peter Bergen is a fellow at the New America Foundation , a Washington-based think tank that promotes innovative thought from across the ideological spectrum and at New York University 's Center on Law and Security . He 's the author of `` The Osama bin Laden I Know : An Oral History of al Qaeda 's Leader . '' Peter Bergen says deals with the Taliban could further destabilize the situation in Afghanistan . -LRB- CNN -RRB- -- It is a longstanding cliché that there is no military solution in Afghanistan , only a political one . Linked to this is the newer , related notion , rapidly becoming a cliché , that the United States should start making deals with elements of the `` reconcilable '' Taliban . As with many clichés , there is some truth to both these notions , but neither of these comforting ideas are a substitute for a strategy that is connected to what is happening on the ground in Afghanistan and Pakistan . Sunday 's New York Times ran an interview with President Obama in which he said that , just as the U.S. had made peace agreements with Sunni militias in Iraq , `` There may be some comparable opportunities in Afghanistan and in the Pakistani region . '' He also cautioned that this could be `` more complex '' than was the case in Iraq . It 's not only going to be more complex , but doing deals with the Taliban today could further destabilize Afghanistan . Before getting to why that is the case , let 's stipulate first that there are always going to be some local commanders of the Taliban who can be bribed , coerced or otherwise persuaded to lay down their arms . In fact , the Afghan government already has had an amnesty program in place for Taliban fighters for four years . Thousands of the Taliban already have taken advantage of the amnesty , a fact that tends to be glossed over in most of the recent discussions of the issue . That being said , there are nine reasons why doing deals with most of the various factions of the insurgencies in Afghanistan and Pakistan that are labeled `` the Taliban '' are more in the realm of fantasy than a sustainable policy . First , the Afghan government is a sovereign entity and any agreements with the Taliban must be made by it . Right now the weak and ineffectual Afghan government is in no position to negotiate with the Taliban , other than to make significant concessions of either territory or principle , or both . Second , while Obama did n't talk about dealing with Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar , it is worth pointing out the Taliban leadership , including Mullah Omar , has in the past several months taken every opportunity to say that it has no interest in a deal with the Afghan government . And just last week , Mullah Omar urged the Pakistani Taliban to refocus their efforts on attacking U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan . Those statements should be taken at face value . Third , Mullah Omar 's intransigence is utterly predictable . He was prepared to sacrifice his regime on the point of principle that he would not hand over Osama bin Laden after 9/11 . And he did . This does not suggest a Kissingerian realism about negotiations , but rather a fanatical devotion to his cause . Fourth , the Taliban believe they may be winning in Afghanistan , and they also are confident that they are not losing , which for an insurgent movement amounts to the same thing . They see no need to negotiate today when they can get a better deal down the road . Fifth , the Taliban leadership is largely in Pakistan . Side deals done with the Afghan Taliban will have little or no effect on the fact that the command and control of the insurgency is in another country . Sixth , when Pakistan 's government has done `` peace '' deals with the Taliban in the Pakistani tribal regions in 2005 and 2006 and in the northern region of Swat earlier this year , they were made following military setbacks by Pakistan 's army . Those deals then allowed the militants to regroup and extend their control over greater swaths of Pakistani territory . Why would new agreements with the Taliban on either side of the Afghan-Pakistan border yield different results ? Seventh , `` reconcilable '' Afghan Taliban leaders have already reconciled to the government . Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil , the former foreign minister who met with Afghan government officials in Saudi Arabia in September , to discuss some kind of agreement with the Harmid Karzai administration , was a foe of bin Laden 's long before 9/11 and was never a hard-liner . Muttawakil has no standing today with Taliban leaders , who have been waging war now for 7 1/2 years against Karzai , and who quickly denied they were in any negotiations with his government . Eighth , while the Taliban was never a monolithic movement , it is much closer to al Qaeda today than it was before 9/11 . Yes , there are local groups of the Taliban operating for purely local reasons , but the upper levels of the Taliban have morphed together ideologically and tactically with al Qaeda . Baitullah Mehsud , for instance , the leader of the Pakistani Taliban , sent suicide attackers to Spain in January 2008 , according to Spanish counterterrorism officials , and sees himself as part of the global jihad . The Haqqani family , arguably the most important component of the insurgency on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border , has ties with bin Laden that date back to at least 1985 , according to the Palestinian journalist Jamal Ismail , who has known the al Qaeda leader for more than two decades . Gulbuddin Hekmatyar , a commander allied to the Taliban , has been close to bin Laden since at least 1989 , according to militants who know both men . Al Qaeda was founded in Pakistan two decades ago , and bin Laden has been fighting alongside Afghan mujahedeen groups since the mid-1980s . Al Qaeda Central on the Afghan/Pakistan border is much less of a `` foreign '' group with far deeper and older roots in the region than Al Qaeda ever was in Iraq . The Taliban 's rhetoric is now filled with references to Iraq and Palestine in a manner that mirrors bin Laden 's public statements . The use of suicide attacks , improvised explosive devices and the beheadings of hostages -- all techniques that al Qaeda perfected in Iraq -- are methods that the Taliban have increasingly adopted in Afghanistan and have grown exponentially there since 2005 . iReport.com : Should there be a deal with the Taliban ? One could go on listing examples of the Taliban 's ideological and tactical collaboration with al Qaeda , but the larger point is that separating al Qaeda and the Taliban is not going to be as relatively simple as splintering Iraqi insurgent groups from al Qaeda in Iraq . And ninth , unlike Al Qaeda in Iraq , which was a foreign-led group that sought to impose , unpopular Taliban-style rule on Sunni areas of Iraq , the Taliban in Pashtun areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan are not outsiders , but are often neighborhood people whose views about religion and society are rooted in the values of the Pashtun countryside . While , of course , the U.S. should be splintering , buying off and co-opting as many elements of the Taliban as possible , American officials also need to be realistic about how much closer Al Qaeda and the Taliban have grown together in recent years , and the fact that the insurgency has mushroomed in size on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border . Winston Churchill once observed that `` it 's better to jaw-jaw than to war-war . '' True enough . But `` jaw-jaw '' with the Taliban wo n't work if they think they are winning as they do right now . The Obama administration has ordered 17,000 additional American soldiers to go to Afghanistan this year . As a result , two Marine brigades and a mobile , well-armored Stryker brigade will deploy into the heart of the Taliban insurgency in southern Afghanistan . Marine and Stryker brigades are not the kind of units you send in to play nice . Those deployments strongly suggest that for all the public discussion of negotiations with the Taliban the decision already has been made that any such negotiations should precede from a position of strength rather than weakness . These comments are , in part , based on Peter Bergen 's testimonybefore the U.S. House of Representatives , Committee on Oversight and Government Reform , Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs on March 4 . The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Peter Bergen .