WSJ front-pager on how Karzai is losing support from Afghanistan's minorities due to his desire to reach out and co-opt the Taliban. This is seen as the equivalent of reaching out to the Sunnis in Iraq during the similar surge.
Naturally, the non-Pashtun fear any accommodation will allow the Taliban a long-term path for returning to power.
A rep of the Hazara (the Shiia in this equation; a similarly sized Hazara popultion exists in Iran) puts it this way:
We feel betrayed by the president . . . It seems that what President Karzai pursues now is the Talibanization of Afghanistan. The only difference between him and the Taliban is that he sits in the presidential palace and the Taliban sit in the mountains.
This is part of why I think the fracturing of Afghanistan is inevitable: to bring the Taliban back into the fold is to admit they own the south, and once you do that, the rest of the minorities will either want the same or will seek to do battle at some point in the future. But with damn near everybody saying the military defeat of the Taliban is impossible, it's hard to see how you get any peace without co-opting them.
In the end, the minorities fear that the endgame as currently imagined leads to a resumed fight that the Taliban has a good chance of winning seems far from hyperbolic.
So a divided Afghanistan (however we maintain the fiction of unity) seems in the works. The only question is who is the external guarantor. We seem to be choosing Pakistan, ignoring the alternative of India-Iran-Russia, and I don't see how that doesn't buy us a return visit, because we've been down this path before.
So it feels like a catch-22: don't include the Taliban and you have a truncated state, but include them and you get a divided state with the most likely unifier being the Taliban--again.