AFP - Western governments must negotiate with the Taliban to end their guerrilla war against NATO forces in Afghanistan and allow a peaceful state to emerge, said a Canadian report released Thursday.

The study by a small team of Afghanistan geopolitical experts from across Canada said negotiations with the Taliban are not guaranteed to succeed, but "failure to negotiate will almost certainly cede the field to them."

"I think it's the best chance for success and the least bad option," said lead author Gordon Smith (news, bio, voting record), a former Canadian ambassador to NATO and now director of the Centre for Global Studies at the University of Victoria.

"Negotiating with the Taliban would be very difficult and very distasteful. These are not people I would want around my dining table. But I don't see any alternative. We need some form of political resolution," he told AFP.

Canada has deployed 2,500 troops in the volatile Kandahar region of southern Afghanistan, hunting down Taliban militants. Since 2002, 44 Canadian soldiers and one senior diplomat have died in attacks or roadside explosions.

Ottawa has already refused to negotiate with the Taliban.

But Smith's team said: "We do not believe that the Taliban can be defeated or eliminated as a political entity in any meaningful time frame by Western armies using military measures, and certainly not with the relatively small increases in force strength that are currently planned."

As well, reconstruction efforts aimed at winning the support of local Pashtuns tribes against the Taliban have been stalled by insecurity in several parts of the war-torn country.

"A massive troop surge is not going to happen and relying solely on development assistance is naive," Smith told AFP.

The Taliban may not be universally accepted as a legitimate force, he noted, but most Pashtuns now believe the Taliban will remain long after NATO forces withdraw from Afghanistan.

The best hope for peace is for "back channel negotiations" with the Taliban leadership and local tribal leaders to draw the Taliban into greater participation in central and provincial governments, the study said.

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