Afghan President Hamid Karzai has announced a peace overture aimed at top Taliban leaders. On Thursday, Karzai told an international conference in London he hopes to negotiate a peace deal with the Taliban that would end the more than eight years of fighting since the US invasion. The Obama administration has so far refused to endorse the proposal. Addressing the same conference, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the US would only back an agreement with low-level Taliban fighters, not leadership.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: “We have a very clear understanding of what we expect from this process. We expect that a lot of the foot soldiers on the battlefield will be leaving the Taliban because many of them have wanted to leave, many of them are tired of fighting. We believe the tide is beginning to turn against them, and we need incentives in order to both protect them and provide alternatives to them to replace the payment they received as Taliban fighters.”