It is time to sort out the mess in Afghanistan - and where better to start than by talking with the enemy?

For six years, Nato has been fighting Taliban insurgents in what has turned into the biggest military operation in the alliance’s almost 60-year history. But in terms of results there is not a great deal to show for it - and the European public senses it. Support for Nato’s operations in Afghanistan was fairly broad-based to begin with. But now it is fracturing - and not just in Germany and Italy, where the enthusiasm for sending troops to a war in Asia was not exactly robust in the first place.

Yet if the EU and the Americans, Canadians and others were to pull out, it would deal a damaging blow to Nato, to western security more generally, and to the EU’s hopes of running a successful common foreign and security policy. What is needed isn’t a disorderly withdrawal, but an imaginative rethinking of the whole operation.

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