Special to WorldTribune.com

By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com

NEW DELHI — Why do high-powered U.S. diplomats persist in thinking that sitting around a table with the bad guys is going to produce a lasting peace and everyone will then live happily ever after?

Apparently Washington never learned from years of yakking that resulted in the “Paris peace” of January 1973 with North Vietnam. While the U.S. withdrew its troops, Hanoi geared for the final offensive — and victory in April 1975.

If all that seems like ancient history, however, we need only hark back to all the misbegotten deals to get the North Koreans to give up their nuclear program beginning with the Geneva framework agreement of October 1994. The payoff for that deal was the revelation eight years later of North Korea’s program to build nukes with highly enriched uranium instead of plutonium.

Having not quite absorbed the lesson, the Americans plunged into more talks and two sure-to-fail nuclear deals with North Korea in 2007.

Now Washington is tinkering again with North Korea’s call for talks. Just get the North Koreans to say anything slightly conciliatory and U.S. diplomats would leap to their seats at the table.

But wait, while all that’s going on, who would believe Secretary of State John Kerry really wants to sit down with another bunch of bad guys, the Taliban, in the safety of Doha in the Persian Gulf enclave of Qatar? He was here in New Delhi trying to convince reluctant Indian leaders of that idea this week, after which the U.S. envoy on Afghanistan and Pakistan, James Dobbin, arrived straight from Doha for more meetings to draw the Indians into the process.

The Indians, though, seem to have more common sense than the Americans realize. In the interests of what the Americans love to call “strategic partnership,” Kerry has backed off from the call for talks with the Taliban while indicating all depends on how much the U.S. can trust the Taliban, with whom U.S. forces have been battling ever since 9/11/2001.

While the Taliban does whatever it can to destabilize Pakistan, many Indians are convinced they’re strengthening ties among zealots in India’s Muslim “minority,” approaching 180 million of India’s 1.2 million people.

Kerry while here sought to allay Indian fears, to assure everyone that of course the U.S. won’t enter into talks with the Taliban as long as they can’t be trusted.

The U.S., however, wants India to help convince Afghan President Hamid Karzai of the need to bring the Taliban into the political process. That aim reflects the premise that Afghanistan, after the U.S. has pulled out its forces, is not going to move from incessant war to uneasy peace unless the Taliban has a role.

In that spirit, Kerry has been promising talks are not going to happen as long as the Taliban have links to Al Qaida — an assurance that Indians find hard to accept. Salman Khurshid, minister of external affairs, said that Kerry had pledged “none of the concerns of India will be overlooked” — less than a strong reassurance.

Commentators wonder about the strength of the India-U.S. “partnership” while the Taliban exploit old-time enemy Pakistan’s economic disarray and political dissension. Hopes are high that Pakistan’s newly installed prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, will work on reconciliation with India, but the chances of deterring the Taliban along the Afghan border, and deeper inside Pakistan, are remote.

A former Indian ambassador to Afghanistan, Vivek Katju, summarized the doubts in a scathing commentary in The Hindu, one of India’s leading national newspapers.

“The U.S. has already gone to great lengths to accommodate the Taliban and Pakistan,” he wrote. “Such is the measure of its strategic desperation that contrary to its earlier position, it has accepted the Taliban’s vague assurances regarding Afghan territory not being used to foment violence outside the country.”

Despite Karzai’s “anger and the deep resentment in Kabul,” wrote Katju, there’s “little doubt that talks between the United States and the Taliban will take place sooner rather than later.”

Kerry seems to want it both ways. India has “a critical role” to play, he said, in Afghan’s presidential election next year. There’s no real confidence, however, that the U.S. won’t find a pretext for talks with an enemy that’s hardly promoting democracy while bringing the Afghan war ever closer to India.

Somehow the pattern seems familiar to one who was in Saigon when the U.S. fell for the “Paris peace” 40 years ago and watched round after round of useless negotiations with the North Koreans everywhere from Geneva to Berlin to New York and Beijing.

It would be nice to think Washington had learned from these disillusionments — rather than prove, yet again, that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

  Hamid Karzai, James Dobbin, John Kerry, Salman Khurshid, Talking to the Taliban: Diplomacy 101 should be about learning from past failures