It seems, after the Taliban and Afghan government exchanged prisoners on Tuesday, that the Afghan peace process is showing signs of life once again. It stayed out of the headlines after US President Donald Trump effectively killed it with a tweet in September, primarily because of the direction the negotiations had taken. The main problem with the process headed by US Special Envoy Zalmay Khalilzad was that it completely excluded the legitimate Afghan government. For more than a year the Americans talked with the Taliban with zero input from Kabul, no doubt frustrating President Ghani. To make matters worse, whenever Ghani tried to remind everybody that he, not the Taliban, represented his country, the Americans would still side with the insurgents and not include the government in the talks. It only made matters worse, no doubt, that the Taliban kept calling the government ‘US puppets’. Now, for some reason, the insurgents have decided to purposefully engage with Kabul. The prisoner exchange should be the first of a series of confidence building measures, laying a solid foundation for the two legitimate stakeholders in this long, ugly war to negotiate directly. And both have something to gain. The Afghan government has been stretched beyond capacity ever since it was erected with the help of the US and the wider international community. Consumed by the war, it has been unable to pay attention to or provide funds for people’s most pressing needs. It needs the war to end more than anything at the moment. And the Taliban, for all their gains and snowballing Spring Offensives since at least 2006, know as well as anybody that they will never take Kabul again. Even if the government is ridiculed for its writ not really extending beyond the capital, it is well known that it, backed by the US/nato alliance of course, will never relinquish Kabul. Peace talks, on the other hand, can catapult the Taliban right back to the government as coalition stakeholders. That, really, is about as good a deal as they can hope for no matter what kind of gains they make on the battlefield. Once this process gets going hopefully a complete US/nato withdrawal will follow and Afghans will be left to sort out their own issues. All countries who’ve helped kick start talks again after the Trump snub, especially Pakistan, China, Russia and Iran, must be appreciated for their effort. But they must also realise that once the talks are on track they must all withdraw. Afghanistan has suffered for decades owing to outside interference. This must finally be the moment when all sorts of non-Afghan influences end and an Afghan-led, Afghan-owned process takes over *