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The Taliban's leadership is between a rock and a hard place: they are not capable of giving the US what the US demands, and nothing less will prevent the US from attacking. They cannot give bin Laden up and shut down Al Qaeda. A quarter of their military might (and in fact the best, most disciplined part) is directly loyal to bin Laden rather than to the Taliban directly, and if the Taliban turns on bin Laden those forces will at the very least stop fighting (opening up the Taliban to an attack by the Northern Alliance) and very likely begin directly attacking the Taliban itself. In addition, Al Qaeda is actually responsible for a large part of the funding that is keeping the Taliban itself going; without them, the Taliban's government would be financially unsound. They would no longer be able to pay or supply much of the rest of their army, with all that implies. Morale among the civilians in their area of control is terrible, and at least 20% have decamped and headed for relative safety in refugee camps at or across the border. That has crippled the economy, which was none too healthy anyway. The Taliban are not self sufficient in any important regard: the nation doesn't have an armaments industry and isn't even self-sufficient in food. Prolonged isolation alone represents a deadly danger to their power, but that is far from the most urgent thing they face. So they are reduced now to trying forlorn attempts at diplomacy. They begged bin Laden to leave Afghanistan and take his war with the US somewhere else, and he ignored them. They have been trying everything they can think of to try to engage the US in conversation, which is difficult because the US won't even talk to them. There was their attempt to trade the 8 missionaries for relief from the military pressure, and now their offer to try bin Laden in their own courts under Islamic law. That offer is, of course, a sham; perhaps a trial would be held but even if he were "convicted" his effective punishment would be little different than his current living situation, and Al Qaeda itself would continue to operate from Afghani territory. This isn't about bin Laden, it's about all of Al Qaeda, and terrorism, and brutality. Bin Laden is only one piece of the whole. The political situation does not actually permit a compromise, so diplomacy is pointless. In that the US is correct: there is nothing to talk about. The US requires that Al Qaeda be shut down, while the Taliban cannot survive without it. It's not clear that the Taliban can survive anyway, and that is the dilemma they are looking at, clearly with rising horror. And to me as an atheist, it becomes clear that they are further shackled by their religion: they truly believe that God is on their side and that some miracle will save them, because their scripture tells them that the righteous cannot lose. Unfortunately, it's not going to happen, and once military operations begin they won't stop until Al Qaeda and the Taliban itself are eradicated. On one level their religion tells them that this can't happen, but on another level they are coming to believe that this is true; it's a classic conflict of intellect versus faith. So they are also suffering a crisis of faith. The final problem they face is that the Taliban itself is intolerable to us and must be destroyed. It's not a formally stated goal of the US, but I believe it is actually one of the goals we have set. The regime the Taliban has established and the way they have treated their own people are abhorrent to us, and to most of the world. The way they have treated their women, in particular, is revolting. I believe that our leadership has decided to take this opportunity to annihilate the most stifling and brutal police state on the planet. And given the willingness that the Taliban have shown in the past for harboring international terrorists, if they were allowed to continue in control of Afghanistan, there could be no assurance that they would not continue to do so in future. Even if Al Qaeda was eradicated from Afghanistan now, they or someone like them would return. The only way to prevent that is to remove the Taliban itself and to put in place a new government. I think that our government knows full well that the Taliban are not capable of satisfying the demands the US has made; I believe that the demands have been crafted deliberately to make it impossible to avoid war, so that the Taliban can be toppled as part of the conflict. (Which is not to say that the demands are unreasonable from our point of view.) A great deal of the diplomatic maneuvering that the US has been doing in the last couple of weeks has been to try to figure out what to put in place in Afghanistan once the Taliban are destroyed, which clearly is the expected outcome. The bigge 
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