Margaret Beckett is surely right to leave open the prospect of one day talking to the Taleban.

But as she said yesterday on her visit to Afghanistan, right now those prospects look dim. There is no other possible position on a day when a suicide bomber, claimed by the Taleban as one of theirs, tried to kill Dick Cheney, the US Vice-President, at Bagram airbase near Kabul. “We wanted to target Cheney,” Mullah Hayat Khan, Taleban spokesman, told Reuters news agency by phone from an undisclosed location.

The Foreign Secretary said that talks with the former Taleban or sympathisers who were no longer active may be possible in the future.

“That could be a different matter, but I certainly don’t envisage some form or process of dialogue at present,” she said.

Nothing about this policy can stay clear cut. In the end, it will probably be necessary to deal with the Taleban or their sympathisers (if a distinction can really be made), as the Afghan and Pakistani governments are already doing. Cheney’s sudden trip to Pakistan was prompted by US alarm that al-Qaeda terrorists were returning to the wild borderland with Afghanistan, although not with anything like the numbers or freedom of movement that they enjoyed when Afghanistan was almost entirely run by the Taleban.

He told President Musharraf that if Pakistan did not clamp down on fighters crossing the border into Afghanistan, then the US may be forced to cut off some aid.

President Bush has already proposed giving Pakistan $785 million (£400 million) next year, including $300 million for its military. This threat comes after four months of rising US exasperation, since Musharraf struck controversial deals with some of the tribal leaders on the Pakistani side of the border. If they halted the transit of “foreign fighters” (al-Qaeda and Afghan Taleban) then Musharraf would withdraw Pakistan’s army from their territory. US and British officials agree that the hasn’t worked.

There is little sign of a crackdown, and suspicion that the recent surge in attacks on Nato forces in Afghanistan is a sign that the Taleban have been released from pressure on the eastern front.

Musharraf has told the US and Britain than he has done more than is popularly supposed, and that his forces have suffered some 700 fatalities since they began more two years ago to close the border dividing the Waziristan tribal area from Afghanistan. For this reason alone he had to do the deals.

Up to a point. His army is under such strain partly because of the separate tribal unrest in Baluchistan, a patch of trouble Musharraf ought to settle quickly and through political means, answering their grievances about their share of local gas revenues.

The more profound motive for the deals is that Pakistan is losing confidence in the Nato strategy for southern Afghanistan. For a start, the definition of Taleban is much fuzzier than Nato officials imply. Al-Qaeda fighters, often Arabs, and not part of the local Pashtun communities, are certainly identifiable. And it is possible to identify Taleban leaders, organising attacks on Nato forces, as those forces and the Afghan Army have done.

But it is less clear whether the label “Taleban” should be slapped on those who fight with them, whether out of fear or belief, and communities supporting them.

The Afghan Government and Nato will have to persuade as many of these people as possible to change sides. Beckett is right to leave open the chance to talk to them in the future. The deal Musharraf struck with his tribal leaders was a bad one, but the principle was not outrageous.

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