The Defense Department is carrying on its review of the US military’s role in the Afghanistan conflict.

A spokesman for US Forces in Afghanistan, Col. Sonny Leggett, in a statement, rejects reports of changes in US operations in the country and says “we have no such orders and have made no such changes”.

Three months after 9/11, two months after U.S. President George W. Bush ordered bombs to begin raining on Kabul, the day The Village Voice published one of my war reports from the front in Afghanistan: “We’ve lost this war,” I wrote. To drive my point home, the headline was: “How We Lost Afghanistan.”

U.S. diplomats held talks with Taliban delegates on Monday in the United Arab Emirates to discuss ways to end the war in Afghanistan, a Taliban spokesman and Afghan government officials said.