Burhanuddin Rabbani, former Afghan president and head of the government’s High Peace Council, was killed by a Taliban suicide bomber on Tuesday in a dramatic demonstration of the Taliban’s reach.

The bomb was detonated while two men posing as Taliban peace emissaries were meeting with Rabbani at his home. A senior adviser to Afghan President Hamid Karzai was also seriously injured in the attack. The killing was the latest in a string of high-profile assassinations in Afghanistan, including the death of the president’s half-brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, in July.

“The Taliban wants to send a very powerful message that the Karzai government is not in charge,” Vali Nasr, a former senior official in the State Department’s Afghanistan/Pakistan office, said.

Details of the assassination and the identity of the killers remain unclear, as Stratfor points out: “Taliban suicide bombers do not typically rise above the rank of foot soldiers—far short of negotiators with private access to Rabbani. Nor do we know how the two attackers infiltrated the strong layer of security that surrounds Rabbani’s residence in the Wazir Akbar Khan neighborhood” (September 21).

The attack comes as U.S.-Taliban negotiations, mediated by Pakistan, are in their initial phases, reports Stratfor, and it may be an attempt by some Taliban factions to shape the talks in their favor.

Rabbani, the lead representative of the Tajiks, “posed a strategic hurdle to the Taliban,” Stratfor says. His assassination creates a power vacuum within the factions in the north, and “allows the Taliban to push their demands for political dominance in any postwar political arrangement” (ibid.).

If this was the Taliban’s purpose, “it leaves the United States in a highly uncomfortable position,” writes Stratfor.

Marine Gen. John Allen, commander of the International Security Assistance Force stated the obvious: that the Rabbani assassination represents “another outrageous indicator that, regardless of what Taliban leadership outside the country say, they do not want peace, but rather war.”

Or, as Nasr said, “[I]t makes it very difficult to say the Taliban is serious about negotiations if they keep killing people they should be negotiating with.”

Still, America feels it has no option but to seek a political settlement involving the Taliban so it can extract itself from Afghanistan. “It is going to be important to continue the efforts to bring all of the elements in Afghanistan society together to end the senseless cycle of violence,” President Barack Obama said on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.

“[A]t the end of the day,” writes Stratfor, “the United States has no choice but to engage in an unsavory negotiation with the Taliban—and this may be what the Taliban were calculating all along.”

The situation the U.S. finds itself in in Afghanistan perfectly demonstrates how this great nation is spending its strength in vain, as was prophesied in Leviticus 26:19-20. Read “Spending America’s Strength in Vain” for more details on this prophecy.