"Black and White thinking" = "arriving at a conclusion."
I will readily agree that refusing to follow a line of thought to an endpoint does avoid a lot of uncomfortable dead ends. A tendency to drift off the subject also helps, if one is willing to define an enthusiastic leap off the train of thought as "drifting."
The Taliban willing to turn over bin Laden? I did find this one news item, but I really don't think it's what you want to see.
The pipeline was a dead issue by 1998. Nobody, especially oil companies at the time, was pursuing it.