The Afghan conundrum
The protracted war in Afghanistan has of late produced its inevitable counter efforts for peace. The peace talks in Doha between the US and the Taliban appeared to be tantalisingly close to producing a settlement, especially when reports emerged of US President Donald Trump having invited a Taliban delegation to Washington for what may have been the final act of the peace negotiations. However, these seemingly positive developments nosedived when Trump abruptly cancelled the proposed meeting with the Taliban and declared the peace process ‘dead’ in response to continuing attacks by the Taliban. The issue of a ceasefire declaration or at the very least a scaling down of the violence by the Taliban eventually emerged as the main stumbling block to further progress in bringing the US’s longest foreign war to a close. If that was the eventual verity that emerged from the many repeated rounds of talks in Doha, the bombing of a mosque in the eastern Nangarhar province on October 19, 2019, in which 70 worshippers died and 33 were wounded, amongst them dozens of children, certainly does not portend a turn away from the impasse that played out in Washington. There was no claim of responsibility for the atrocity, with the Taliban denying they had carried it out and attempting to shift the blame to the Islamic State (IS) or the government. IS too retains its enigmatic silence on the incident, presumably because both it and the Taliban fear the negative fallout of such a dastardly attack on innocent worshippers at Friday prayers. Whatever the truth of the matter, neither group has been above such atrocities in the past. Meanwhile a flurry of statements and visits has followed the massacre in Nangarhar. First and foremost, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo reiterated Washington’s commitment to peace and stability in Afghanistan and the fight against terrorism. On October 20, 2019, US Defence Secretary Mark Esper made his maiden visit to Kabul for talks with the Afghan government to review options for restarting the stalled peace process. It may be mentioned in passing in this context that so far the Afghan government has been kept out of the talks process. Back home in Washington, the US’s chief negotiator Zalmay Khalilzad met the Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley and then flew to Europe to get the US’s allies on board and hold discussions in Moscow with his Russian and Chinese interlocutors to advance the peace process. The EU too has called for a ceasefire in Afghanistan to create the necessary conditions for a permanent political settlement. Pakistan, not to be left behind, is reportedly pressing the Taliban to declare an ‘unannounced ceasefire’ without so far any response from the insurgents. In the absence of such a ‘non-announcement’, confidence-building measures such as a scaling back of the fighting is another idea on the table.
The survey of statements and visits above highlights what now appears to be the focus of Washington vis-à-vis the Afghan quagmire. The US’s initial demand that Afghanistan never again serve as the launch pad of terrorism against it and its allies a la 9/11 has been agreed. The now central demand for a ceasefire or at the very least a diminution of the violence is still to be clinched. In the process, one or two other factors are noteworthy. The Afghan government, ignored for the peace talks by Washington and dismissed out of hand by the Taliban as ‘puppets’ is currently in flux after the Afghan presidential election results have been delayed, ostensibly due to some technical hitches. A round of mutual jockeying, claims and counter-claims by the two leading contenders, Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah, as in the last election, could leave the new Afghan government even weaker and more irrelevant to the power play in progress between the US and the Taliban. The abrupt decision by Trump to throw the US’s erstwhile Kurdish allies to the wolves in Syria has triggered alarm and speculation that Washington may well leave Afghanistan to its own devices in a similar manner, although US officials have been at pains to deny this. With an unreliable imperial power, a weak and ineffective local government, and the battlefield threats from the Taliban and IS, the Afghan brew appears to be heading for some form of catastrophe. Pakistan cannot remain unaffected, especially if increased violence produces a fresh flow of Afghan refugees to our soil. The global and regional powers and the Afghan protagonists must come together and find an acceptable path out of this morass if the long suffering Afghan people are to be spared more of the same deadly mixture they have endured for so long.
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