Spin, rinse, repeat

Whatever influence Pakistan may have had over the Taliban is largely dissipated and the cycle looks set to continue

Seemingly no road leads to peace in Afghanistan no matter how often the road to reconciliation is redesigned, redrafted and rebooted. There is an entire generation that has grown up and reached maturity that has never known the country to be completely at peace. The Taliban, a creature of multiple parentings and with children of their own, have never been sufficiently unified to present a cohesive and coherent set of proposals for peace that were anything other than a reiteration of their own terms, irrespective of all other positions. In that at least, they are constant. The national government in concert with external players had cobbled together yet another hybrid beast, the Quadrilateral Coordination Group (QCG) made up of Afghanistan, China, America and Pakistan in another attempt to bring peace on to the agenda and it is foundering even before the ship sets sail. The Afghan government has now called for the Taliban to be declared “irreconcilable” because they have refused to engage in talks and have pushed ahead with their spring offensive.



There are those in the Afghan government that openly doubt the relevance of the QCG, and the meeting scheduled to be held in Islamabad on May 18 is likely of doubtful utility. The reality on the ground in Afghanistan is that the Taliban, fragmented as they are, control vast swathes of the country and enjoy considerable support from the populace peddling as they are the same formula as when they were in power — a stripped-down neo-brutalist regime that dispenses rough justice and has zero time for democratic processes — or peace talks. Why talk peace and compromise when you are winning? President Ashraf Ghani has the thankless task of trying to sell the QCG to the rest of the world as a credible vehicle which will action the ‘road map’ born in February 2016, but without the Taliban aboard. President Ghani probably has little option but to stand and fight. Once again, Afghan will be pitted against Afghan and the generations-deep wounds reopened to bleed anew. Whatever influence Pakistan may have historically had over the Taliban is largely dissipated and the cycle looks set to continue — spin, rinse, repeat.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 17^th, 2016.

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