Peace for Afghanistan
To give peace a final chance, all stakeholders will have to abandon the victor or vanquished psyche.
After several rounds of negotiations and breaking through innumerable obstacles, the US and Taliban finally can claim some progress was made. While a peace deal is in sight, the entire process remains one mishap away from being derailed, as it always has been in the past. Practically, peace is achievable in Afghanistan, and it always was, even without the 19-year-long conflict.
A peaceful resolution would require all parties to the conflict agree on the need for a political settlement because two decades of war has only left the country more fragmented than it ever was. While peace is achievable, it will not be as easy as Washington D.C. would like it to be. History has a few lessons. One of them tells us that talks of this nature, particularly between an insurgent group and a state, tend to take decades before a final agreement can be inked. And this peace process, like all the others attempted before it, faces a long list of challenges. One of them is the mercurial US president himself, who, as we know, is not known for patience. There is a possibility that if the negotiations fail to yield desired results, President Donald Trump, will lose patience and pull out of the talks, effectively, abandoning a weak government in Kabul.
If that happens, Afghanistan will plunge into another endless cycle of civil unrest. Another significant challenge is the intra-Afghan talks and the absolute lack of structure for such a dialogue in the future. Since the US has nothing else to gain in this complex equation and so much to lose, the only way to negotiate a peace deal at this point would require a little more flexibility than what we have seen so far.
And that applies for all major players who are trying to negotiate the end of the longest nightmare for both America and Afghanistan. To give peace a final chance, all stakeholders will have to abandon the victor or vanquished psyche.
Published in The Express Tribune, February 3rd, 2020.
A peaceful resolution would require all parties to the conflict agree on the need for a political settlement because two decades of war has only left the country more fragmented than it ever was. While peace is achievable, it will not be as easy as Washington D.C. would like it to be. History has a few lessons. One of them tells us that talks of this nature, particularly between an insurgent group and a state, tend to take decades before a final agreement can be inked. And this peace process, like all the others attempted before it, faces a long list of challenges. One of them is the mercurial US president himself, who, as we know, is not known for patience. There is a possibility that if the negotiations fail to yield desired results, President Donald Trump, will lose patience and pull out of the talks, effectively, abandoning a weak government in Kabul.
If that happens, Afghanistan will plunge into another endless cycle of civil unrest. Another significant challenge is the intra-Afghan talks and the absolute lack of structure for such a dialogue in the future. Since the US has nothing else to gain in this complex equation and so much to lose, the only way to negotiate a peace deal at this point would require a little more flexibility than what we have seen so far.
And that applies for all major players who are trying to negotiate the end of the longest nightmare for both America and Afghanistan. To give peace a final chance, all stakeholders will have to abandon the victor or vanquished psyche.
Published in The Express Tribune, February 3rd, 2020.