generalspeaking

Friday, August 09, 2019

U.S.-Taliban Peace Talks

"Indiscriminate attacks and intentional injury to civilians are never warranted."
"The focus should be on immediately reducing violence as we move closer to intra-Afghan negotiations that will produce a political roadmap and a permanent ceasefire."
Zalmay Khalizad, U.S. negotiating envoy

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, which killed 14 people.

Afghanistan must surely qualify as the most embattled, conflict-ridden country in the world with its history of invasion by Russia, Britain, United States, Pakistan. With a neighbour like Pakistan always prepared to aid insurgents in destabilizing Afghanistan, peace can never be assured. With an adversarial contingent like the Pashtun Taliban, implacable in their determination to return to power and subjugate Afghans once again to fundamentalist Islamist rule, it is assured that all the societal, educational, health, political gains that were achieved under the auspices of a UN-sponsored, NATO-combined force keeping the Taliban at bay, will be reversed.

There can be no possible reconciliation between the people of Afghanistan, their government and the Taliban for the simple reason that the Taliban aspire to regain control and they will do that by destroying government rule. As it is, they will not submit to having government officials at the negotiating table alongside their own negotiators and those of the United States. Understandably, the Americans want to shake the clinging dust of Afghanistan from the boots of U.S. military which has been mired in the unforgiving conflict for far too long.

But the U.S. administration must surely know that irrespective of any conditions the Taliban may eventually agree to, in a power-sharing government with the elected government of Afghanistan, it is meant to be temporary. The issue for the Taliban is to rid the country of the presence of a foreign military power, leaving the field open for them to completely destroy Afghanistan's military and national police, never quite committed to the defense of their own country. All the western training in the world cannot instill commitment that is merely skin-deep.

The Taliban may be sitting at the negotiating table with the Americans, in a sham face-saving ploy for the U.S. which can say it negotiated in good faith when it withdrew its troops and left the Afghan military and police to perform the work delegated to them by the government, to support it and ensure that the values of enlightenment and democracy thrive in the battle-scarred country, and it wasn't their fault, after all, if Afghanistan was incapable of defending itself from its own internal enemies.

The 20,000 foreign troops, part of the U.S.-led NATO mission has trained, assisted and advised Afghan forces, helped the government with its civil infrastructure-building, aided in building schools and clinics, and prisons. All the schools in the growing region controlled by the Taliban have been destroyed. U.S. forces even carried out counter-terrorism operations, and all that is to recede and vanish, the country left to its own devices of struggling to become a forward-looking advanced civilization rather than an embattled bastion of Medieval carnage.

Afghans are seen through a shattered windshield of a bus after an explosion in Kabul, Afghanistan. A suicide car bomber targeted the police headquarters in western Kabul on Wednesday. Rafiq Maqbool/AP

"You shall pay for your crimes in villages and rural areas right in Kabul and other cities", Zabihullah Mujahid, Taliban leader, warned the Afghan government, relating to the government's orders to its military to rout out the Taliban insurgents wherever they can. This, just incidentally, is the same group that is heavily engaged in negotiations, "steady but positive progress", he stated, was being made. Progress relating without doubt, to the eventual and growing nearer time when foreign troops depart and the stage left to the Taliban.

On Wednesday as a sign of their good faith negotiations, a Taliban suicide bomber struck the Afghan capital, killing 14 people and injuring 145 during the morning rush hour when a truck carrying the bomb was stopped at a checkpoint outside a police station. Facades were blasted off buildings and rubble marked the site where moments earlier buildings had stood. The Taliban gave itself credit for directing one of its suicide bombers to attack a "recruitment centre".