If the heart is not at peace, proclaiming the peace mantra won’t do any good, it will just be a buzz doomed to fade. For peace to prevail, it must reside in the heart. Iqbal envisaged the same by framing Afghanistan as “the heart of Asia.
Peace in Afghanistan is a prerequisite for the collective growth and prosperity of the Asian continent, while unrest in Afghanistan will cast a negative domino effect on the peace prospects of the region. The geographical position of Afghanistan, along the crossroads of West Asia, Central Asian Republics, and South Asia, makes it a strategic pearl, but after the US withdrawal, it is in a social and economic peril.
It took four decades of war, and around 250,000 lives, to cool down the USA’s hubris. The urge to be a global policeman and coerce the western liberal democratic models has been a folly that the USA and the region have heavily paid for and continue to do so. Rationality prevailed, and the prospects of peace brightened when the US-led coalition decided to give up the military solution it could neither sustain nor tilt in its favour. The resulting and much-needed soft solution to the Afghan conundrum culminated in the Doha deal of February 2020 between the USA and the Taliban.The credit must go to Pakistan for playing the mediatory role in the peace talks.
Had the Ashraf Ghani Government adopted a more sensible approach, had it assiduously tried to reach a political settlement with the Taliban, had the USA agreed to the prior power share formulae, the situation could have been better. Afghanistan’s strikingly rough, attractive yet deceptive terrain lived up to its notorious expectation of being a “graveyard for empires.” In the words of Macedonian monarch Alexander the Great, Afghanistan is “easy to march into but difficult to march out of”. similar lines, Pakistan’s erstwhile spymaster Lt Gen Hameed Gul foresaw the western troops melting in the Afghan mountains. His prophecy came true when helicopters uplifted the melted American soldiers from the embassy roofs.
The Afghan National Army, alleged to be internally corrupt, was externally standing on the USA’s shoulders. As the time came for US troops to pack their bags, the Afghan Army was left helpless, and what followed was a Taliban blitzkrieg. And within 11 days, on 15 August, the so-called insurgent group took control of government offices.
President Ashraf Ghani fled to Uzbekistan, and international intelligence agencies were shocked at the speed at which the events unraveled. US President Joe Biden conceded on 16 August 2021 that “this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated.” Taliban’s spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid, in his first official news conference in Kabul on 17 August, stated that the Taliban wished to “assure the international community, including the United States, that nobody will be harmed in Afghanistan.” Subsequently, on 21 August, the Taliban’s supreme leader Abdul Ghani Baradar arrived in Kabul for the first time in over a decade as the Taliban began internal negotiations on how to govern the country.
Pakistan has finally realized that since the advent of the nation-state system through the treaty of Westphalia (1648), no nation had won while fighting simultaneously on two of its borders
The unceremonious US withdrawal prompted comparisons with past events. In an article in The Conversation, William Maley compared the fall of Kabul to the 1956 Suez Crisis and its effects on the perception of the United Kingdom as a global hegemon. He commented that Biden had “failed the people of Afghanistan and tarnished US credibility around the world” remarking that the USA “increasingly appears a fading power internationally.” Erstwhile US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta compared the fall of Kabul to the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion of Cuba in 1961, saying that “President Kennedy took responsibility for what took place. I strongly recommend to President Biden that he take responsibility … admit the mistakes that were made”.
The most famous comparison was with the Fall of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War in April 1975. in July 2021, American president Joe Biden had rejected the comparison, stating that “the Taliban is not the North Vietnamese Army… There will be no circumstance for you to see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable.”
The writing on the wall is crystal clear. Afghanistan is going through the worst economic crisis, and a human catastrophe is in the making. Governance and politics, rights and justice, security tensions, Taliban recognition, and international engagement are the major dilemmas faced by the Taliban regime, owing to which the country is in a precarious situation. The fear of a civil war adds to the region’s dismay as it will bear the brunt of refugee exodus, cross-border terrorism, gun culture, and narcotics proliferation.
Now, the onus is on the Afghan Taliban to discontinue the trend of follies and heed to the warnings echoing in the Afghan soil. An inclusive political setup of a multi-ethnic state with its religious fabric torn with a sectarian divide is a demand that cannot be bartered for at any cost.
Pakistan has been an integral part of all significant Afghan peace talks till date, whether it be the Moscow Format, led by Russia aimed at “establishing peace and creating conditions for the process of national reconciliation in Afghanistan,” or hosting the Troika-plus meeting, or in this regard any other peace effort. The most recent development came from the 17th extraordinary session of the OIC Council of Foreign Ministers on December 19 in Islamabad.
Pakistan has always espoused the peace process in Afghanistan for two principal reasons. Firstly, the Afghan Taliban always had a soft corner for Pakistan, and Taliban accommodated in government would make Kabul pro-Pakistan contrary to Ashraf Ghani’s tilt to India; secondly,. In a quest to secure its western border and shift focus on a much more significant eastern threat, it was cogent for Pakistan to be at the forefront of soft diplomatic engagements.
