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Afghanistan: a war without end: by Humayun Shafi in DailyTimes, 22-Oct-16

The writer is a former member of the police service of Pakistan
The long-running war in Afghanistan tragically does not appear to be moving towards an early resolution. The informal contacts for peace talks between the Afghan government and Taliban in Doha, Qatar are seemingly mired in suspicion and opposing demands, and hence at the moment expectations from such contacts are low. America committed itself to the ‘war on terror’ in Afghanistan in October 2001, and now it is 15 years that the US is still engaged in Afghanistan. During this time peace talks did not get beyond initial contacts. The US and NATO must question themselves about the losses of entering Afghanistan.

The combat operations came to a formal end in 2014, yet the US and NATO have a military presence of 8,500 personnel comprising of trainers and special operation forces. The Afghan army aided by the US ground and air force is fighting resurgent Taliban forces, many a time in fierce battles. The Taliban are once again in a strong position in Kunduz, where earlier in September last year they were able to capture the city for about a week before retreating, of course taking with them large quantities of arms belonging to the Afghan Army. Now the Taliban have gained in seven of the 14 districts in the Helmand province, and threatening presence on the outskirts of Lashkar Gah.

On October 11 the Afghan army suffered a heavy loss of 100 soldiers, killed near Lashkar Gah. These soldiers surrounded by the Taliban for days negotiated a withdrawal. During the withdrawal the insurgents killed the retreating soldiers, and the Taliban took with them large quantities of arms and ammunition. This killing spree raged while the informal peace contacts were on in Doha. A new factor of the Islamic State group is emerging in Afghanistan especially in the Nangarhar province.

Unfortunately, the situation is made rather alarming with NATO countries losing a will to remain engaged in the Afghan war. Similar to the 1990s US and European allies are once again having an evasive attitude towards Afghanistan, an attitude of escape from its battlefields. The recently concluded international donors conference of 70 countries in Brussels organised by European countries displayed a lack of enthusiasm to help Afghanistan keep afloat in these days of insurgency. The conference pledged $15 billion through 2020 for budgetary support, and another five billion in military aid. This amount is supposedly not enough to fund a war in a country that can finance only about 20 percent of the budget.

The alarming factor is that the aid is not linked to the requirements of the Afghan security situation. There are conditions to aid: Afghanistan will be asked to accept the 250,000 Afghan refugees and asylum seekers presently residing in Europe. The aid is linked to the compliance of benchmarks prepared in a similar donor conference in Tokyo in 2012, which included progress on fight against corruption and human rights, among others social issues. Hence Afghanistan is entirely relying upon aid to effectively control the insurgency, a task US and NATO forces could not really accomplish in all these years. The Afghan army is faced with many serious issues, like motivation, desertions and training to operate as an independent force.

There are no easy answers on how to bring the Bush era war to an end, and establish a meaningful peace that has evaded Afghanistan since 1979 or even earlier. US and NATO after their military engagement in 2001 used many a strategy to secure a lasting victory. The strategy of committing the army in large numbers could not really work; US and NATO committed 150,000 of their troops and air forces, but the foreign armies got entangled in the whirlpool of vast windswept mountains that added to difficulties in fighting an ‘invisible enemy,’ an enemy that was almost never seen by these troops.

Then a reconstruction strategy was tried under the banner of “winning hearts and minds” of the Afghan people; that did not work either. The reconstruction programme cost the US $131 billion, and after accounting for inflation, this amount is larger than the Marshall Plan, the US plan for reconstruction of Europe after the World War II. The massive reconstruction effort had started in early 2002, proposed by the then US ambassador to Afghanistan, Robert Finn. The very first assessment of these programmes was rather discouraging, pointing at the strong possibility of failure of the reconstruction effort. Simply, there was no administrative structure, an army or a proper police force to secure the ground for such programmes. There was a sense of denial of the ever-growing insurgency that was hampering reconstruction efforts. In all these long years of fighting, the US and NATO countries never appeared to be in a winning position.

Unfortunately, the peace initiative was lost in October 2001; there is a school of thought that believes it was wiser to engage in negotiations with the Taliban in 2001 over an extended time period before the massive air strikes. September 11 to October 7, 2001, the day when US airstrikes started, was a very short period for meaningful negotiations with the Taliban. The main opportunity to peace having been lost in 2001, over a period of time, events became irreversible; all subsequent peace initiatives with the Taliban have not been of any significant consequence. From the way the events are unfolding there seems to have been massive miscalculations by NATO countries at the time of committing of their forces in 2001 regarding the capability of the militants to wage a long insurgency in the harsh Afghan landscape. One wonders who faltered while committing forces to Afghanistan. The Bush era wars in Afghanistan and in the Middle East now seem to be endless engagements. Lessons from the Soviet ignominy and retreat from Afghanistan in 1989 were just a little over 20 years removed from 2001.

Surprisingly, all lose sight of the fact as to how much destruction and death wars bring, and how much mental pain is caused to unsuspecting citizens who either suffer in their homes or are forced to become refuges and live a life of insecurity and cruel uncertainty. One is sure that leaders who initiate wars are aware of the miseries caused to individuals living through a war. All the thoughts as to the sufferings were forgotten. Then what prompted the Afghan war in 2001 is really incomprehensible; it resulted in tens of thousands of humans losing their lives, many more getting injured, and worst, many incapacitated for life. The war has generated some four million refugees, mostly taking refuge in Pakistan. Life will never be the same for the refugees, people suffering through trauma, disturbing many family and societal bonds.

An ‘end’ to this war is seemingly a distant prospect. The current informal peace talks are an encouraging sign, but previous talks have seldom been successful, and in the 2008 talks, the Taliban demanded the status of a government, an ‘emirate’. In 2001, the West failed to assess the capacity of insurgents in Afghanistan to engage in a long battle; the basic lesson from the Soviet Afghanistan war was lost. The US and NATO forces in Afghanistan fought on the very same battlefields that the Soviet Union was engaged in from 1979 onwards. Yet all the warnings and associated catastrophes of a military engagement in Afghanistan were ignored in 2001.

We in Pakistan have suffered enough due to the war in 2001 when democracy was missing from the country. This time the US and NATO find it difficult to exit from Afghanistan, and there is no viable exit strategy or even an immediate prospect of a peaceful negotiation and an end of a violence-free Afghanistan. After 15 years of sufferings there are just many unanswered questions on the necessity of starting the seemingly unending Afghan war that has assumed global proportions.
http://dailytimes.com.pk/opinion/22-Oct-16/afghanistan-a-war-without-end

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