and as a result an Afghan army outpost was destroyed.”
Meanwhile, top U.S. military officials have met with president Ashraf Ghani to talk about extending the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan, beyond 2016, in light of a possible threat from Islamic State fighters. On July 19th, the Los Angeles Times reported that Gen. John Campbell, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, and Gen. Martin Dempsey, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, met with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani. Following the meeting, General Dempsey said he agreed that the US needed to have a transnational strategy against the Islamic State. He said he would raise Ghani’s idea that Afghanistan “could serve as a hub from which the US its allies and Afghanistan itself could work to prevent Islamic State from gaining followers in South Asia the way it has in the Middle East.”
US military officials diminish the credibility of any proposed cease fire when they suggest that the US will, after all, consider maintaining bases and troops in Afghanistan far beyond the supposed 2016 evacuation of US bases. Confidence in a cease fire is further undermined when parties to negotiations know that the US could assassinate them if they appear on a list of US targets.
The US State Department published its Country Reports on Terrorism: 2014 on the 19th of June 2015, from which we can see that in 2002, at the start of the US-led global war against terrorism, 725 people were killed worldwide. During President Barack Obama’s first full year in office, in 2010, the number rose to 13,186. In other words, terrorist-related deaths grew by more than 4,000 percent from 2002 to 2010.
This is borne out on the ground in Afghanistan where the United Nations has been reporting record increases in civilian casualties.
Stopping the failed, counter-productive war against terrorism in Afghanistan and removing drones from her skies during peace talks would inspire respect for the idea of peace processes. Rural populations – the “constituency” of the Taliban in Afghanistan– fear the drones and look for protection, making them vulnerable to recruitment by armed militias vowing to eject the foreign militaries.
The US could indicate that it doesn’t wish to keep military personnel in Afghanistan or maintain ongoing bases there.
Yet, even were the US to take these steps, a declared ceasefire between warlords who have, in the past, neglected the needs of Afghanistan’s poorest communities, whose war making has exacerbated suffering and poverty, may not be very meaningful to ordinary people living in rural areas. Whose interests would the warlords aim to secure?
It seems that the most crucially needed ceasefire agreement, in Afghanistan, would be one that occurred among ordinary communities, agreeing to no longer cooperate with warring parties, to no longer allow warlords to use them as pawns. This kind of ceasefire might fill the need and longing for peace so often expressed by people who are weary of living through wave after wave of destruction. But ordinary Afghans living in rural areas need to feed their children, plant crops, restore irrigation systems, replenish their flocks and rehabilitate their agricultural infrastructure in order to survive. If they could have some realistic assurance of sustained resolve to help them reach these goals, they’d have good reason to link up and rise up in opposition to continued war.
What source of funding and skill could possibly offer the assistance required for this kind of rebuilding?
The US military doesn’t hesitate to demand sums for continued US military presence in Afghanistan which could instead be dedicated to rebuilding the country. The U.S. should state that it wishes to pay reparations for suffering caused in the past. This could be done in the form of setting up an escrow account to be administered by an NGO or agency that has not been accused of succumbing to corruption in Afghanistan.
By doing so, the US could credibly begin to withdraw from warlord status in Afghanistan, and apply itself to being part of reconstruction, setting a model desperately needed throughout the world.
This article has been excerpted from: ‘No warlords need apply: a call for peacemaking in Afghanistan’. Courtesy: Counterpunch.org