End of war?

With the departure of the last US soldiers in Afghanistan, it appears that the US has closed this 20-year-old chapter – or has it? The last vestiges of the American presence in Afghanistan have finally taken off and the Kabul airport is now under Taliban control. It is time now to examine what this prolonged conflict has achieved and whether it has met its goals of wiping out terrorism from Afghanistan. If we are to go by recent events, this is certainly not the case. The Taliban are back in power as they were in 2001, prior to the American invasion, and matters have become even more complicated with the Islamic State now active in Afghanistan, and threatening to put up a struggle against the Taliban, which could lead to even more conflict. The Islamic State is almost directly a creation of American policies in Iraq and other places where the group cropped up and based its policies around a hatred for US action on sovereign soil.

In Afghanistan, according to a study by Brown University, at least 174,000 persons were killed in the 20 years of fighting. They included 51,600 civilians, and about an equal number of Taliban fighters. The rest were essentially military personnel both Afghan and US. So, what has been achieved through so much death and misery? The period of American occupation was marked by violence, bomb blasts, clashes between the Taliban and the US and a feeling of uncertainty and unrest. The war was futile and aimless, alienating more people than it benefitted. It is true that some development work took place both under the Soviet and then the US occupation of Afghanistan, but the truth remains that any development that does not have support of the people proves to be short lived. Perhaps, a better strategy would have been to foster a broad-based government, but the Taliban did not participate in any of the Loya Jirgas (Large Councils) held in Kabul during the past 20 years.

At the same time, we have the threat of more drone attacks. The last one killed at least seven children, as well as other members of a family that quite obviously had nothing to do with terrorism, and no connection to the Islamic State. They will only add to the horrors that Afghans must live with as hundreds and thousands continue to try and flee their homeland. At the end, it is the people of this region who have been the hapless losers in all these wars played in Afghanistan. The tragedies that common people have had to go through are a dark chapter in human history. The Taliban – now in control of nearly all of Afghanistan – have tremendous responsibility on their shoulders. The country they have recently retaken is not the same that they occupied 25 years ago in 1996. There is an entirely new generation that is keen to live in 21st century Afghanistan. Any attempt on the part of the Taliban to revert back to their old mores is likely to result in a backlash that will be much harder to crush than it was in the 1990s. A broad-based government involving different political and social segments of society is the only way forward. Let’s hope sanity prevails, and a political solution is found rather than a military one which has repeatedly failed in the past four decades.