Mudasir Wani
After more than 18 years of war, a deal between the US and Taliban has put Afghanistan on the path to what many hope will be a permanent peace. The US and Taliban signed the accord on Saturday in Doha Qatar more than 18 years after George Bush first sent forces to topple the Taliban in the wake of 9/11 attack in 2001.The US-Taliban have signed an agreement aimed at ending nearly two decades of conflict in Afghanistan. US secretary of state Mike Pompiohailed the signing of the agreement in Doha after the reduction of violence from over past weeks and called it the best opportunity as to end the regional distablility and regional prosperity ,each side have committed to reduction in violence .The agreement paves the way for the US to gradually withdraw it’s troops from Afghanistan and in return The Taliban have promised not to allow the country to be used as a base for terrorist attacks against the west. Moreover less than 24 hours after the US signed a landmark agreement with Taliban on Saturday in Doha, it’s implications has already hit it’s first speed bump, Afghan war survivor’s , amputees from the war torn Naghdehar province expressed committment over Washington’splans to sign a peace deal with the Taliban wished it had been done years earlier. The response of Afghan locals has been always committed to “peace by dialogue”. We are so happy today we feel like it’s Eid day ,we are born in war and we don’t want to be hit by the war anymore so that our fresh generation doesn’t get killed or crippled. We are happy about the US-Taliban peace agreement and we wish this deal had been signed as soon as the US came to Afghanistan ,most Afghans have been suffering badly from this decades long conflict almost every family has lost a member.
A positive approach of peace by dialogue to put an end to this decades long war”
However Pakistan has been playing a key role in setting the stage to bring both the parties on negotiation table and has been cooperating with US to help pressure the Taliban to strike a peace deal with the aim of extricating the US from its longest war. The US has acknowledged Pakistan’srole to bring the US-Taliban back on negotiation table .US special envoy ZalmayKhalilzad said that Pakistan had assured the US of every support to out an end to this decades long conflict and to bring peace and stability in the region. This comes true when Pakistan prime minister Imran khan visited US last year to meet US president Donald Trump and to offer every support for result oriented talks for which president Trump assured a meaningful dialogue between the US and Taliban to put an end to this war. In a statement by Dr Mohamed Faisal said Pakistan hopes that it will lead to intra-afghan negotiations and ultimately to a peaceful and stable Afghanistan.
No one should be happy about this situation. But Americans might console themselves with the sober recognition that they’ve been through events like this before. The United States is a powerful, extremely fortunate, and intermittently virtuous country that has done great things for its citizens and for others on more than one occasion. But it is neither perfect nor omnipotent, and its history also contains any number of errors and disappointments. The War of 1812 was an ill-conceived venture that got Washington occupied and the White House set ablaze. The sad fate of post-Civil War Reconstruction might have taught the United States that remaking societies through military occupation is a chancy business at best. U.S. intervention in the Russian Civil War was a failure too, the Korean War ended in stalemate, and the war in Vietnam, Defeat in Afghanistan need not lead to defeatism; it should lead instead to smarter decisions about where and for what purpose the country commits its military forces. The war in Afghanistan continues destroying lives, due to the direct consequences of violence and the war-induced breakdown of public health, security, and infrastructure. Civilians have been killed by crossfire, improvised explosive devices (IEDs), assassinations, bombings, and night raids into houses of suspected insurgents. Even in the absence of fighting, unexploded ordnance from previous wars and United States cluster bombs continue to kill. Hospitals in Afghanistan are treating large numbers of war wounded, including amputees and burn victims. The war has also inflicted invisible wounds. In 2009, the Afghan Ministry of Public Health reported that fully two-thirds of Afghans suffer from mental health problems.Prior wars and civil conflict in the country have made Afghan society extremely vulnerable to the indirect effects of the current war. Those war effects include elevated rates of disease due to lack of clean drinking water, malnutrition, and reduced access to health care. Nearly every factor associated with premature death — poverty, malnutrition, poor sanitation, lack of access to health care, environmental degradation — is exacerbated by the current war. While Afghanistan has benefited from investments in health care that may ameliorate some of the effects of war, the results are mixed, with improvement in some areas, such as infant mortality, balanced by continuing or growing needs in other elements of public health.
To be clear, the Afghan debacle is not, strictly speaking, a military defeat. The Taliban never vanquished the U.S. military in a large-scale clash of arms, or caused its forces there to collapse. Instead, it is a defeat in the Clausewitzian sense—18 years of war and “nation building” did not produce the political aims that U.S. leaders (both Republicans and Democrats) had set for themselves. The reason is fairly simple: Afghanistan’s fate was never going to be determined by foreigners coming from 7,000 miles away. The security situation has worsened in recent years, with rates of civilian casualties reaching record highs in 2018. A flawed and contested parliamentary election in October 2018 and uncertainty around the presidential election in September 2019 have furthered political instability. The humanitariansituation also remains dire, as the possibility of a prolonged drought and other resource scarcity issues threaten greater levels of displacement and human suffering. About 157,000 people have
been killed in the Afghanistan war since 2001. More than 43,000 of those killed have been civilians
(The author is President Jammu and Kashmir Students Welfare Organisation. Views are his own)
