Afghanistan Times
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As new threats have started emerging in the Arab peninsula, President Ashraf Ghani called on the international community at the Munich Security Conference that Afghanistan shouldn’t be kept on backburner. His call is timely and needs attention. Though too many other global challenges have emerged, but Afghanistan shouldn’t be ignored as all the gains made during the past 14 years will be reversed soon if the international community turns a blind eye to it. Since terrorism is a global threat that’s why it shouldn’t be fought selectively. All the countries where there is terrorism and peoples’ lives are under threat should be treated equally. Selecting one and ignoring one means fighting terrorism selectively which wouldn’t eliminate this threat from this planet. To declare victory in Afghanistan is too early as some international key players have declared, but contrary to their claims, the war is still far from over. In fact, it is escalating. The Taliban still continue to pose a serious threat. Though they lack the capacity to capture the country by force, but yes they have the capacity to keep the fire on and bleed the country for decades. The dialogue process being kicked off was a non-starter where the government was neither willing to confess its failure nor let it completely ended. Because complete end means shutting the doors of hope and solely relying on the use of force. Afghanistan didn’t feted America with flowers, but since it has invaded Kabul to topple the Taliban, it’s now obligatory it should take the war on logical end. People in Afghanistan feel that the United States stumbled into a quagmire here and now it is having troubles freeing itself, that’s why whenever there is a talk on the war, it is America to start from and it is America to end with. It was the United States who created the Mujahideen against the then USSR and supported them through Pakistan’s ISI but despite that Mujahideen leaders like Hekmatyar, Rabbani and Sayyaf, vowed their support for Saddam Hussain. Saddam’s Iraq, unlike Saudi Arabia and UAE, was among the few Arab countries that still maintained cordial ties with Dr. Najib’ s government. In December, Hekmatyar, visited Baghdad and met with Saddam where he offered to send his Mujahideen to help fight alongside the Iraqi Army. Why did this happen? Because Afghanistan was becoming isolated from the international community, and besides keeping relations with Muslim world intact, it wanted to gain some material gains as well. Should this time Afghanistan be dumped, leaders with militant ideology wouldn’t hesitate to visit foreign Muslim capital cities to forge alliances with. Therefore, what Ghani shared in the conference should be taken as writing on the wall. He said that NATO’s pullout and emergence of ISIS in the Arab world will cause Western allies to end mission in Afghanistan. Should this happen and the freefall of Afghanistan will start. Ghani’s words that because of Libya and Syria’s threats, Afghanistan must not be forgotten, should be an attention grabber and this time policymakers in Washington shouldn’t make blunders they made back in 1990s after the pullout of the then USSR forces from Kabul.
