Editor in Chief: Moh. Reza Huwaida Friday, March 29th, 2024

Peace-Building Requires More than a Flawed Process

Any negotiated settlement of a conflict requires mechanisms and outcomes to be laid down clearly. The process must be inclusive and based on broad-based consultation with a wide range of stakeholders. Afghan government has been pursuing and implementing integration and reconciliation program to bring the Taliban and other insurgent groups to the fold.

But the process runs void of clear mechanisms and defined outcomes. As a result, a lot of money provided by the international community has been spent on this flawed process. President Hamid Karzai has not been able to define the negotiation and reconciliation with the Taliban and other insurgent groups as a permanent peace-building.

That is why the president persists with his policy of appeasing the enemies that remain completely unfamiliar with culture of peace. Peace can be built upon a culture of non-violence, a conviction of coexistence and belief in human dignity. The Taliban have shown no sign of such a culture and belief.

They continue to boast about their violent philosophy as a struggle for establishing an Islamic Emirate. Afghan government, in particular president Karzai, has been taking a lot of confidence-building measures as a precondition to a genuine negotiation to reach a settlement of the conflict.

But the Taliban have used these pre-negotiation measures as a pretext to kill some highly prominent figures of the country. They have used impostors in this pre-negotiation phase- that is, talks about talks- to the head of High Peace Council.

The Taliban are yet to come to terms with the fact that they cannot win the war, and will never be able to re-establish their brutal and repressive Islamic Emirate. That is why they continue to use violence with the aim to tire the international community and wait for their withdrawal from Afghanistan so that the militants can come back to run the country.

It can be said that the Taliban neither believe in culture of non-violence nor they think that they are facing limits of armed struggle. They, therefore, have no motives in denouncing violence and breaking links with the world's terrorists to come to negotiation table.