Voice of Russia
March 31, 2014
Will Afghanistan get peace?
Anna Mikhailova
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It is hard to rule a country like Afghanistan for a number of reasons – territorial, economical, ethnical – but it is twice as hard to rule a country which safety is in the hands of foreign military forces. One of the major issues on the Afghan political agenda for the last two years has been the withdrawal of NATO combat troops.
They are leaving the country after 13 years of fighting a fierce Islamist insurgency that erupted when the Taliban were ousted from power after the 9/11 attacks on the United States.
Amid a rising death toll and the increasing unpopularity of the conflict among Western voters, pressure grew for a withdrawal of foreign forces. In 2012, the 11th year of the conflict, NATO backed plans to hand over combat duties to Afghan forces by mid-2013. Some 130,000 NATO-led combat troops will leave Afghanistan by December 2014. The alliance says it is committed to a long-term strategic relationship with Afghanistan beyond that date. Foreign military trainers will stay on.
The reason why NATO came to Afghanistan in the first place was to drive the radical Taliban movement from power. If battling Islamic terrorism was the goal of the foreign invasion of Afghanistan, it didn’t succeed much, says Rick Rozoff, the owner and manager of the Stop NATO website and international mailing list.
“Taliban is still active, other groups, which by the way, like the Haqqani network or Hezb-e Islami Gulbuddin, which are led by people the US supported, supported primarily in the Mujahedeen war in the 1980s, these forces are still active both in Afghanistan and across the border in Pakistan. There has been no consolidation of a viable representative or even reputable government in Kabul. So this has been an unequivocal debacle first of all for the Afghan people who have suffered immeasurably by 12 more years of dislocation, of night raids, of bombing raids, of other catastrophes, destruction effectively of their infrastructure and their agricultural economy,” Rick Rozoff said.
So it looks like the Afghan people are finally getting what they were craving for during the last decade – an independent and hopefully democratic government. But will they get peace? This is what the new president has to take care of on his own now.
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