The recent meeting of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and senior politician Abdullah Abdullah with Joe Biden in the White House, as well as the US secretary of state questioning whether the Afghan Taliban are serious about the peace process, indicates that hectic efforts are afoot to chalk out a game plan for the post-US withdrawal scenario in Afghanistan.
The message from President Biden was clear: the “Afghans are going to have to decide their future”. However, the Americans have failed to understand Afghanistan, and their policies towards the country have not achieved positive results. Unsettling as it may be, it appears that the countdown to the Taliban’s takeover of Kabul has begun, and the Americans have yet to come to grips with the fact that after decades of involvement in Afghanistan, costing thousands of lives and billions of dollars, their strategy has failed.
The sad fact is that over the past few decades, there has never been a negotiated transfer of power in Afghanistan. In 1973, the king, Zahir Shah, was overthrown by his relative Daud Khan and from then onwards, power has been taken by parties that have seized Kabul by force. So while the Taliban should respond to peace overtures, expecting them to break with this ‘tradition’ is unrealistic. The Americans should see this, considering their lengthy involvement in Afghanistan, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. In fact, US blunders in Afghanistan go back to the Soviet invasion, when, fired up by Cold War rhetoric, Washington opposed the communist government in Kabul by playing the religion card and creating the ‘mujahideen’.
