HOW TO WIN IN AFGANISTAN

MOST experts on Afghanistan are convinced that former US President George Bush’s strategy of using the military to establish peace in that strife-torn country has proved to be a failure. The various Taliban factions, the real source of trouble in Afghanistan, remain as potent a force as they were ever. Even the country’s capital, Kabul, is not out of bounds for them.
Nine Taliban suicide bombers, believed to be men of the Haqqani faction, attacked Kabul’s Intercontinental Hotel, popular with Westerners, on Wednesday in a daring manner. It is a different matter that they were soon killed by NATO forces. Yet 11 civilians and two policemen lost their lives. NATO’s intervention came because the authorities were not confident of the Afghan security forces successfully handling the situation.
The Taliban factions continue to control large parts of Afghanistan despite the US-led multinational forces remaining there in large numbers. The extremists have not been defeated militarily and there is no hope of their getting vanquished in this manner in the future. The sceptics should revise their opinion now when one of the most respected experts on Afghanistan, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, Britain’s former Ambassador in Kabul, has expressed the view that it is not possible to achieve “the wider strategic goal of stabilising Afghanistan to the point where the Afghan authorities can secure and govern the country with only money and advise from outside”. Almost similar observations were made by senior military leaders of the US after President Barack Obama occupied the White House. Thus, the Obama strategy of withdrawal from Afghanistan is based on sound logic: Why waste your resources when the goal is not achievable militarily?
The best way out of the Afghan imbroglio is to bring the Taliban to the negotiating table. This is what is being done in the case of what are described as the “good Taliban”. Keeping in view the emerging reality, India will have to review its strategy so that the enormous investments it has made in various sectors in Afghanistan do not go waste. Most Taliban factions are anti-India, but those who may join the government in Kabul as part of a future arrangement may change their thinking. They are basically power-hungry and may not behave the way they did in the late nineties when they ruled Afghanistan.