The Afghan Peace Deal
It is now time again to write about the US–Afghan(Taliban)
deal. This time the signatures have been made after the aborted first attempt.
The deal has come out of the US compulsion to get out of disputes the world
over. Wherever America is involved in a dispute, it inevitably bogs down. The
Americans are known to go in with full commitment, pump in a lot of money for a
number of years and even if it is a wholehearted effort, it is generally lacking a thorough understanding
of the ground realities. This results in a long drawn operation, military and
civilian combined, which achieves nothing, and eventually a withdrawal of
troops with no tangible solution. Many a times the Americans leave with far
greater problems for the region than what existed on ground before they came to
the place.
Whether the Afghanistan peace deal will go the same way will
be hard to predict at the moment. The irony is that the Americans went into
Afghanistan to fight the Taliban. The Taliban were the enemy number one. Today
the Americans gave negotiated with the Taliban and according to many, have left
the Afghan people in the lurch. This deal is compared to the Vietnam peace deal
where the Americans left the South Vietnamese to deal with the North as
domestic public opinion began to go against the war in Vietnam. The ultimate
withdrawal from Saigon was definitely not a feather in the US cap. Where ever
the Americans go they have an abysmal record of negotiating a successful peace
deal. After 9/11 the Americans went into Saddam Hussein’s Iraq on the pretext
of finding their (Weapons of Mass Destruction) WMDs. They never found any.
Saddam was removed from power and a political vaccum was left, which go filled
with the ISIS. Today the region is in turmoil with consequences being felt in
Europe. The refugee influx has caused a lot of social and political turmoil.
Looking at this record it does not give any studied observer
confidence that this deal will bring any lasting peace for the Afghan people.
Already cracks are beginning to show even as the ink is still drying on the
accord. A big glitch in the peace deal is that the Afghan government has been
kept out of it. This deal is essentially signed between the US and the Taliban
with the aim that the Taliban does not target the US and its allies. The allies
are probably defied in secret. The US
probably thinks that the current Afghan government is expendable. President Ashraf Ghani has said that there
will be no exchange of prisoners with the Taliban, which is actually an
important clause in the deal. He says the US does not have the jurisdiction to
decide on the release of Taliban prisoners with the Afghan government. Also
other terrorist groups like the ISIS and the Jaish-e-Mohammed would get the
wrong signals. Any terrorist group worth its salt will now think of becoming a
legitimate political entity. Whether they will be committed to peace or not is
another matter.
Probably this deal is not about peace at all. It has a lot of secret clauses. One could surmise from this, that it is a agreement between the USA and Taliban to let American troops withdraw from that region with some semblence of dignity. It is not known what the Deal promises and to whom. One will have to wait and see if the people
of Afghanistan get their lasting peace. The certain thing is that this accord
has caused a question mark to be put on the stability of the region,
which would entail another write-up on the subject. 
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