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Accompanied by his key cabinet ministers and senior Aide, President Karzai arrived in Lisbon to attend a NATO summit starting today.
The summit is designed to come to terms on a schedule of withdrawal of NATO forces from Afghanistan. The decade old war is fast becoming a bone of contention between all the stakeholders as results fail to come the way they had been expected and planned. It’s now described as the biggest challenge for the Alliance of North Atlantic Treaty Organization after it was formed some 61 years ago.
President Karzai’s team comprises of his foreign Minister, Defense Minister, and Senior Aide Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai. The Afghan team is expected to remind the alliance that they are neither the only players nor the only decision makers. In the wake of recent remarks of President Karzai on military tactics that US foreign secretary and other officials categorically rejected, it’s expected that the current strategy may be slightly modified to accommodate Afghan’s reservations.
The summit to start today is expected to set a timeframe for the ultimate withdrawal of the NATO forces whose death has exceeded 650 so far this year. Other points to be discussed would be tackling the growing threats of Taliban and other fighting rebels in Afghanistan, training, equipping and enhancing the capacity of Afghan security forces and the handing over of security responsibilities of relatively calm provinces to the Afghan National Army. The most important agenda appears to setting a deadline for ending the “combat operations” and “night operations” against the militant and review of the progress on the political front in convincing the warring factions to come to talks with the Kabul government.
Decision makers of the developed world are sitting together to come up with a solution for a war that has brought their pride to risk. Afghanistan has been notoriously known as the graveyard of the Super Powers. Everything has, therefore, gotta be sorted out with utmost sense of care and responsibility. A single mistake could have an ever lasting impact on the so-called developed nations or in other terms world powers could face the most humiliating defeat of the 21st century.
For a durable peace and a stable Afghanistan, every single stakeholder should be taken on board. As NATO meets today, the most important elements, Pakistan and Iran, remain missing. These two nations have more interest in the affairs of Afghanistan than any other nation on earth. Without these two countries taken into confidence, no solution will be a durable solution for Afghanistan. The need of the hour is to include not only Iran and Pakistan but all other regionally influential countries like China, India and the Central Asian Republics to come up with a regional solution to Afghanistan. In the meanwhile, the Afghan nation should itself be included in a way that the Afghan forces inside shouldn’t feel estranged.
