Editor in Chief: Moh. Reza Huwaida Saturday, April 27th, 2024

A Tricky Situation Unfolding even before 2014

Afghanistan is getting into a trickier situation even before 2014 when international forces are slated to complete transitioning of security responsibility to Afghan national security forces and when the third cycle of presidential election is to be conducted, which has already stimulated discussion and debate whether the two could be managed together or not.

This difficult situation is being caused by an emboldened insurgency and a lack of clear policy on the part of Afghan government and its international partners and supporters to deal with it. More importantly this potentially challenging spring and summer are gonging to be down to the growing lack of mutual understanding and communication between Afghan government and international community on the way forward.

After ten years of working together, Afghan government and international community are not on the same page when different events unfold in Afghanistan and they start blaming each other. Earlier this week, Kabul was rocked by organized and coordinated attacks carried out by terrorists and insurgents.

President Hamid Karzai was quick to say that the assault demonstrated a failure of intelligence on the part of Afghan forces as well as NATO intelligence services. On Sunday, April 15, thirty-six militants, 11 Afghan security personnel and four civilians were killed in the near-simultaneous attacks in Kabul, Paktia, Logar and Nangarhar. Thirty-two civilians and 42 security forces were wounded. This was shocking for Afghan people as well.

Responding president Karzai's blame, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said "We do all we can to prevent such attacks in co-ordination with the Afghan security forces and the Afghan intelligence services, but of course you can never give a 100 percent guarantee." He rightly mentioned that the blame game would not help Afghanistan and international community in such a situation, saying "think we are in this together. We should help each other."

President Hamid Karzai's team does not have the capacity and efficiency to work together with the international community to begin to address these problems. In fact, his team is not looking for the interests of Afghanistan as a nation that deserves to emerge out of these ills and interferences by the hostile neighbors and become prosperous and developed.

If Afghan government and international community do not sit together to come up with clear and agreed upon policies on how to tackle the possible surge of Taliban's activities in the spring and summer ahead, Afghanistan will run into a chaos even before international forces complete their withdrawal.