Peace in Afghanistan Depends on Its Leaders, Neighbors, and Security Forces
There are three key ingredients for peace in Afghanistan. Afghan leaders must negotiate a peace. Afghan neighbors must respect the peace. And Afghan soldiers and police must keep the peace.
Only the Afghan parties should take part in the formal negotiations over their country’s future. But all of the major external stakeholders, including India, Iran, Pakistan, Russia, and the United States, should conduct parallel, less-formal discussions, with a view to exercising convergent influence on the Afghan parties. All potential parties to a peace treaty accept that the Taliban must be involved in negotiations and granted some role in the resulting government.
As for keeping the peace, there is likely no organization in the world other than the U.S. Army that can train security forces on the scale needed in places like Afghanistan. But current U.S. Army doctrine is insufficient for this task, and Western models for security forces may not work in Afghanistan. Developing and fielding
host-nation forces that take the unique context of the country into account will be critical. So will be the army’s selection of advisers and preparation of leaders.
Pacifying Afghans and Their Neighbors
Agreement among the main Afghan parties is a necessary but not sufficient condition for peace. Unlike Iraq and Yugoslavia, which are strong states riven by even stronger ethnic antipathies, Afghanistan is a weak polity that has been torn apart by its near and more-distant neighbors, not unlike the hapless sheep that is pulled apart by mounted riders in buzkashi, the Central Asian version of polo. Until these neighboring countries sense that there is a credible endgame for an Afghan peace accord that protects their interests, they have every incentive to continue meddling destructively and to promote divisions among Afghans. To succeed, any peace process must include Afghanistan’s neighbors. More
