Afghanistan’s agony: is the end in sight?

Seventeen years: that’s how long the West has been fighting in Afghanistan, said Agnes Tandler in Der Tagesspiegel (Berlin). And still the Taliban seems unstoppable. On 10 August it launched a brazen attack on Ghazni, a strategic city some 80 miles south of Kabul, holding it for several days before being driven out. At least 140 Afghan troops and 60 civilians died. Residents have told horror stories of a besieged city without water, electricity and food, where the wounded were left untreated and Taliban fighters went from house to house shooting anyone suspected of supporting the state. As ever, the government insists all is under control, but the attack is a worrying development. The Taliban already controls most of the surrounding province: had it succeeded in holding Ghazni, Kabul would have been cut off from the south of the country.

The only comforting thing about the Taliban’s resurgence is that it will check the rise of Islamic State, whose arrival three years ago has added to the chaos, said Emmanuel Derville in Le Figaro (Paris). It had established a foothold in the north under the leadership of a former Taliban leader. Yet on 1 August, some 200 of its fighters there surrendered to Afghan forces to avoid falling into the hands of the Taliban. Nearly half turned out to be minors. So much for Isis’s boast that it would fight to the death. It is now time to admit that the endless war in Afghanistan “has only one solution”, said Dawn (Karachi): a political peace process. With foreign support, the government is at no risk of collapse. But the Taliban dominates large swathes of the countryside, and the battle for Ghazni merely underlines the futility of carrying on a conflict that neither side can ever win. Certainly the Afghan people, having been at war for two generations, have had enough: witness the joyous reaction when the Taliban declared a brief ceasefire in June for the Eid festival. And there are signs of a new realism on both sides, said Spencer Ackerman on The Daily Beast (New York). Diplomats note that Taliban leaders are more serious about ending the conflict than they were when the Obama administration tried to launch a peace process in 2011. They have even hinted they’ll abandon a key demand that all US and other foreign troops leave Afghanistan, suggesting that some could be allowed to stay on to train government forces. This flexibility may encourage the Trump administration to rethink its refusal to talk directly with the Taliban. Years of arduous diplomacy lie ahead. But the US must abandon the idea it can carry on fighting until the Afghan government is strong enough to manage security on its own: like it or not, the Taliban is part of the country’s future.