Afghanistan’s misery

The appalling bomb attack in Kabul in which 63 wedding guests and others were killed and hundreds injured comes amid efforts to broker a peace in Afghanistan between the Taliban and the government. The alleged perpetrators of this atrocity were suicide bombers acting for the Islamic State group (Isil), whose caliphate in Syria and Iraq has been destroyed but whose malevolent influence continues to be felt throughout the region. It is no coincidence this has happened as the Americans and the Taliban reach some sort of concordat to allow the remaining US troops to leave Afghanistan 18 years after their arrival.

Donald Trump indicated at the weekend after a meeting with Zalmay Khalilzad, his peace envoy to Kabul, that there had been sufficient progress to reach an agreement with the Taliban. But the continuing violence will make this harder, and is intended to. A bombing of a mosque in Pakistan two days ago killed the brother of the Taliban leader Haibatullah Akhundzada, who appears to have been deliberately targeted.

The framework deal worked out at meetings in Qatar would allow for the phased withdrawal of the remaining 14,000 US troops in return for the Taliban ensuring Afghanistan cannot be used as a base for extremists to operate from, as Al-qaeda once did. Mr Trump made ending the deployment to Afghanistan – the longest in America’s history – a key foreign policy objective for his presidency and is anxious to see it through before the next election for the White House.

But getting the Taliban and the Afghan government to agree terms will not be easy and it is not clear yet whether the US withdrawal is conditional on an internal settlement. What is apparent is that the “death cult” of Isil will do as much as it can to prolong Afghanistan’s misery.