The news of the day is that the Taliban have an office in Qatar where face-to-face talks between them and the US as well as members of the Afghan High Peace Council are being held today. A press conference between Taliban spokesperson Muhammad Naeem and an official of the Qatar Foreign Office on Tuesday was further evidence that such a process is underway. President Obama and Commander General Joseph Dunford are optimistic that the talks would yield fruit. And not surprisingly, Pakistan has also lauded the initiative.
Obviously this is not a spur of the moment decision. There is reason to believe that the US knows it’s a safe bet it is venturing for. Withdrawal of troops next year means that Afghans would themselves be pitch-forked into running their state. The danger, or rather real possibility, of the country falling in the hands of terrorists should be forestalled. The criterion should figure atop all agendas, if any headway is to be achieved. And apart from the scope of the talks, the kind of outfits involved will also matter much. The Taliban is a loose term, most of the times given to the resistance and guerrilla groups fighting the international troops, a misnomer that over the years the groups have conveniently taken up. When the first time Mullah Omer took control of Herat and Kandhar, he did not refer to his movement as The Taliban. It hides a multitude of sins. The flipside of using this term frequently is that it tends to blur the lines between those guerilla factions who believe in waging war against the conventional army with conventional warfare and those groups that have taken to terrorism just because they believe it is a holy duty. Afghanistan as of now is a can of worms. There are terrorist groups who kill just because it is their business to kill; some of them are at daggers drawn with the group led by Mullah Omer.
For Pakistan, a fresh reminder of this has been in recent attacks in KPK. The miscreants believe in the language of the gun and hence they need to be dealt with as such. Certain measures, at least at this juncture might be taken under the force of expediency like the prisoner swap, and announcement by President Obama to shut down Guantanamo. The new Afghanistan that the world community hopes to build would be a much better place without killers, warlords and extremists. What kind of groups are invited to the negotiating table would determine the future.