The West is prepared to pull out of Afghanistan without a settlement and attempts to negotiate with the Taliban are unlikely to lead to lasting peace, a respected think tank warned on Monday. In a hard-hitting report, the International Crisis Group (ICG) said the United Nations should supervise talks, condemning as "desperate and dangerous" moves by Hamid Karzai's government to bring insurgents into negotiations.
The Brussels-based group warned that any deal seen to give the Taliban, the largest insurgent group, preferential treatment would likely "spark a significant backlash" from the Northern Alliance, Hezb-i-Islami and others. If international forces leave without a sustainable settlement, "all indicators point to a fragile political order that could rapidly disintegrate into a more virulent civil war", it said.
Afghanistan has been at war for much of the last 30 years, with the 1980s mujahideen resistance against Soviet troops followed by a 1992-96 civil war. The Taliban seized power in 1996 but never managed to control the whole country. Since they were deposed by the 2001 US-led invasion they have waged a deadly insurgency against Karzai's government and his Western military backers.
"The international community's most urgent priority is to exit Afghanistan with or without a settlement," the ICG said. "The negotiating agenda has been dominated by Washington's desire to obtain a decent interval between the planned US troop drawdown and the possibility of another bloody chapter in the conflict."
But the document warned: "No matter how much the US and its Nato allies want to leave Afghanistan, it is unlikely that a Washington-brokered power-sharing agreement will hold long enough to ensure that the achievements of the last decade are not reversed." It said the process should instead be mediated by the United Nations, which should set up a panel to engage with "critical stakeholders".