5 factors for peace in Afghanistan

Given that Afghanistan has been in a state of war for nearly 35 years, only a broad-based reconciliation can resolve the fighting. Peace talks are a vital part of that process. Here are five factors necessary to achieving a sustainable peace in Afghanistan.

3. Talks must be transparent

The talks have to be transparent. No secret deals. As anyone who has worked in Afghanistan knows only too well, grassroots Afghans believe they have been badly duped by the donor countries starting with the top-down Bonn talks at the end of 2001.

Then came the Emergency Loya Jirgha (Grand Assembly) in July 2002, when the Americans shattered public confidence by involving the discredited warlords, some responsible for war crimes. Even more disastrous, Washington sidelined Zahir Shah, the aging former king and only figurehead leader capable of rallying Afghans behind a genuine recovery process.

The same thing happened during the 1980s when Pakistan’s ISI (intelligence agency) undermined the ex-monarch in favor of hard-line extremists now fighting the coalition forces.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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