Was successful with the Paris Peace Accords in 1973 to end the war in Vietnam.
The Taliban, the terror group who have been battling the U.S. and NATO coalition in the country for the last 16 years, should have a seat at the table in peace talks geared toward ending the longest armed conflict in U.S. history, a top Afghan leader said Tuesday.
Including the Islamist insurgency in any bilateral or multilateral peace talks will be integral in moving the country past the war and conflict that have defined Afghanistan over the last several decades and allow the country to benefit from “the dividends of peace,” Afghan Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah said Tuesday.
In a speech at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, Mr. Abdullah said the Kabul government has already taken steps to fold in several of Afghanistan’s warring factions into the political process.
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, head of the Afghan terror group Hezb-i-Islami, said his organization was preparing to take part in next year’s round of district and provincial elections across Afghanistan.
A feared former mujahedeen commander during Afghanistan’s war with the Soviet Union in the 1980s, Mr. Hekmatyar and his followers were responsible for numerous suicide attacks and bombings against Afghan and allied forces. His fighters also planned and executed so-called “green on blue” attacks, where they posed as Afghan soldiers and opened fire on their American counterparts.
Hezb-i-Islami’s willing participation in next year’s elections is a clear sign that even some of Afghanistan’s most hardened terror groups could be willing to come to the negotiation table, Mr. Abdullah said.
“Is it not better to have these [political] debates with these groups, than to have those groups planning attacks?” he asked the audience Tuesday. That sentiment seems to be reflected in the minds of Afghans, according to a new countrywide poll released Tuesday.
The annual survey by the San Francisco-based Asia Foundation, released in Kabul, found that 32.8 percent of Afghans believe their country is moving in the right direction, up from 29.3 percent in 2016, The Associated Press reports.