Fieldnotes on Humanity

These are  important suggestions that the Biden administration should take into account while ruminating on the nature of a possible withdrawal from Afghanistan. A complete withdrawal is a disaster that should be avoided and in fact, it should be off the table when negotiation over peace with the Taliban.  The peace negotiation that was ensued by the previous administration based on narcissistic whims should be rethought. The whole negotiation scheme needs to be reassessed because it was a unilaterally designed between the US and the Taliban insurgents. The Afghan government and the people were not involved in this negotiation from the beginning and even now, they don't have much control over it. The Biden administration should make a revision to the peace scheme and add mandates to commit the Taliban to reduction of violence; otherwise, any dodgy deals not only perpetuates war and violence, but also emboldens the Taliban and other insurgents for further violence. 

-------- … The fear starts when you feel you are someone, specifically when every one of us feels that we are important, for ourselves. But today when we flew from Kabul to Bamyian with a USAID Helicopter, we reached Maidan Shahr, the area that is strongly influenced by Taliban. The helicopter slowly started rising, and the passengers, all journalists, seemed worried. I don’t know, or may be it was only me having fear. Fear of becoming a victim of some guided missile which recently the Taliban are equipped with. It will not be a surprise to hear that the Taliban are equipped with such a missile. Just a few weeks ago, there was a deadly US helicopter crash caused by a stinger guided missile in southern Afghanistan. As you will remember, our USA friends had equipped the Afghan warriors “Mujahideen” with their latest weapons in the times of the holey invasion of the Soviet Union. And today these guided missiles are used against US forces in Afghanistan. In 2005, in a report at RTA...