Little Room for Optimism

During the 11 months of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani’s presidency, and despite the combination of a rapid Western pullout and an expanding Taliban insurgency, there had been, nonetheless, at least some small room for optimism.  After all, until a few days ago, Ghani appeared to have established a genuine rapprochement with Islamabad; and it had seemed, at least fleetingly, that something like genuine talks might actually get underway between the Taliban and an elected Afghan government.  But the optimists can go back to their seats:  Old patterns are reasserting themselves in South-Central Asia.

Ashraf Ghani’s recent denunciations of Pakistan, made in the aftermath of a series of devastating Taliban attacks, could easily have been confused with those of his predecessor, Hamid Karzai, whose relations with Pakistan were famously poisonous.  And no wonder:  Ghani’s diplomatic efforts, never popular in Afghanistan, were now becoming politically untenable in the wake of the latest carnage.  But more fundamentally, Ghani’s bitter words were those of a man whose opportunity to pursue peace talks – a primary reason for his outreach to Islamabad in the first place – was rapidly slipping away.