194: A Possible Paradigm for Afghanistan’s Future
Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury, Principal Research Fellow, ISAS
1 August 2014
The most important question confronting us in Afghanistan is this: what is the best method by
which individual state-interactions with Afghanistan, or among the state- and non-state
actors, may be managed, organised and coordinated in such a fashion as to bring stability and
harmony to Afghanistan, to the extent possible, when the ISAF forces are largely gone. The
global, in particular, the regional matrix is not any more secure than it was when the ISAF
forces had gone in, in the first place. A similar foreign intervention in Iraq seems to have
ultimately found fruition in the birth of a virulent resistance in the form of ISIS. In the view
of a senior UN official, the Taliban would be watching the developments in Iraq closely, and
drawing lessons from it.2
In Afghanistan itself the pre-US and Western withdrawal phase is
becoming increasingly problematic.