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Foreign Policy - https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/07/09/how-to-fix-afghanistans-broken-peace-process/
AFGHANISTAN –TO BENEFIT THE AFGHAN BROKEN PEACE PROCESS – INVOLVE MORE WOMEN, CIVIL SOCIETY, IN PEACE NEGOTIATIONS
By Michelle Barsa – July 9, 2015
For the past five years, the Afghan government has sought a peace deal with
the Taliban without much to show for the effort. But in the 10 months since
President Ashraf Ghani has taken office, the long-stagnant peace process has
shown new sparks of life.
Negotiators have quietly, sometimes secretly, met with the Taliban’s
political leadership in neutral locations such as Qatar, Norway, and China. These
first efforts were tentative — talks about talks — but most recently, on July
7, members of the Afghan government and Pakistani Taliban reportedly met in Islamabad
to talk about how to end fighting in
Afghanistan. The meeting was “warm” and “positive,” and the pre-dawn meal the
sides shared was pervaded by “a sense of celebration,” a Pakistani official
with knowledge of the talks told Reuters. Another round
is planned after the holy month of Ramadan.
While the talks have yet to yield anything substantial, they are a signal
of the new Afghan national unity government’s renewed dedication to resolving
this conflict. (It’s one priority where there has been progress while other
core tasks, such as formation of a new cabinet, have floundered.) Now, it looks
like Ghani is creeping, however slowly, closer toward the political settlement
to end fighting with the Taliban that for so long eluded his successor, former
President Hamid Karzai.
But achieving a peace that will end the 13-year war between the U.S.-backed
government and the Taliban will only come about if the political solution
reached is one that the Afghan people are willing to support — a peace
agreement over which they feel ownership. And for Ghani to do that he has to
fix the problems that plague the current peace process and the body tasked with
its implementation: the High Peace Council.
Since June 2010, the Afghanistan Peace and Reintegration
Program (APRP) has provided the road map for national
reconciliation. Introduced by Karzai, with the backing of 1,600 delegates from
around the country, the APRP provides a road map for national reconciliation
and the demobilization of Taliban fighters ready to return to their
communities. To execute this vision, the APRP established a 70-member High
Peace Council made up of members of parliament, former fighters from all sides
of the conflict, and leaders from civil society. Alongside this body, the APRP
created 34 Provincial Peace Committees, the members of which are appointed by
provincial governors, to facilitate the reintegration of Taliban fighters at
the local level. But at the end of this year, the APRP will expire, and it’s on
Ghani’s shoulders to chart the path that will follow.
The core APRP implementing body — the High Peace Council — has operated
without a clear mandate since its founding. It was never established whether it
is meant to bring the conflict parties to the negotiating table as a neutral
mediator or, when formal talks begin, if it is supposed to negotiate on behalf
of the Afghan government. Its members have alternatively served in both roles
over the past five years. Most recently, council members participated in the
meetings in Qatar, Norway, and China; in the consequent talks in Islamabad, a
council member attended but as part of a broader delegation of government
representatives.
Impartiality is critical for the success of a mediating body, but how can
impartiality be maintained if council members are alternating between roles as
mediators and government negotiators, let alone are intimately entwined in the
country’s half-century of conflict? Of greater issue is that the reconciliation
program excludes those most intimately affected by the war, those who will
ultimately be responsible for implementing the final accord.
Leaving political actors — many marred by corruption scandals or
allegations of war crimes — alone to negotiate peace accords in secret doesn’t
work. Conciliation Resources, a London-based nonprofit, conducted a study of 83
peace agreements signed between 1989 and 2004, finding that only one-third of the
negotiations included representatives from unarmed, affected communities. But
for those negotiations that did, the risk of returning to conflict was reduced
by 64 percent. Without
meaningful inclusion of Afghan civil society, the agreement won’t be worth the
paper it’s printed on. Quantitative analysis of
182 peace agreements by the International Peace Institute, a New York-based
think tank, found that women’s participation in peace negotiations — as
mediators, negotiators, witnesses, and signatories — increases the durability
of those agreements. Such accords are 20 percent more likely to last at least
two years and 35 percent more likely to last for 15 years.
It’s now incumbent upon Ghani to articulate a clear plan for the next
iteration of the peace talks that breathes new life into the process, while
addressing its most critical issues. In this case that means deciding what role
the High Peace Council is actually meant to play. It also means including
underrepresented stakeholders — such as community-based organizations, human
rights defenders, academics, women, and traditional leaders — in an attempt to
reach a peace agreement defined by a sense of true national ownership.
Mediators frequently mythologize the inclusion of women and civil society
in peace negotiations as complicated and problematic. Peace negotiations are
precarious, and mediators, always in private, have offered a litany of excuses
for exclusion, suggesting that additional actors will destabilize talks or
claiming that they don’t have the authority to expand the guest list or that
the time for inclusion is during the implementation phase rather than during
the negotiations themselves. But these leaders are often the individuals who
have relentlessly advocated for peace and equality since long before the
Taliban fell, as well as those doing the difficult daily work of holding
communities together in spite of the war. They are, in a sense, Afghanistan’s
peace constituency.
They can also prove the difference between talks that go nowhere and the
end of a war.
In the Philippines, for example, when negotiations between the government
and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, a rebel group seeking autonomy for the
Moro people, reached an impasse in May 2010, the government organized a
national dialogue to convince the parties to return to the table and negotiate
an accord for which there would be broad popular support. The Moro Islamic
Liberation Front insurgency had been fighting since the 1960s, and its leaders
didn’t think its constituencies would support a deal. Putting the question of a
possible peace to local, regional, and national representatives from all sides
of the conflict, however, revealed widespread support for reaching a political
resolution to the war. The findings were made public and distributed to all the
negotiating parties and the mediators, ultimately leading to a resumption of
the negotiations. This process was credited with generating broad-based
ownership and understanding of the peace process throughout the country, as
well as providing concrete recommendations for provisions of the final accord.
The High Peace Council has rhetorically committed to engaging women and
civil society in the Afghan peace process. It even went as far as signing a memorandum of understanding
with more than 60 Afghan civil society organizations in May 2013, which was
meant to pave the way for more intentional partnership. But local and regional
consultations have been ad hoc at best and have been seen as relevant
exclusively for provincial-level reintegration and grievance-resolution efforts
— interventions designed to take place parallel to the national-level
political reconciliation negotiations. The two tracks are not designed to meet
or interact.
As Ghani reconceptualizes the road map to peace, this must be rectified.
First, it’s well past time for a national dialogue on reconciliation — one
focused not just on the physical development needs of an impoverished country,
but on the real and legitimate political grievances that undergird this
conflict. Afghans, from the districts on up, must be formally engaged and asked
what they think about the future of their state. The agenda for the
national-level peace talks is the same agenda that should guide these
consultations. The space can and should also be used to air local grievances
and devise locally relevant strategies to advance districts and provinces
toward peace. In that way, it would dovetail the provincial-level reintegration
efforts with a more inclusive national reconciliation process. Critically, this
dialogue can move forward even while the official peace talks are stalled.
Second, more women need to be involved. Only nine of 70 current council
members are women — not enough to comprise a critical mass. In the original
formulation of the related Provincial Peace Committees, there were hardly any
women until now-deceased Chairman Burhanuddin Rabbani issued a directive
ordering provincial governors to ensure no less than three women members on the
committees of 25 to 40 people. Women members, as part of their
official duties, have negotiated directly with insurgent commanders, facilitated
the release of hostages, and helped build a peace constituency in their
provinces through community engagement, awareness raising, and local
mobilization. Yet, still, they are excluded by their male counterparts from
primary forums of decision-making within the committees themselves, restricted
from access to actors at the national and international levels, and often are
made to carry out their activities without access to the resources that have
been set aside to fund the reintegration program.
Afghan women are excluded from peace talks for the same reason that women
are consistently excluded from peace negotiations around the world. It is the
result of an underlying belief that the way to end wars is to gather together
armed actors and get them to agree to a cessation of violence, followed by
power- and wealth-sharing arrangements they find to be suitable enough to
induce them to concede to peace. These actors are privileged over those
individuals and communities that have remained peaceful in times of war, and
this results in the prioritization of the interests of those who used violence
to destroy a country, rather than the interests of those who worked tirelessly
to build peace.
An Afghan woman from Kandahar put it best when she said to me, “If the roots
have a problem, the tree will not grow. Our tree is sick. We need to work to
remove root causes [of conflict], like corruption, and bring women into the
peace process. Then the branches will grow fruit and leaves, and it will be
beautiful.”