1 ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Four Decades of Efforts for Peace and Reconciliation in Afghanistan Authors: Dr. Mohammad Qasim Wafayezada Ghulam Reza Ebrahimi, Husain Ali Karimi & Safiullah Taha (Research Assistant) Kabul – January 2017 Add: Qale 9 Borja, Karte Parwan, Kabul, Afghanistan www.aiss.af 2 Contents Acknowledgement ................................................................................................................................................ 7 Disclaimer ................................................................................................................................................................ 8 Summary ................................................................................................................................................................... 9 Key Findings ............................................................................................................................................................ 9 CHAPTER ONE........................................................................................................................................................... 15 Overview ................................................................................................................................................................ 15 Importance and Necessity of Research ...................................................................................................... 16 Purpose of Research .......................................................................................................................................... 16 Fundamental Questions of Research .......................................................................................................... 17 Scope of Research............................................................................................................................................... 17 Methodology of Research ................................................................................................................................ 17 Open Coding ......................................................................................................................................................... 20 Challenges of Research ..................................................................................................................................... 20 Structure of Research ....................................................................................................................................... 21 CHAPTER TWO ......................................................................................................................................................... 23 Analysis of the Research Findings ............................................................................................................... 23 The Settings of War: The 27th April 1978 coup, The Soviet Invasion, and Efforts for Peace and Reconciliation ...................................................................................................................................................... 23 Geneva Treaty and the Lack of Political Agenda for Afghanistan .................................................... 25 Dr. Najibullah’s National Reconciliation Plan .......................................................................................... 26 UN Peace Plan and Benin Sivan Efforts...................................................................................................... 33 Section Two .......................................................................................................................................................... 36 Jihadi Parties and Attempts to Form a Government and Ensuring Peace and Stability ......... 36 The Post-Jihad Political Plan: From Rawalpindi Council to Peshawar Agreement .................. 37 Islamabad Agreement and the Peace Efforts Restoration .................................................................. 40 Section Three ....................................................................................................................................................... 44 The Emergence of Taliban and Peace Efforts with the Northern Alliance ................................... 44 3 Taliban’s Success in Bringing Security and Their Failure in Peace ................................................. 45 Zahir Shah (King) Peace Efforts .................................................................................................................... 53 Section Four .......................................................................................................................................................... 56 Bonn Agreement and Post-Bonn Peace and Reconciliation Efforts ................................................ 56 Section Five ........................................................................................................................................................... 61 A Review of the Efforts towards Reconciliation with the Government and Armed Opposition During the Last 15 Years ................................................................................................................................. 61 Lack of Will and Plan for Peace from America and Countries in the Region ............................... 65 Geopolitics of Insecurity and Barriers to Regional Peace ................................................................... 66 Negotiate with the Taliban or Pakistan? ................................................................................................... 67 Do the Taliban Want Peace? ........................................................................................................................... 71 What are the Taliban’s Demands for Reconciliation? .......................................................................... 72 Pakistan’s Demands .......................................................................................................................................... 74 The Structure and Authorities of the High Peace Council .................................................................. 78 Formation of a Third Measure ...................................................................................................................... 81 Lack of Financial and Professional Transparency in the High Peace Council............................. 82 Lack of a Clear Strategy for Peace ................................................................................................................ 83 Confusion of Competencies between the High Peace Council and the Diplomacy of the Country ................................................................................................................................................................... 84 Peace and Justice ................................................................................................................................................ 85 CHAPTER THREE ..................................................................................................................................................... 89 Analysis of the Challenges and Providing Basic Guidelines ............................................................... 89 Section Six ............................................................................................................................................................. 89 The Overall Challenges in Front of Peace Process in Afghanistan .................................................. 89 Foreign Intervention ......................................................................................................................................... 89 Internal Obstacles for Peace ........................................................................................................................... 92 1)Urban-rural gap .............................................................................................................................................. 92 2)Cross generation gap .................................................................................................................................... 93 3)Structural, political, economic and cultural factors .......................................................................... 94 4 4)Ethnic structure of the power and the capacity to re-integrate the Taliban into the government .......................................................................................................................................................... 95 5)Lack of coordination between the institutions to manage the process of negotiation ....... 96 Section Seven ....................................................................................................................................................... 97 The Guidelines and Recommendations to Achieve Peace .................................................................. 97 Domestic Consensus.......................................................................................................................................... 97 Regional Consensus ........................................................................................................................................... 98 Bilateral Peace Talks and Emphasis on Direct Dialogue with