An End to the War in Afghanistan
by Jeffrey Stacey - The National Interest
For the first time in history, Afghanistan's neighbors have joint interests in seeing the country become stable.
… Yet several key factors appear to be making some form of ceasefire and/or peace possible, if not necessarily fully probable. First, the Afghan special forces are actually fairly effective. While they do not constitute a large percentage of Afghan forces, they are well trained and well commanded (evidence supplied by the fact that the Taliban never hold large towns or cities for long). Second, most of the country’s thirty-five million people are not just tired of war, but they are expressing their discontent in novel ways. For example, the breakthrough ceasefire in June also coincided with a young-person-led “Peace Caravan†that traveled from Helmand province on foot to Kabul to demand a cessation to the conflict, laying blame for the long war’s continuance directly at the feet of Pakistan, Iran and Russia—the three major funders of the Taliban.
http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/end-war-afghanistan
