ISAS Working Papers

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.