Afghanistan is a prime example: over
the past forty years, geopolitical tensions have imposed destructive conflicts
on what is one of the most naturally endowed countries at the heart of rising
Asia.
On Monday the 8th of April 2019, various
academics, diplomats, military officers and distinguished guests met for a
public lecture on ‘Why the Stabilization of Afghanistan Matters for Ensuring
Maritime Security in the Indian Ocean’. This was organized by the Institute of
National Security Studies Sri Lanka (INSSSL) and attended by guest speaker HE M. Ashraf Haidari, Ambassador of Afghanistan.
After a warm welcome from the Director General of INSSSL, Asanga Abeyagoonasekera, HE M. Ashraf Haidari spoke extensively about the Afghanistan and how it matters to the maritime security in the Indian Ocean.
Coming from a landlocked but increasingly land-sea-air-linked country, Afghanistan, many of the difficulties facing maritime security are land-based. And their resolution requires an inclusive approach which promotes cooperation and partnership between littoral and landlocked countries to address their shared problems. Indeed, maritime security, on which much global economic growth depends, is interconnected with events in landlocked countries.
In absence of peace in Afghanistan to enable sustainable development that
secures the future of the youthful population, poverty permeates the society.
And this provides an enabling environment for such maritime security challenges
as terrorism, drug trafficking, arms smuggling and human trafficking—among
others. These threats have been thoroughly examined and discussed, which
directly relate to the challenges that confront Afghanistan and the
international partners.
Over the past 18 years, Afghanistan has been a victim of external aggression in the form of terrorism. As a proxy of a coastal state, the Taliban have daily killed and maimed innocent Afghans, while destroying the infrastructure that should help connect and integrate Afghanistan with our surrounding resourceful regions in the North and South for increased trade, business and investment.
The Taliban insurgency has enabled several terrorist networks with global and regional reach to operate out of Afghanistan. At the same time, this imposed insecurity has enabled a permissive environment for mass drug cultivation and production in Afghanistan, which now provides more than 90 percent of regional and global demand for drugs.
In turn, revenues from the drug trade finance terrorism and fuel dysfunctional corruption that undermines governance and rule of law, which together destabilize drug producing and transit countries alike. Sri Lanka is a victim of increased drug addiction, while serving as a transit country, through which narcotics is trafficked elsewhere.
Because of the interconnectedness of these imposed security challenges, Afghanistan is facing a complex humanitarian crisis with diminishing human security. Hence, this makes our country a major source of refugees and asylum seekers, who are often ferried by human smugglers to Europe, Australia and elsewhere. As we see, what is imposed on and happens in countries like Afghanistan directly affect maritime security.
This dangerous situation necessitates that littoral and landlocked states no longer pause but join hands, pool their resources, and share intelligence to pursue and implement a common counterterrorism strategy—one that doesn’t make any distinction between terrorist networks. Alongside this effort, they must work together to free their nations off abject poverty, knowing that a lack of human security allows terrorists, extremists, and state-sponsors of terrorism to recruit among the jobless, destitute youth to radicalize, brainwash and exploit them in conflicts of their choice.
Indeed, the best way to fight poverty that feeds terrorism is to foster political and security confidence-building through regional economic cooperation. The latter can serve as an important enabler in deepening connectivity, enhancing competitiveness and productivity, lowering transaction costs, and expanding markets in any region.
How can this be done? In fact, Afghanistan has already put forth a number of strategic solutions for support, adoption and implementation by our coastal and landlocked neighbors; these include:
• The Heart of Asia–Istanbul Process (HOA-IP);
• The Regional Economic Cooperation Conference on Afghanistan (RECCA);
• The Kabul Process for Peace and Security Cooperation;
• The Joint Counter-Terrorism and Counter-Narcotics Strategy;
• The Afghanistan-Pakistan Action Plan for Peace and Solidarity (APAPPS).
We have worked hard to establish these Afghan-led processes to help secure regional cooperation for Afghanistan’s stabilization and sustainable development. It goes without saying that a stable Afghanistan at the heart of rising Asia will help ensure stability and prosperity throughout our surrounding regions. That is why it is in the best short- and long-term interests of coastal and non-coastal countries to participate in and to double and triple their efforts to achieve the shared goals of these regional security and development cooperation mechanisms.
every tangible step these countries take toward using these processes will help minimize their (and other countries’) vulnerability to terrorism and its state sponsors. That is why time is of the essence and they must reaffirm their often-pledged commitments to the implementation of the projects, programs, and policies, proposed under these mechanisms of regional cooperation.
In November 2017, the 7th Regional Economic Cooperation Conference on Afghanistan (RECCA) took place in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan. The conference focused on “Deepening Connectivity and Expanding Trade through Investment Infrastructure and Improving Synergy.” RECCA remains a major opportunity for Afghanistan’s littoral and landlocked neighbors to take stock of the progress made so far, and, besides working together to address the challenges and bottlenecks, they should move on to commit the financing and investment needed with respect to the priority projects in the key areas of energy, transport networks, trade and transit facilitation, communications, and business-to-business and labor support.
To name a few, the full, unimpeded implementation of the Chabahar Port—which involves Afghanistan, India, and Iran—deserves mention, as it will further enhance connectivity through Afghanistan and facilitate our integration with the regional and global markets. As work continues on this and other land and sea connectivity projects, we have launched air-corridors for trade, exporting Afghan products to markets near and far in the region.
Over the past few weeks, I have met with the Honorable Prime Minister of Sri
Lanka Ranil Wickremesinghe and relevant Sri Lankan cabinet ministers and the
private sector to help jumpstart bilateral trade between Afghanistan and Sri
Lanka, utilizing the Chabahar Port and extending the commercial air corridors
to Colombo. Indeed, increased connectivity and trade between our two countries
will help diminish poverty—creating jobs for our peasants, youth, and
professionals. And this would have a direct, positive impact on stability in
Afghanistan and the rest of the region.
Moreover, in December 2017, the 7th Ministerial Conference of HOA-IP, with its
political, security, and economic confidence-building measures implementation
mechanism, took place in Baku, Azerbaijan. Afghanistan aims at deepening
synergies and complementarities among the interconnected projects of RECCA and
HOA-IP, maximizing their impact on sustainable development not only in
Afghanistan but also throughout our surrounding regions. This should encourage
the country-participants to assess their shared security and development needs
and to bolster their engagement with Afghanistan accordingly, in order to
initiate the implementation of the proposed projects with win-win benefits.
Because sustainable development is impossible without durable stability, in
2017, we re-launched the Kabul Process for Peace and Security in Afghanistan.
Through this Afghan-owned and Afghan-led process, a results-oriented peace
strategy has been laid out, the key purpose of which is to engage in
unconditional, direct talks with the Taliban. Just yesterday, H.E. President
Mohammad Ashraf Ghani convened the first meeting of the Leadership Council on
Reconciliation, as well as finalizing a list of 22 Afghan representatives, who
would engage in peace talks with the Taliban.
Afghanistan peace strategy aims to separate reconcilable Taliban insurgents from transnational terrorist networks. But to succeed in this endeavor, they rely on honest and tangible regional cooperation, foremost on the closure of the sanctuaries and other forms of support, which the Taliban enjoy in the region.
In parallel to the peace strategy, afghan is pursuing a joint counter-terrorism and counter-narcotics strategy. The two strategies mutually reinforce one another, as our counter-terrorism and counter-narcotics efforts not only contribute to similar efforts at the regional and global levels but also advance Afghan peace efforts by increasing the number of reconcilable Taliban, who otherwise would refuse to discontinue violence.
Sri Lanka can help
Afghanistan in this joint effort both by initiating counter-narcotics law
enforcement cooperation with the counter-narcotics police and exchanging
counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism expertise and operational experience
with our army, as we continue battling these dangerous threats.
In addition to these and other peace and war-fighting efforts, Afghanistan have
striven to engage with Pakistan on a state-to-state basis to secure the
country’s cooperation both in fighting terrorism with no distinction and in
persuading the Taliban leadership to participate in the intra-Afghan peace
process for a political negotiated settlement. In this regard, the inaugural
meeting of the Afghanistan-Pakistan Action Plan for Peace and Solidarity
(APAPPS) took place in Kabul last July, as the APAPPS five working groups
discussed issues of counter-terrorism, intelligence-sharing, peace efforts,
trade and investment, and refugees.
For our part, the Afghan side firmly committed to working with relevant Pakistani institutional stakeholders to implement the key goals of the five working groups, in line with the core principles of the APAPPS agreed between Afghanistan and Pakistan. However, Pakistan remains reluctant to tangibly reciprocate our overall efforts, be them bilateral or multilateral in collaboration with others like the United States and NATO with forces in Afghanistan.
Considering these major opportunities for regional security and development cooperation, Afghanistan welcomed and strongly support the South Asia Strategy of the United States. The Strategy has followed a conditions-based approach to helping stabilize Afghanistan, and its key objective is to have Pakistan crack-down on terrorist sanctuaries on its soil and use its undeniable leverage over the leadership of Taliban in Pakistan to engage in direct, results-oriented peace talks with the Government of Afghanistan.
At the same time, the US Special Representative for Reconciliation Zalmay Khalilzad has been meeting with Pakistan and other regional stakeholders to build strong support for the Afghan peace process to bear fruit. Success in this necessary endeavor should help reduce violence across Afghanistan, compelling the Taliban to opt for peace through a negotiated political settlement for sustainable and dignified peace, an outcome, which every Afghan desires and demands.
That is why afghanistan believe that the full execution of the US South Asia
Strategy, in partnership with and support of coastal and littoral states that
share Afghanistan’s security and development interests, will not only help
stabilize our country but it will also ensure security as a precondition for
sustainable development across our wider region—including the Indian Ocean—in
the Asian continent.
Udeshika Jayasekara, Research Assistant of the
Institute of National Security Studies Sri Lanka (INSSSL)
ඉන්දියානු සාගරයේ සමුද්රීය ආරක්ෂාව තහවුරු
කිරීම සඳහා ඇෆ්ගනිස්ථාන අභ්යන්තර ස්ථාවරත්වය අවශ්ය වන්නේ ඇයි?
2019 අප්රේල් මස 8 වැනි දින, ඉන්දියානු
සාගරයේ සමුද්රීය ආරක්ෂාව තහවුරු කිරීම සඳහා ඇෆ්ගනිස්ථාන ස්ථාවරත්වයෙහි අවශ්යතාවය පිළිබඳව වූ ප්රසිද්ධ දේශනයට විවිධ
විද්වතුන්, රාජ්ය තාන්ත්රිකයන්, හමුදා
නිලධාරීන් සහ සම්භාවනීය අමුත්තන් රැසකගේ සහභාගීත්වයෙන් පැවැත්විණි. මෙය ජාතික
ආරක්ෂක අධ්යයන ආයතනය ශ්රී ලංකාව
(INSSSL)
විසින් සංවිධානය කරන ලද අතර ඇෆ්ගනිස්ථානයේ තානාපති එම්.
අශ්රාෆ් හයිදාරි (HE M. Ashraf Haidari) විසින් ආරාධිත දේශනය
පවත්වන ලදී.
ශ්රී ලංකා
ජාතික ආරක්ෂක අධ්යයන ආයතනයේ මාධ්ය නිවේදනය.
උදේශිකා ජයසේකර