Category: Nation

The upcoming G7 Summit in Cornwall, UK from June 11 to 13 is perhaps the first international event, in the backdrop of the continuing Covid pandemic, when the leaders from the worlds wealthiest countries — the US, Japan, Germany, the UK, France, Italy and Canada — will be meeting with leaders from India, Australia, South Africa and South Korea face to face for the first time in the last one-and-a-half year.The leaders from the most advanced nations of the G7 meet regularly to try to determine the course the world will follow, with their own interests taking a backseat.

Expectations from the summit

There is a lot of optimism ahead of the gathering in Cornwall. US and UK government sources have briefed that the G7 will demonstrate that “the West ain’t over just yet”. The optics are bound to be promising. For the US it’ll give a chance to prove that ‘America is back’, while for the UK it’ll help to give a boost to its ‘Global Britain’ strategy.On the agenda are the autocratic challenge from Russia and China, climate change, the global vaccine rollout and trade. In addition Myanmar, Indian democracy and its minorities, instability in Sahel region, Israel-Palestinian conflict and change of guard in Israel are also expected to occupy the agenda.

A move, spearheaded by US President Joe Biden, to set a minimum global corporate tax rate to help states reclaim resources lost to tax havens seems promising. Also the British proposal to transform the G7 into a “D10” of democracies has been achieved, the participation of guests from India, Australia, South Korea and South Africa will reinforce a sense that the West is open to alliance-building again.Meanwhile, the G7 finance ministers reached a “historic” deal on taxing multinational companies, last week in London. They agreed to counter tax avoidance through measures to make companies pay in the countries where they do business., besides ratifying a global minimum corporate tax rate to counter the possibility of countries undercutting each other to attract investments. UK Chancellor Rishi Sunak described these as “seismic tax reforms” and said that it will help create a fairer tax system fit for the 21st century.

Preparations for the summit

The foreign ministers from D-10 met face-to-face for the first time in two years in May earlier, following a coronavirus-extended pause, to prepare for the summit and in the communique issued after the meeting listed 82 points which will try to grab the attention of G7 or D10 leaders. In addition the issues discussed were NATO’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, Iran, China and the threat posed by Russia.Meanwhile, Britain’s Foreign Office has said a key part of the June summit will be plans to boost girls’ education and women’s employment after the Covid pandemic would be a key topic.

G7 nations are expected to sign up to new global targets that aim to get 40 million more girls into school in low and lower-middle-income countries by 2026. The aims also include getting 20 million more girls reading by the age of 10. The countries are setting up a $15-billion fund, to be administered by developing countries over the next two years.However, the trade unionists and the wider environment movement in the UK have sounded the bugle against G7’s inability to take any concerted action on climate change. In a statement they asserted that the vaccine apartheid response to the Covid threat might be replicated in their approach to the climate crisis.

They further assert that if the world’s wealthiest countries continue to move too slowly to curb their own carbon emissions, continue to invest in and boost fossil fuel energy and production, fail to make a just transition at home while denying the global South the resources it needs to deal with climate impacts, their pretensions to “global leadership” will fail the test.A $100 billion a year transfer to the developing world to make transition possible was pledged at Copenhagen and built into the Paris Agreement to be met by 2020. But it has not been done.They further assert that this commitment is a tiny fraction of the $3.8 trillion that global banks have invested in fossil fuels since the Paris Agreement, and less than a tenth of the combined G7 military budget of $1,043bn last year.

Post-summit scenario

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson plans to use the G7 Summit to increase cooperation between the world’s democratic and technologically advanced nations. Between them, the 10 leaders represent more than 60 per cent of the people living in democracies around the world.The UK will also host several meetings throughout the year between government ministers from the G7, both virtually and in different locations across Britain. These meetings will cover economic, environmental, health, trade, technology, development and foreign policy issues.

Observers are of the view that post-summit the western world may be transformed into one where it may lose its supremacy and China may pull ahead of the West technologically and economically, secondly the West could reassert itself by investing in green industries to renew its economies and societies in the backdrop of the lessons learnt from the Covid pandemic and thus China might be neutralised, thirdly a more Eurasian Europe may emerge, due to the eclipse of both the US and UK and it’ll be drawn towards Asia’s growing economic influence. For India, the summit offers a chance to further reinforce its relationship with the UK by signing a trade treaty and for Mr Modi to establish a rapport with Biden to ensure a fruitful bilateral relationship, and to some extent this seems possible. (IANS)

China is hosting foreign ministers from the 10 ASEAN countries on Monday and Tuesday, with Beijing pushing for closer economic cooperation and aligning COVID-19 recovery efforts even as it looks to push back against the recent regional outreach of the Quad grouping. Chinese officials have in recent weeks stepped up criticism of the Quad — the informal India, Australia, Japan and United States grouping — and of Washington in particular. During recent visits to Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, China’s Defence Minister called on both countries to reject “military alliances” — a term that some Beijing are using to describe the Quad, but a label that the group rejects.

China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said in a statement the China-ASEAN foreign ministers meeting, in the city of Chongqing, would mark the 30-year anniversary of relations and also “focus on combating COVID-19, promoting economic recovery, [and] better dovetail[ing] strategic plans.” A vaccine passport connecting China and ASEAN countries is also being discussed. China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi will hold bilateral meetings with all the visiting ministers, and also chair a meeting of the Lancang-Mekong Cooperation (LMC) with Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam.

Deepening economic cooperation, particularly following the signing of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) trade deal, would be China’s focus, analysts in Beijing said, even as it grapples with disputes over the South China Sea. Recently, China and the Philippines have clashed over the presence of Chinese vessels near a disputed reef, while Malaysia alleged the intrusion of 16 Chinese aircraft into its airspace.The Communist Party-run Global Times on Monday blamed the U.S. for those tensions rather than China’s moves that prompted the protests from the Philippines and Malaysia. Countries “see clearly that quarrels on South China Sea are not the biggest threat to regional stability; it is the U.S., whose warships frequently sail through the sensitive waters and try to force ASEAN countries take sides to confront China,” the newspaper wrote.

After the first Quad leaders’ summit held in March and the announcement of a regional vaccine initiative, many Chinese analysts framed ASEAN as a key space where Chinese and Quad initiatives may rub up against each other.China “cannot rule out the possibilities that Quad members will further rope in ASEAN members to counter China as Southeast Asia is of great significance to the US’ Indo-Pacific Strategy,” wrote Yuan Zheng, senior fellow of the Institute of American Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. “Yet ASEAN will not easily take sides.”

The framing of the Quad as “an Asian NATO” by Beijing has been criticised by the group’s members. India’s External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar in April described the using of words such as “Asian NATO” as “a mind game which people are playing”.ProPublica: Many of the uber-rich pay next to no income tax

While Bennett and his new partners, headed by opposition leader YairLapid, still face some obstacles, the sides appeared to be serious about reaching a deal and ending the deadlock that has plunged the country into four elections in the past two years.

With the announcement by a former ally of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he would seek to form a coalition government with the Opposition,Israel’s longest serving Isreali’s leader’s regime may come to an end, media reports here suggested/ The ultra-nationalist leader Naftali Bennett said his party would join talks to form a governing coalition with centrist party leader YairLapid. The dramatic announcement by Naftali Bennett, leader of the small hardline Yamina party, set the stage for a series of steps that could push Netanyahu and his dominant Likud party into the opposition in the coming week.

“It’s my intention to do my utmost in order to form a national unity government along with my friend YairLapid, so that, God willing, together we can save the country from a tailspin and return Israel to its course,” Bennett said.Bennett, 49, who leads the Yamina party, made his announcement in a televised address. “Mr Netanyahu is no longer trying to form a right-wing government because he knows full well that there isn’t one. He is seeking to take the whole national camp, and the whole country, with him on his personal last stand,” he said. “I will do everything to form a national unity government with my friend YairLapid.”

While Bennett and his new partners, headed by opposition leader YairLapid, still face some obstacles, the sides appeared to be serious about reaching a deal and ending the deadlock that has plunged the country into four elections in the past two years.They have until Wednesday to complete a deal in which each is expected to serve two years as prime minister in a rotation deal, with Bennett holding the job first. Lapid’sYeshAtid party said negotiating teams were to meet later Sunday.

Bennett, a former top aide to Netanyahu who has held senior Cabinet posts, shares the prime minister’s hard-line ideology. He is a former leader of the West Bank settlement movement and heads a small party whose base includes religious and nationalist Jews. Yet he has had a strained and complicated relationship with his one-time mentor due to personal differences.Bennett said there was no feasible way after the deadlocked March 23 election to form a right-wing government favored by Netanyahu. He said another election would yield the same results and said it was time to end the cycle.

“A government like this will succeed only if we work together as a group,” he said. He said everyone “will need to postpone fulfilling part of their dreams. We will focus on what can be done, instead of fighting all day on what’s impossible.”If Bennett and Lapid and their other partners can wrap up a deal, it would end, at least for the time being, the record-setting tenure of Netanyahu, the most dominant figure in Israeli politics over the past three decades. Netanyahu has served as prime minister for the past 12 years and also held an earlier term in the late 1990s.

In his own televised statement, Netanyahu accused Bennett of betraying the Israeli right wing and urged nationalist politicians not to join what he called a “leftist government. A government like this is a danger to the security of Israel, and is also a danger to the future of the state,” he said. Netanyahu is desperate to stay in power while he is on trial. He has used his office as a stage to rally his base and lash out against police, prosecutors and the media.

Despite his electoral dominance, Netanyahu has become a polarizing figure since he was indicted on charges of fraud, breach of trust and accepting bribes in late 2019. Each of the past four elections was seen as a referendum on Netanyahu’s fitness to rule, and each ended in deadlock.In order to form a government, a party leader must secure the support of a 61-seat majority in the 120-seat Knesset, or parliament. Because no single party controls a majority on its own, coalitions are usually built with smaller partners. Thirteen parties of various sizes are in the current parliament.

While Bennett’s Yamina party controls just seven seats in parliament, he has emerged as a kingmaker of sorts by providing the necessary support to secure a majority. If he is successful, his party would be the smallest to lead an Israeli government.Lapid already faced a difficult challenge, given the broad range of parties in the anti-Netanyahu bloc that have little in common. They include dovish left-wing parties, a pair of right-wing nationalist parties, including Bennett’s Yamina, and most likely the Islamist United Arab List.Although Arabs make up some 20% of Israel’s population, an Arab party has never before sat in an Israeli coalition government.

Israeli media reported that under the proposed terms of the deal, Mr Bennett would replace Mr Netanyahu, 71, as prime minister and later give way to MrLapid, 57, in a rotation agreement. The arrangement has not been officially confirmed. The proposed coalition would bring together factions from the right, the left and the centre of Israeli politics. While the parties have little in common politically, they are united in their desire to see Mr Netanyahu’s time in office come to an end.

The prime minister, who is on trial for fraud, fell short of a decisive majority at a general election in March. It was the country’s fourth inconclusive vote in two years – and again Netanyahu failed to secure coalition allies. After Netanyahu’s failure to form a government, Lapid was then given four weeks to cobble together a coalition.YohananPlesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute, said Netanyahu will try to undermine those efforts until the end. Even if Lapid and Bennett manage to put together a government, Netanyahu is unlikely to disappear, Plesner said.Netanyahu could remain as opposition leader, working to exploit the deep ideological differences among his opponents to cause the coalition to fracture. “History teaches us it would be unwise to write him off,” he said.

India’s External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar has offered India’s support to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres for his re-election during a meeting in New York at which they discussed a range of issues from Covid-19 vaccines to terrorism.In a tweet after the meeting May 25, Jaishankar said that he told Guterres that India “values” his leadership and conveyed its support for his election to a second term. The global crisis of the Covid-19 pandemic featured prominently in their discussions.

Jaishankar tweeted that they emphasized the importance of finding “urgent and effective global vaccine solutions” and the critical need to ramp up the vaccine supply chain to “ensure greater production and fairer distribution.”With India set to assume the rotating presidency of the Security Council in August, their meeting covered a wide range of issues.In a series of tweets on the meeting, Jaishankar said that they talked about “regional challenges in India’s neighborhood” and “shared our concerns about ensuring that the gains of the last two decades in Afghanistan are adequately protected.”

U.S. President Joe Biden is pulling out the nation’s troops from Afghanistan after a 20-year deployment even as terrorist activities continue raising fears of regional instability.In his tweets Jaishankar said, “Countering terrorism and radicalization remain priorities for the entire region.”Jaishankar said that he “highlighted India’s constructive role” in the Security Council and “conveyed priorities of our presidency in August.” He added, “Maritime security and technology for peacekeeping address the needs of the day.”

A spokesperson for India’s UN Mission said that India planned to hold high-level meetings on those topics during its presidency. Jaishankar also noted that Guterres expressed “appreciation of India’s peacekeeping operations including at Goma, DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo) recently.”India peacekeepers based in Goma have been involved in rescue operations after the eruption of the Mount Nayargongo volcano displaced several thousand people in the region last week. Several hundred people are also missing following the calamity.

Climate change, a topic that Guterres gives top priority to, also was discussed, Jaishankar tweeted. “Greater resources are essential for larger ambitions (in setting goals for combatting climate change). Financing will determine our seriousness and credibility,” he added.The spokesperson for India’s UN mission said that Jaishankar “apprised the Secretary General of India’s efforts to meet its Paris commitments (on curbing greenhouse emissions), enhance renewable energy goals, as well as its leadership role in the International Solar Alliance and Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure.”

Jaishankar “underlined our strong development partnership with Africa, Small States and Small Island Developing States,” the spokesperson said. “The Secretary-General conveyed his appreciation for the consistent role played by Indian peacekeepers in support of international peace and security. Their response in aiding the people of Goma in the Democratic Republic of Congo following the volcanic eruption was recognized,” the diplomat added.In the discussion of fighting Covid-19, they felt that “the proposal by India and South Africa for a temporary waiver of vaccine patents “can also contribute to greater production and more equity,” the spokesperson said. The U.S. has agreed to the waiver, but it is facing opposition from several countries including Germany.

Guterres’s spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said that they “discussed a number of issues relating to peace and security” but said he had no further details on those topics. He also said that they discussed the Covid situation and the development of vaccines.Guterres is running for re-election with no credible opposition and in the election India gets two votes, one in the Security Council and another in the General Assembly. A Canadian of Indian descent, Arora Akanksha, has declared she is running for the office, as have at least five others, but lacking a government sponsorship, their candidacy has not so far been accepted officially.

The current crisis between Israelis and Palestinians in East Jerusalem, between Arabs and Jews in cities inside Israel, and between Israel and Hamasunravelling has its roots in the political dysfunction of both Israel’s party system and the Palestinian national movement’s decayed one-party dictatorship.

The current crisis between Israelis and Palestinians in East Jerusalem, between Arabs and Jews in cities inside Israel, and between Israel and Hamas, is not analogous to any of the previous rounds of violence inflicted on Palestinian and Israeli civilians by their increasingly feckless and bankrupt political leaders. This is not another 2014, or another 2009, or another Second Intifada. It is something new. This is what the death of the two-state solution looks like.

The current unravelling has its roots in the political dysfunction of both Israel’s party system and the Palestinian national movement’s decayed one-party dictatorship. But the precipitating event was the move by Israel’s government, last spring, to include annexation of West Bank territory in its coalition agreement, pending the resolution of the urgent COVID-19 pandemic.

For years, hardliners on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, often including officials, have sought to erase or at least to blur the Green Line — the line that separated Israel from Jordan and Egypt before June 4, 1967, which is also the line that delineated Israel’s post-1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Officials erase the line from government and textbook maps, and activists wield slogans like “from the river to the sea,” or “no settlement is illegal.” Against such pressures, from 1993 until last year, stood the commitment of both Israeli and Palestinian leaders to negotiating an end to conflict through territorial compromise. Negotiated territorial compromise, more recently shorthanded as a “two-state solution,” is what extremists on both sides were pushing against with their expansionist policies, maps and slogans. And now, at last, they have succeeded.

The movement of Israeli political leaders in 2020 — with the enthusiastic support of U.S. President Donald Trump — toward ending Israel’s Oslo commitment to negotiating territory and borders pushed the conflict to the edge of a precipice. The prospect of Israeli annexation of West Bank territory was another deep cut into the already tattered legitimacy of the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah, and it began to unravel the intricate web of Israeli-Palestinian security, economic, and regulatory coordination in the West Bank. When annexation was put on hold in August 2020, some of that cooperation resumed. But the official Israeli abandonment of negotiated compromise, alongside continued settlement expansion and the forcible relocation of Palestinian families in East Jerusalem and communities in the West Bank, made a new crisis almost inevitable. It made inescapably obvious what was already clear to many: that the Oslo framework was exhausted, and the rationale for the prevailing order in the West Bank, including the existence of the Palestinian Authority, was defunct.

The 27 years since the Oslo Declaration in 1993, for better or worse, put boundaries around a conflict that had generated major wars in every decade since 1948, along with countless acts of international and cross-border terrorism and assassination. This is not to minimize what outlived Oslo. Those 27 years saw periods of military conflict and terrorist violence that cost thousands of Israeli and Palestinian lives, along with the entrenchment of Hezbollah and Hamas, continuous Israeli expansion of Jewish settlements and the Jewish population in the West Bank, and severe restrictions on the ability of Palestinian residents of the West Bank and Gaza to live lives free of structural violence. The Palestinian Authority, created by the Oslo Accords to hold a sublease on certain responsibilities of the Israeli occupation during the negotiating period, was corrupted by its cooperation with the occupation but also by its graft, infighting, lack of accountability, and increasingly its repression and autocracy.

And still, throughout this period, the vision of a two-state solution, and the commitment of Israeli and Palestinian leaders — backed by the United States — to negotiate that compromise, also established a certain degree of clarity, predictability, and constraint in relations between Israelis and Palestinians. The injustice and violence of occupation, in which about five million people, between the West Bank and Gaza Strip, lack either citizenship or self-determination, are daily features of this reality. And yet, until now we could not begin to understand what boundaries the formal commitment to a negotiated solution put around the behavior of the two communities living cheek-by-jowl in the land both claim as their own.

The different zones of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict evident this past month — in East Jerusalem, in the streets of Israeli cities, in Gaza and in the skies over Israel — reveal just how badly those boundaries in the conflict have been breached. Palestinians in East Jerusalem, in Lod, and in Gaza all hold very different status under Israeli law and policy. But in different ways, all of them are frustrated, even enraged, both at the obstreperous supremacy advanced by ideological Jewish activists against these Palestinians’ rights, freedoms, and interests, and at the callously unequal treatment they receive at the hands of Israeli authorities. And in the wake of the riots and vigilantism in Jerusalem, Lod, Jaffa, Bat Yam and more, it’s also clear that too many Israeli Jews have come to see all of these Palestinians — whether fellow citizens or not — as their enemies.

The bankruptcy of political leadership on both sides is another reason why this crisis is so much worse, and so much more widespread, than previous episodes. Israel has held four elections in two years — and may now be on its way to a fifth, since coalition negotiations have been derailed by the violence and the political posturing around it. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “anti-solutionism” fuels regular rounds of crisis even as it enables him to retain his hold on power despite his simultaneous trial on corruption charges. And Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s hold on power is likewise loosening — infighting within his own party torpedoed his plans for a new election that could have strengthened the legitimacy of his movement and his leadership. Instead, Hamas is able to use its rocket fire on Israeli civilians to usurp the narrative, to claim international attention and engagement, and likely also to win material benefits for itself and for Gaza Palestinians as part of an eventual ceasefire. And Israeli ministers can focus their narrative at home and abroad on defending Israeli civilians from Hamas attacks instead of the shredded fabric of Israeli society and the polarized dysfunction of its politics. This violence, redefined as another Israel-Hamas war, is all upside for the extremists and all downside for the forces of negotiated compromise and peaceful coexistence, both inside Israel and beyond the Green Line.

The latest escalation of violence demonstrates the folly of trying to marginalize this conflict for Israel, for its new Arab friends, and for the Biden-Harris administration. They may all prefer to focus on cooperation in pursuit of what they see as higher priorities. But the current crisis threatens to overturn their fragile consensus, further destabilize a fragile region, and divert the new U.S. administration’s attention from other foreign policy goals. And what we are now seeing, what Israelis and Palestinian civilians are now suffering, was more likely than not this year, as I noted in a Center for a New American Security report I published with Ilan Goldenberg and Michael Koplow in December.

A two-state outcome to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is indeed a distant prospect — but the horrific alternative is now clear. It is time for leaders in Israel, in Palestine, in the region, and around the world to take that lesson to heart, and commit to assiduous efforts to get Israelis and Palestinians back on the long, arduous path toward a negotiated resolution.

(Tamara CofmanWittes is a Senior Fellow – Foreign Policy, Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings Institute)

President Joe Biden’s plan to withdraw U.S. armed forces from Afghanistan by Sept. 11 is leading observers to renew concerns about continued progress on human rights, the status of democratic reforms and whether a resurgence of violence will set back the war-beleaguered country.

The looming concern expressed to Catholic News Service by those observers focuses on civilians, who have borne the brunt of violence for decades.

The pullout, while welcomed by the observers, is worrisome to them because they are unaware of steps to prevent a recurrence of fighting among Afghan government forces and the Taliban, a fundamentalist Islamist movement that ruled the country until its ouster by the U.S.-led coalition in 2001.

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“The U.S. policy has had diminishing returns and has not been able to achieve any significant goal over the last decade or more. The goal was to create a more secure, stable Afghanistan and that certainly has not happened,” said David Cortright director of the Global Policy Initiative at the University of Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs.

The plan, which Biden announced April 14, calls for the remaining 3,500 troops to redeploy by Sept. 11, the 20th anniversary of the al-Qaida-led jetliner attacks on the United States. In the announcement, NATO partners said they would be reassessing their commitment to maintaining troops on the ground after the departure.

Shukria Dellawar, an Afghanistan native who is policy director of the Washington-based Afghanistan Peace Campaign, said the U.S.-led war “never focused on peace,” but was fought solely to achieve a military victory.

The emphasis on meeting military goals rather than wide-scale humanitarian and political achievements poses future dangers for Afghan civilians, said Dellawar, who last visited her homeland in 2019.

“You owe it to people to leave this conflict on peaceful means,” she said. “When leaving without a peace accord and peacekeeping forces, we are leaving a colossal disaster in Afghanistan.”

The pullout from Afghanistan originally was to be completed by May 1 under an agreement negotiated in February 2020 by President Donald Trump’s administration and the Taliban. The deal called for the Taliban to stop attacking U.S. forces, sever ties with terrorist organizations, including al-Qaida, and begin negotiations with the Afghan government toward a cease-fire and peace accord.

Inter-Afghan talks began in September, but no progress has been reported. But the observers said the 2020 agreement was hardly one that will secure peace. “It’s just a troop withdrawal agreement,” said Kathy Kelly, a Christian faith-based peace activist who has visited Afghanistan numerous times during the last two decades to promote peace and reconciliation.

She feared that humanitarian efforts to address hunger, education, health care, job creation and environmental concerns will suffer without a peace accord in place. “The creation of peace would so importantly rest on alleviating the desperation people have to feed their family, have clean water, get some fuel,” Kelly said. Creating jobs that would stabilize incomes should be among the priorities of any peace talks, she added.

The observers acknowledged the work ahead is long and difficult and must expand beyond U.S. interests.

Cortright, who has written extensively about Afghanistan for 20 years, suggested that establishing an interim transitional authority that includes Taliban representation becomes the first step toward a modern Afghanistan. He said he believed neither the fragile government of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani nor the insurgent Taliban can oversee the entire country and its diverse factions alone.

Afghanistan is at the crossroads of so many powers

“It’s clear that the Afghan government cannot defeat the Taliban and it’s a problem for the Taliban that it cannot defeat the Afghan government. The Taliban doesn’t really have the support across the whole country to really win. I’m skeptical they can just fight their way into Kabul and take over,” he said.

Further, Cortright and others said, a United Nations peacekeeping mission, led by Muslim countries, must be in place to prevent potential violence as long as necessary until a wide-ranging peace accord can be negotiated.

Dellawar called for young people and women particularly to “be front and center and meaningfully included” in any peace talks.

For negotiations to be successful, neighboring countries that depend on a political stability in Afghanistan must be involved, including China, Russia, India, Pakistan and Iran, explained Lisa Schirch, senior research fellow at the Tokyo-based Toda Peace Institute, who teaches at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.

Such talks would better be conducted under auspices of the United Nations, she told CNS, because the U.S., as a party to the conflict through its long presence in the country, has “not been able to do the mediation that is needed.”

“Afghanistan is at the crossroads of so many powers,” Schirch said. “We have always needed a regional solution. Part of the problem that the peace talks (since September) haven’t been successful is it goes beyond just the parties in Afghanistan.”

U.N. involvement, Dellawar said, would better ensure continued success in broadening human rights, particularly for women; boosting education, especially for girls; instituting democratic reforms; accessing health care; and diversifying employment.

A renewal of violence also would endanger the work of nongovernment organizations, such as Catholic Relief Services, in providing humanitarian and development assistance. CRS has operated community-based education programs since 2003. The programs have taught more than 36,000 students, 50% of them girls.

The Catholic Church, in the person of Pope Francis, may also be able to influence the peace process, the observers said. Citing the trust and respect Pope Francis has gained throughout the Muslim world for his interfaith outreach efforts, they said his encouragement to work for peace would likely be heard. “I support anything he does in terms of using his voice for peace,” Dellawar said.

The pope met in Iraq March 6 with Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, one of Shiite Islam’s most authoritative leaders. While the Taliban preach a hard-line form of Sunni Islam and hold deep disagreements with Shiites, they have reached out to some Shiite communities in an effort to build a coalition in Afghanistan.

The pope’s continuing emphasis on integral human development and the importance of protecting human dignity resonates across the Muslim world and may open channels of communication and possibilities of cooperation, Cortright told CNS.

“I can see how there can be some form of dialogue the church could help lead to facilitate the coming together of this broken society,” he said.

In Washington, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on International Justice and Peace declined comment on the U.S. withdrawal.