Kabul airport carnage

It is now confirmed that about 170 people, including 13 US military personnel, were killed in a suicide bombing at the Kabul airport. The aim was to target the US soldiers but the result was a tremendous loss of Afghan lives. We cannot but condemn this cruel mindset that thinks nothing of civilian lives while trying to kill a few foreign soldiers. In fact, such indifference towards lives of the locals reveals the hypocrisy of the assailants' often professed love for Afghanistan.

The tragedy indicates that the Taliban is faced with the immediate security situation of saving themselves and their people from the attacks of groups who want a share of power and are willing to create a civil war to get it. It is known that there are several such groups, with their respective foreign patrons, who are not willing to give the new victors a free hand in either stabilising the situation or running the affairs of this country that has been at war for nearly half a century both against foreign powers and internally.

Setting the human toll aside, the Taliban has a country on the verge of disaster to attend to. To fix it will take a long time. The need of the hour is to attend to the urgent needs of supplying food and other essentials. The prediction by the UN system is that they face imminent crises in many areas.

The fact that after 12 days the Taliban have not been able to form a government is indicative of the complexity of the ethnicity based power structure and the difficulty in finding suitable representatives from various groups willing and able to give Afghanistan the much needed stability. The good side of the delay is that the Taliban are showing sufficient maturity for the task at hand and are not rushing. However, the bad side of the long delay is it is opening up scope for factionalism to wreak havoc on the collaborative process.

However, so far the news is good that the Taliban are working for an "inclusive" caretaker government with leaders from all tribal and ethnic groups. The responsibility of the dominant Pashto-speaking, Sunni Muslim group consisting of 42 percent of the population is enormous. Their strength in numbers should give them the confidence to be flexible in power sharing and providing the environment for confidence building among the minority groups. A failure here will return this war-fatigued country to internecine conflict that we saw before.

   In this process, the roles of the big powers of the region—Russia and China—and powerful countries like Iran, India and Pakistan are very crucial. We would urge them to be accommodative in every way and put the interest of the long suffering Afghan people as the first priority.