Jonathan Powell, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair's chief of staff, acknowledged that the West should have dealt with the Taliban 20 years ago, but he thought the winner took all and undermined his armed forces.

In an article in the Guardian newspaper, Jonathan Powell said that the fall of Kabul to the Taliban 20 years after the events of 9/11 represented not only the failure of the West's strategy in Afghanistan, but rather a broader failure of its comprehensive strategy to address the terrorism that led to the attacks in Afghanistan. New York and Washington.

He added that the ultimate failure is not really the result of "eternal wars" nor an attempt to "reshape nations", as some suggest, and that if the West does not have the patience to continue wars then it should not have embarked on them in the first place.

And if he doesn't help countries rebuild institutions after participating in the war, he will end up in a dizzying mess like Libya.

The challenge is to do these things right.

The Great Friday

"The main failure in Afghanistan is the failure to learn from our past suffering with terrorism, that you will only reach lasting peace when you have comprehensive negotiations, not when you try to impose a settlement by force as Britain did with Northern Ireland when it tried to make peace in 1973 and 1985," Powell said. And 1993, excluding Sinn Fein each time, each time failed to end the troubles. After we tried everything else, she finally had to talk to the armed men, so the Good Friday Agreement worked."

Powell commented that Britain in Afghanistan repeated previous mistakes in Northern Ireland, and the first missed opportunity was in April 2002 when the Taliban swept to peace after their collapse.

Instead of engaging it in a comprehensive operation and giving it a stake in the new Afghanistan, the Americans pursued them and went back to fighting.

The lesson from Afghanistan is as clear as it was in Northern Ireland, which is that if we ever want to secure lasting peace, we must deal with our enemies, not just those we love.

He added that there have been frequent tangible opportunities to start negotiations with the Taliban since then, as they were at the time much weaker than they are today and ready to compromise, but political leaders were very sensitive to seeing them openly dealing with a "terrorist group".

moral debt

Powell believes that the West has a moral debt to the people of Afghanistan and that the only way the international community can help them is to use whatever influence it has left with the Taliban to press for a comprehensive operation in Afghanistan.

This should include representative and accountable government and a monitoring mechanism to ensure that they actually do so.

He added that it is in the West's self-interest to do so because if Afghanistan falls into civil war again, Europe will feel the impact of refugees, drugs and terrorism on its streets.

More importantly, he must learn lessons from Afghanistan and elsewhere in the world, including how to deal with Islamist armed groups across North Africa, in Somalia, in Mozambique and Nigeria, whether he can continue to delude himself so that he can defeat them by military means alone, and whether he will continue to He refused to speak with the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) and other Islamic groups.

Powell concluded that the lesson from Afghanistan was as clear as it was in Northern Ireland, that if we were ever to secure a lasting peace;

We must deal with our enemies, not just those we love.

A critical first step will be for Western governments to make it easier to talk to outlawed groups like the Taliban, and to be politically brave enough to do so before it is too late.

He concluded his article that the West should rethink its strategy if it does not want to spend the next 20 years making the same mistakes over and over again;

Wars do not end forever before we talk to those who bear arms.