Will Afghanistan fall to the Taleban?

A last-ditch effort to broker peace in Afghanistan will be made in the Qatari capital of Doha this weekend. A senior Afghan government delegation which includes Abdullah Abdullah, chair of the country’s High Council for National Reconciliation, and former national president Hamid Karzai will engage in talks with the Taleban. Afghanistan’s unending 42-year civil war has predictably intensified with the imminent departure of western armed forces led by the United States.

This week a Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist with Reuters, Danish Siddiqui, was killed near the Spin Boldak border crossing between Afghanistan’s Kandahar province and the Pakistani region of Balochistan – he was apparently a victim of indiscriminate Taleban firing.

The Taleban captured power in the country a quarter of a century ago, before being ousted by the US after 9/11. Crucially, the American President George Bush who ordered the military invasion, did not finish the job – obsessed as he was with regime change and removing Saddam Hussein in Iraq.