Hailing Turkish initiative in late April, when Ankara hosted a meeting between Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the same diplomats are anxious to know whether Turkey will continue this process, which they say will be very important if it ends with a mechanism established between the two countries to enable constant dialogue.
The Ankara-brokered meeting between the two leaders came after a fierce war of words between Karzai and Musharraf, with the former accusing the latter of not taking adequate measures to stop the infiltration of terrorists into Afghanistan.
Speaking to Today's Zaman in a telephone interview, Hikmet Çetin, NATO's former top civilian representative in Afghanistan, explained that the 2,500-kilometer-long border with Afghanistan coupled with mountainous terrain with peaks of around 5,000 meters is difficult to control and helps facilitate the movement of terrorists into Afghanistan from Pakistan.
Holding a press conference in Kabul in August of last year, Çetin also noted that the Taliban's method of blending in with local civilian populations after attacks is similar to a tactic used by Hezbullah in Lebanon and Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) terrorists in his own country of Turkey. "This kind of strategy is very, very difficult, not only for NATO in Afghanistan, but also in other parts of the world," Çetin said during the same press conference.
Over the phone he admitted: "We have now been witnessing a Talibanization of northern Pakistan. Pakistani President Musharraf is aware of this situation and has been trying to cooperate to end the Taliban infiltration, but has been facing serious difficulties." Çetin also argues that, despite some successes achieved in Afghanistan since the war against terror was launched by NATO there in 2001 to remove al-Qaeda forces and oust the Taliban regime controlling the country, the achievements were overshadowed when the US went into Iraq in 2003.
"The war in Iraq resulted, among other things, with the diversion of some of the economic aid to Iraq. It is a well-known fact that military measures alone in Afghanistan cannot fix the country's poverty. More economic measures are needed," he emphasized.
The fact that over 6 million students, including over 2 million girls, are now enrolled in school in the wake of road construction easing intercity and rural travel in Afghanistan is cited by Çetin as a sign of the successes achieved there.
But, as both Çetin and the Western diplomats stressed, one of the key things for reducing Taliban-led violence in the region is that the Afghan and Pakistani states need to have their good governance felt in rural areas, ending the nature of those regions as breeding grounds for terrorists.
"If there is no state felt throughout the said country, people become helpless and terrorists abuse that situation. Not exactly similar but, for example, in the past Turkey's southeast was vulnerable [to PKK terrorists] due to a lack of fully operating state mechanisms there. Now the Turkish state has made its governance better felt in the area," Çetin claimed.
Indeed, President Abdullah Gül's latest visit to the terror-stricken and Kurdish-dominated Southeast, the first by a Turkish president in 15 years, has not only been welcomed by the people of the region but also by those closely watching developments in Turkey.
The key question now is what further and tangible steps the government will take to address the region's serious economic and social problems.
With its own experience in the Southeast and its good relations with both countries, the Turkish government is now being looked to by NATO allies to continue its efforts in helping establish an institutionalized mechanism between Afghanistan and Pakistan to resolve together the problems in their countries and bring peace to the region.
