The Christian Science Monitor

Afghanistan’s stalemate: ‘talking and fighting’

Gray bearded and devout, Mohammad Waqif was the breadwinner. His salary working for the relief agency CARE fed and educated his entire family for 22 years.

And he was the driver. His devotion to his job took him on every road in Afghanistan, where he survived 20 lives’ worth of close calls, his family says.

Yet finally he was the victim, for whom peace in Afghanistan did not come soon enough.

Mr. Waqif was killed by a Taliban suicide car bomb May 8 in Kabul, even as the latest round of U.S.-led peace talks with the Islamist insurgents in Doha, Qatar – which once gave a flash of hope that America’s longest war might soon end – began to flail.

The Taliban attack was carried out amid a broader spring offensive – and an Afghan government and U.S. military counteroffensive – in which all sides are escalating violence even as

‘War should end’‘Talking and fighting’Commitment to peace?

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