According to media reports, the Taleban have opened a political office in Doha and now direct talks will start between the United States and Taleban.

This move comes before the NATO’s scheduled withdrawal next year. The recent attacks on sensitive locations prove that things are still not under control and the war is intensifying. Now everyone is looking for a political solution to the 12-year-old conflict in Afghanistan.

Questions are also mounting as to the high economic cost of Afghan war. According to latest figures compiled by British sources, the US has spent $ 6 trillion in the Afghan war. Britain’s war expenditure has reached $ 56 billion. Britain spent $ 40 billion in Helmand, which tops Afghanistan’s poppy-growing provinces, producing 40 percent of the war-ravaged country’s annual 6,000 metric tons of opium.

Meanwhile, Pakistan has released several top Taleban prisoners including a former Taleban Shoura member who was arrested two years ago. Pakistan’s decision comes after recent visit of a high-ranking Afghan delegation to Pakistan a month ago. The UN would also delete names of several top Taleban officials from its sanctions list.

Now it seems that reconciliation efforts are going on before the withdrawal of NATO forces from Afghanistan next year. Reconciliation efforts started two years ago and several secret meetings were held in some other countries also. Decades of Afghan war prove that dialogue is the last and only solution to every war.

At a time when major European economies and the US itself are passing through worst economic crises, high war expenditures of the countries involved in the Afghan war are being questioned. Now instead of war, dialogues would decide the future of Afghanistan, which is good for Afghan people. — Khawaja Umer Farooq, Jeddah