Why the Peace Plan Offered by Abdul Haq Remains the West's Only Way Out of Afghanistan
A lecture by Lucy Morgan Edwards, former Political Advisor to the EU Ambassador in Kabul.
In late 2001, a group of Afghan tribal leaders met to plan how to topple the Taliban. Thwarted by the West, the plan was in tatters within weeks, and its leader, Abdul Haq, assassinated by the Taliban. Lucy Morgan Edwards's investigation into Haq's tragic mission led her to Taliban Ministers, warlords, spies and two American Republican brothers who financed Haq's venture. Based on her own experience of the war in Afghanistan, Lucy Morgan Edwards will discuss how a solution to the war was lost and why it matters today.
Lucy Morgan Edwards is a former Political Advisor to the EU Ambassador in Kabul with responsibility for civil military affairs, narcotics and security sector reform. During her seven years in the region she worked for the UN in Kandahar at the height of the Taliban regime (supervising community and urban water supply projects), was an election monitor at the 2002 Emergency Loya Jirga, the initial researcher on Transitional Justice issues for the International Crisis Group, a monitor on the currency exchange project with the Afghan Central Bank and correspondent for the Economist and Daily Telegraph. She also spent many months in Jalalabad, Eastern Afghanistan, with a leading tribal family (that of Abdul Haq and Haji Abdul Qadir), whereby she developed an insight into the post 9/11 political situation in the disenfranchised Pashtun areas of the East. Her final job was Country Expert to the EU Monitors of the 2005 Afghan Parliamentary Elections. She has written several academic papers on the post 9/11 Afghan intervention. Her recent book entitled 'The Afghan Solution: The Inside Story of Abdul Haq, the CIA and how Western Hubris Lost Afghanistan' was published by Pluto Press in October 2011.
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