Japan should get involved in rebuilding Afghanistan by encouraging the international community to broker a peace settlement once the U.S.-led NATO forces withdraw from the country, according to a top American scholar on the Middle East.

Vali Nasr, who served as a senior adviser to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and others in the Obama administration on Middle East and Afghanistan-Pakistan policy from 2009 to 2011, said that reconstructing Afghanistan will require both sufficient military force to keep order and a concerted effort by the international community to host peace talks like those that led to the Bonn Agreement in 2001.

During the talks in the German city brokered by the United Nations, prominent Afghans agreed on a road map for rebuilding the nation, which has been torn by warfare following the Taliban regime's ouster and subsequent insurgency against the NATO forces that deployed to the country after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States.