All regional players are struggling to come to terms with the withdrawal of NATO-led Western forces from Afghanistan by the end of 2014. Early this month, Istanbul became the latest venue where 12 regional states and the Afghan government came together to try again to agree on ways of bringing some semblance of security and stability to Afghanistan and its surrounding region.
A broader international gathering on Afghanistan will be held in Bonn later this month, followed by a NATO summit next year in Chicago, to assess political progress in Afghanistan.
At the Istanbul conference, regional cooperation was declared the only viable alternative to the festering tensions that have plagued Afghanistan for decades. Various South and Central Asian governments recognized that Afghanistan's problems of terrorism, narcotics trafficking and corruption affected them all and had to be addressed through cooperative efforts. They adopted the Istanbul Protocol, which commits countries as diverse as China, India, Iran, Kazakhstan, Pakistan and Russia to cooperate in countering terrorism, drug trafficking and insurgency in Afghanistan and in the neighboring areas.