{"id":21815,"date":"2020-10-18T14:35:13","date_gmt":"2020-10-18T14:35:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/armytimes\/uncategorized\/2020\/10\/18\/after-more-than-40-years-of-conflict-afghans-say-preventing-next-war-as-vital-as-ending-this-one\/"},"modified":"2026-08-08T05:51:19","modified_gmt":"2026-08-08T05:51:19","slug":"after-more-than-40-years-of-conflict-afghans-say-preventing-next-war-as-vital-as-ending-this-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/armytimes\/flashpoints\/2020\/10\/18\/after-more-than-40-years-of-conflict-afghans-say-preventing-next-war-as-vital-as-ending-this-one\/","title":{"rendered":"After more than 40 years of conflict, Afghans say preventing next war as vital as ending this one"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

KABUL, Afghanistan \u2014 At a Kabul museum honoring Afghanistan\u2019s war victims, talking to visitors reveals just how many layers and generations of pain and grief have piled up during four decades of unrelenting conflict.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fakhria Hayat recalled an attack that changed her family forever. It was 1995, and the Afghan capital was under siege, pounded by rockets fired by rival mujahedeen groups. Her world exploded: A rocket slammed into her yard, killing her brother and leaving her sister forever in a wheelchair.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Danish Habibi was just a child in 2000 when the Taliban overran his village in Afghanistan\u2019s serene Bamiyan Valley. His memories of those days are reoccurring nightmares. Men were forcibly separated from wives and children. Dozens were killed. Habibi\u2019s father disappeared only to return a beaten, broken man, never able to work again. Habibi wonders how he will be able to accept peace with the Taliban.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reyhana Hashimi told of how her 15-year-old sister, Atifa, was killed by Afghan security forces. It was 2018. Atifa had left home to take her exams, only to get entangled in a demonstration protesting the arrest of a Hazara leader. Afghan forces opened fire on protesters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThey shot my sister right in the heart,\u201d Hashimi said. \u201cNo one from the government even came to apologize. They tried to say she was a protester. She wasn\u2019t. She just wanted to write her exams.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today, those accumulated, unresolved grievances cast a long shadow on the intra-Afghan negotiations underway in the Gulf nation of Qatar.<\/p>\n\n\n\t