Israel-Hamas Conflict: Lessons from Afghanistan

In the present landscape of Middle Eastern geopolitics, the Israel-Hamas conflict stands as a volatile fuse. If mishandled, it threatens to spark a more expansive regional conflagration. The lessons from Afghanistan remain a stark reminder of the repercussions of post-9/11 interventions that lacked a clear endgame strategy, eventually spiraling into a conflict spanning two decades.

The current posture toward the Israel-Hamas conflict appears heavily tilted toward military measures. If recent history teaches us anything, including the Afghanistan aftermath, it’s that military solutions without long-term political strategy often offer temporary relief at best, leaving deep-seated issues unresolved. 

For over two decades, the U.S. policy apparatus resisted recognizing the necessity of a negotiated settlement to end the Afghanistan war—a conflict that resulted in nearly 176,000 casualties. In the aftermath of 9/11 and during the early stages of the conflict with the Taliban, the United States and its allies sidestepped diplomatic engagements, opting instead for a predominantly military strategy despite calls by policymakers in DC acknowledging that there was no military solution to the war. Senior State Department officials advocated for diplomacy and negotiation with the Taliban to President George W. Bush as the United States’ initial response to 9/11. The United States chose to declare war.

A decade later, conflicting parties entered into a stage of stalemate that might have encouraged yet another opportunity for a negotiated settlement. Still, the United States disregarded the potential for a peaceful settlement and continued to pursue military victory over the Taliban. By 2018, when the United States finally prioritized negotiations toward a political settlement, the clock had already run out. Two decades of conflict had driven the parties to such distant poles that neither side could muster the requisite trust or willingness to compromise necessary to achieve a political settlement. 

The absence of a long-term political strategy to guide U.S. military strategy, combined with its inability to pursue a path of diplomacy and negotiation early on, fueled the Afghan conflict. A widely held public opinion summarizes it all—it took four U.S. presidents, thousands of lives, trillions of dollars, and twenty years to replace the Taliban with the Taliban. 

William Zartman’s “ripeness” concept suggests that a conflict reaches a stage “ripe” for political settlement when all parties recognize they are in a “mutually hurting stalemate,” with outright military victory impossible and see “the possibility of a negotiated solution (a way out).” The Afghan conflict, over its duration, presented several such moments reflective of this deadlock, yet the parties recurrently missed capitalizing on these moments for negotiated reconciliation. The Israel-Palestine dispute mirrors this pattern. The post-October 7 events serve as a further testament to this reality. It highlights the urgent need for policymakers to seize the moment and act now.

Years of enduring conflict between Hamas and Israel, combined with the recent swift intensification of hostilities and, most importantly, Israel’s national security strategy anchored in a doctrine of deterrence, have dismantled the ground for a political settlement between Hamas and Israel. However, laying the groundwork for negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) could kickstart the process of reconciliation. It could exert pressure on Hamas to reevaluate its position and draw all parties to engage in a political settlement.

Given the absence of strong and unifying leadership across all conflicted parties, the onus squarely rests on the international community, with Arab states bearing more responsibility, to step in and fill the void towards a negotiated reconciliation. For a political resolution to lead to an enduring peaceful settlement, it must confront and address the root causes of the dispute and be inclusive of all parties involved in the conflict, including Hamas. 

Mounting public pressure adds to Netanyahu’s reluctance to pursue a diplomatic resolution. The prevailing sentiment in Israel today parallels the U.S. psyche in the immediate aftermath of 9/11—a complete military victory over the enemy—ensnaring Washington in a twenty-year-long conflict it eventually lost.

In the broader context of Israel’s rivalries in the Middle East, including Iran’s subtle role in backing Hamas, Israel has more to lose than any other involved party in this conflict should it choose to forego the path of diplomatic resolution to end the conflict. For Israel, the decision to pursue a negotiated settlement is a delicate one—yet it will cost Israel less to make that decision now than later.

Policymakers, regional players, and the international community must heed the lessons from Afghanistan’s failure to seize, or at least fully explore, the ripe moments for negotiations on a political settlement. In Afghanistan, that failure concluded with the loss of a democratically elected republic government to the very faction it refrained from engaging in negotiations. In Israel, failure to contain the conflict through diplomacy and negotiated settlement is laying the groundwork for a larger conflict that threatens to engulf the broader Middle East. 

Omer Niazi is an Edward Mason Fellow and Graduate Student at Harvard Kennedy School and a Research Assistant with the Middle East Initiative at the Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Follow him on X @OmerNiazai.

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