Those of us who witnessed United States officials and Taliban representatives shake hands on February 29, 2020, were inspired by the political will for peace that we witnessed. Yet many of us have also recognised the inevitable difficulties in implementing the agreement concluded in Doha. But what we could not have anticipated was the two crises which would simultaneously threaten to derail the entire Afghan peace process: the Afghan presidential election dispute and the COVID-19 pandemic.
So far, Afghanistan has registered 170 cases of COVID-19 and four deaths. While these numbers are low compared with what is reported from the worst-affected countries such as Italy, Spain, Iran, and the United States, given the limited testing capacity in Afghanistan, it is feared that the true scope of the outbreak is much bigger.
The full article originally appears in Al Jazeera English.