As the final stage of the withdrawal of foreign troops from Afghanistan begins, we will be bringing together leading experts to look at the country’s roadmap and the legacy of the past 12 years.

How is the transition progressing and who are the main actors? We will be examining that process and the role of parties such as the Taliban. With continuing transition of security from NATO to Afghan leadership, we ask if the Afghans are ready and able to manage their country’s security.

Finally with an election approaching in early 2014 we will be looking ahead at the political process and which figures will play leading roles in Afghanistan’s future.

Chaired by Owen Bennett-Jones, freelance journalist and a host of Newshour on the BBC World Service. As a correspondent with the BBC he has reported from over 60 countries, he is author of Pakistan: Eye of the Storm and his first novel Target Britain. He has also written for the Financial Times, The Guardian, The New Republic and the London Review of Books.

The panel:

Dominic Medley was the Spokesman/Media Advisor to the NATO Senior Civilian Representative in Afghanistan from June 2010 to June 2013. He has worked in Kabul since February 2002 including two years with the UN Mission. He has been a leading figure in the development of journalism in Afghanistan and he is the author of the Kabul Guide.

Emal Pasarly is the multimedia editor for the BBC Pashto-Persian service. He was born in Northern Province of Kunduz, Afghanistan and as a result of the Russian invasion, his family migrated to neighbouring Pakistan. He moved to London in 1993 and began working with the BBC World Service in 1996. He also writes fiction in Pashto and has published two novels and four collections of short stories.

Michael Semple is a Visiting Professor at the Centre for Conflict Transformation, Queen’s University, Belfast and affiliated to the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Harvard Kennedy School. He conducts research on the Afghan Taliban Movement, conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan and approaches to reconciliation. He has specialised on Afghanistan and Pakistan since 1985 and speaks Urdu, Dari and Pashto. During this period he has worked with international NGOs, the United Nations and European Union, including serving as Deputy to the European Union Special Representative for Afghanistan 2004-08. Since 2008 he has worked as a scholar and adviser, focusing on opportunities to end the conflict in Afghanistan and the region.

Martine van Bijlert is co-director and co-founder of the Afghanistan Analysts Network (AAN). She grew up in pre-revolutionary Iran and has spent large parts of her adult life working and living in Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan. She was a student researcher in Pakistan in the early 90s, a diplomat in Tehran from 2001-2004, and an aid worker from 1997-98. She served as EU political adviser from 2004-08 and has been an independent researcher in Afghanistan since 2007.

Quhramaana Kakar is a leading figure in Afghanistan working for women’s empowerment. She has served as gender advisor for the Afghanistan Peace and Reconciliation Program (High Peace Council). She has worked for women’s social and political empowerment, and leadership development at advisory senior level positions with USAID, UNIOM and other International organisations. Kakar is the founder of the organisation Women for Peace and Participation, which works for social inclusion of Afghans, inside and outside Afghanistan. She was the young ambassador of the US main aid organisation representing refugee women and is the winner of the United Nations 2012 Role Model for Peace award.

Picture courtesy of multimedia photojournalist John D McHugh

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The decision to go into Afghanistan was necessary as a kind of “acting out” to restore American national confidence and pride in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 2001, but it was done with little idea about what was to be achieved by it.

That was the claim of Jean MacKenzie, senior correspondent for GlobalPost and previously programme director for the Institute for War & Peace Reporting in Kabul, about the decision of president George Bush to send troops into Afghanistan less than a month after the terrorist attacks of 11 September, 2001.

"We had to go in, America had to kick ass because we had been attacked and we had to prove that we were big guys, and there was very little resistance to going in to Afghanistan, Afghanistan was a very convenient ass to kick, because it was not being really defended," said MacKenzie.

MacKenzie, who was taking part in a recent discussion titled: Counterinsurgency and the "War on Terror": Doomed to fail? agreed that America had to react to the terror attacks in New York and Washington. The problem was not the decision to intervene, but  the fact that it was done without a clear idea of what it would accomplish, she said:

"We didn’t need to go in with this open-ended brief of we’re going in there to get rid of al-Quaeda, now we’re going in there so that little girls can go to school and maybe we’re there so women don’t have to wear burqas and now we’re there, as Time magazine tells us, so that women’s noses are not cut off. Where does it stop? We needed to define our goals from the very beginning."

There was also a lack of clarity about who the enemy was, said MacKenzie, who claimed local groups could manipulate NATO or the International Security Assistance Force into fighting their battles by claiming their opponents were Taliban:

"We go into an area, like in Kunar, where two groups are fighting over logging rights – another gets close to us and says they are the Taliban. We start fighting them and they fight back and as soon as they do, they become an insurgency."

As a result of the lack of clarity the rhetoric about the US mission in Afghanistan had taken on a life of its own, MacKenzie argued:

"It’s a very broad statement but I think we are now fighting the Afghan people, the Afghan society. We say the Taliban stone women for adultery, the Taliban stone young couples, the Taliban throw acid in the faces of school children.

But in most of these cases, if you unravel it, it’s not the Taliban, it is the community that has done these things. So if we are fighting those manifestations of Afghan culture, we are not fighting the Taliban, we are fighting Afghan society, we are fighting a culture that we find noxious. That, I think, is quite a bit beyond our brief."

Ten years on, the mood in Afghanistan was one the “darkest despair”, said MacKenzie, adding that there is little trust on the ground in the ability of the Afghan forces to protect the people. In addition, things have gone "way beyond the point" when outside nations could impose anything on the country:

"There was a point at the beginning when there was a certain amount of hope and goodwill among Afghans, but I don’t feel it there any more," she said.

"The Afghans are more and more pessimistic, they have given up on their own government, how do you fight counterinsurgency when you have no legitimate government to partner with? How do we begin to do anything?

Yet the US is likely to leave Afghanistan with "honour and dignity in the strategic communications sense," said MacKenzie, who predicted that from now until the end of 2014 the US administration was going to be "busily engaged in painting a narrative of victory":

All that is required for us to have won is for the media to pack up and go home so there’s no focus on what’s actually happening and for us to redefine victory and to move the goalposts as it were."

Malte Roschinski, a security consultant, political analyst and author who reported from Afghanistan for AFP news agency, was also pessimistic about the future of Afghanistan and said he believed the best that the US could do was to "come up with a good PR strategy and hope for the next six months or so it’s going to stay fairly quiet".

"After that the media focus will have moved away from the country. There will be stories afterwards but the media works in cycles and public attention has just so much bandwidth anyway so it’s just going to be a PR exercise."