Karzai chasing red herring

EDITORIAL:THE FRONTIER POST

What can you really make of this? After Pakistan asked for hard evidence to support Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s assertion regarding Lashkar-i-Jhangvi (LJ) owning up responsibility of the terrible terrorist bombing of Ashura procession in Kabul, his spokesman has come out with an amazingly senseless statement. “It is up to Pakistan”, he says, “to take action and find out where and how the contact was made by Lashkar-i-Jhangvi from inside Pakistan” without waiting for evidence. So do they expect Pakistan to act with no incriminating material or leads in hand to work on? There indeed is too much of jiggery-pokery to Kabul’s stance over this tragic episode, fraught with even contractions in its various official strands’ positions about it. While Afghan foreign ministry says it is collecting the evidence of LJ’s involvement, their interior ministry has accused the Taliban of perpetrating the mayhem. Clearly, they are still to determine the real culprits, and it was some half-baked information that a Karzai itching to take on Pakistan used as a launching pad to fling at Pakistan. Had he been any wise, he would have eschewed an impetuous assertion and instead first tried reaching the truth by critically wading through his various official arms’ disparate versions. The Taliban have denied any responsibility in the horrific carnage, which they have termed un-Islamic. Even the LJ has disowned any involvement. Obviously, the Afghan state apparatus has no concrete substantive information in its possession and different official organs have slapped the responsibility where that suited their fixations. And since Karzai with a strategic partnership pact with India in pocket is in these days in a jingoistic binge against Pakistan, he flew with some raw information to assail it.But certainly now is the time that he takes a pause and ponders seriously that his chase of red herring would take him to nowhere. His problem is right inside Afghanistan, not outside in Pakistan. The thorns were in fact sowed all over his land to sting its polity inconsolably the day Tajik-led Northern Alliance of minorities rode on the CIA’s shoulders to saddle in power in Kabul to the Pakhtun majority community’s great consternation. Had indeed he understood this right from the outset, his country in all probability would not been such a troubled land as is it now and personally he would have been earning acclaim worldwide as a great nation-builder to go down in history with golden letters. He would have been making all the right demands to the US-led occupiers and taking all the right initiatives for grand national reconciliation to bring lasting peace, security and stability to his war-torn country. He would have insisted firmly on the occupiers to put enormous boots on the ground to establish his writ not just in the south or the east but in the north and the west as well. He would have insisted on the international community unbendingly to channel all their aid through his government alone. And he would have demanded unflinchingly a fully free hand to found an all-inclusive power dispensation with due representation of each and all the ethnic entities of his polity. He did nothing of the sort. And now he is reaping the bitter harvest of his infirmity. Not only the Pakhtun bastions of the south and the east stand irreconcilably estranged with his. Even the Pakhtuns in the rest of country are alienated with him. And no darling is he of the Tajiks or Hazaras or Uzbeks either. He indeed is just a lame duck, dependent on others’ mercies and easily pliable by the occupiers. The insurgents denounce him as a mere West’s stooge, no peace interlocutor worth the name. Worse, he is getting a lot of infamy of corruption for the stolen aid money which in fact has been purloined by the NGOs and private contractors and consultants of the donor countries. But for this infamy he has to blame himself for not standing up for the aid money coming to his government instead of going directly to NGOs and the donors’ contractors and so on. Indeed, at the instance of these real beneficiaries of foreign aid, he showed the door to his competent planning minister Ramazan Bashardost for insisting on at least bridling these fortune-makers. Verily, Karzai has now missed the bus, probably forever. No wild-goose chase will come of avail to him. Pillorying Pakistan will not change the ground realities for him, and for that matter, not even for his allies, local or foreign. For their own failures, Afghanistan is now a veritable live tinderbox that will take long to defuse, if at all. And the people of Pakistan are fed up with being a perpetual quarry of Afghanistan’s turmoil. But Karzai should at least get them rid of the colossal burden of over two million Afghan refugees that has become such an unbearable strain on this cash-strapped country’s back multifariously.