Karzai’s prank

No surprising could it be. Afghan President Hamid Karzai is compulsively given to this prank. Pakistan he thinks is ordained to suffer perpetually on account of Afghanistan, as indeed it has over the past so many decades veritably. Others he believes are destined to always gain from Afghanistan. Religiously, he is given to the belief that for Afghanistan Pakistan must invariably be demonised and punished while others be courted and rewarded. No wonder, giving two hoots to Pakistan’s security concerns in Afghanistan, he gave the Indians a strategic pact. They in fact were the first he accorded this favour. For Pakistan, he says it has to fulfill certain preconditions to get such deal. Those include prevention of “infiltration of terrorists and suicide bombers” into his country. Leave alone the underlying skullduggery that has all through marked this pet contrivance of his and his US-led occupation allies to cover up their monumental collapses, failures and foibles in the Afghan war that they have to all intent and purposes lost. But for a moment could he be honest and tell what for have he and his cohorts berthed Pakistani fugitive militants like Fazlullah and Faqir Mohammad along with hundreds of their brigands in the neigbouring Afghan provinces of Kunar and Nuristan? Who in Afghanistan tasks these proxies to cross over into Pakistan, attack the border posts and civilian villages, slaughter the innocent and put out footage of the Pakistani soldiers they capture in their surprise assaults and behead? For whose pleasure? His own or his occupation coalition allies’? And will he admit at least now how nefariously has his intelligence service infested Pakistan’s underbelly of the tribal areas, about which his spy masters feels so proud and keep bragging arrogantly? And when will he lift the lid on his administration’s dark adventurism of turning Afghanistan into a sprawling nursery of insurgency in Pakistan’s province of Balochistan, and also tell how Brahamdagh Bugti lived under his own wings and was fed so well by the Indian intelligence agencies? Anyway, if someone in Islamabad is hankering for a strategic deal with Afghanistan, that could only be the business of its hierarchy. The people of Pakistan have no such interest at all. All they are interested in, and desperately, is that they now be spared of the tribulations that have visited them in battalions because of Afghanistan over the past several decades on end. The so-called Afghan Jihad had bequeathed them with fearsome gun culture, corroding drug addiction, rabid religious extremism and massive Afghan refuge populace, no less than four-million-strong. And now the war on terror in Afghanistan has landed them with militancy, terrorism and insurgency, much of it foreign-fuelled with its wellsprings lying right inside Afghanistan. For a pause, Karzai must lift the mantle of spurious piety from his face, admit the ugly realities as those obtain on the ground in Afghanistan and call a spade a spade. For a change, he must confess that Afghanistan today is what it is because his occupation coalition allies have failed spectacularly in bringing it to peace, security and stability. Scapegoating of Pakistan would be no avail to him as the reverses that he and his coalition allies have suffered in the Afghan war are just irreversible. The insurgents are in the upswing and not even the world’s armies would now be able to subdue them. This is no hyperbole but a bitter factuality. Even the soldiers of the Afghan army and police are now turning on their coalition mates and trainers lethally, increasingly. In any case, he should not fret about giving Pakistan a strategic pact. Instead, he must do it the favour of taking back nearly two millions of Afghan refugees, still staying put in Pakistan. They have long overstayed their welcome. And a burdensome burden have they become on this nation’s economy, infrastructure and businesses, with which its bruised back is now aching unbearably painfully. He must repatriate the refugees and he may keep his strategic pact with him. The people of this country couldn’t care less. They know from one to all that he is no friend of Pakistan but its eternal enemy and hence no good could be expected of him.