Afghan-Pakistan mistrust

EDITORIAL: DAILY TIMES

The latest row that has broken out between Kabul and Islamabad is a familiar script with added recent ‘scenes’. At a Friday meeting between Pakistani National Security Adviser Sartaj Aziz and Afghan Ambassador Umer Daudzai, the former suggested a power sharing arrangement with the Taliban to usher in peace in Afghanistan, involving a form of federation and ceding power in some Afghan provinces to the Taliban. Reacting bitterly to the suggestion itself and adding Afghan perceptions and suspicions to the proposal, Afghan Deputy Foreign Minister Ershad Ahmadi said, “We believe this federalism is a means for the Pakistanis to achieve what they could not achieve through their proxy (the Taliban) on the battlefield.” Ahmadi further said the ceremonial opening of a Taliban office in Doha, which raised angry protests in Kabul that the office had the appearance of a government-in-exile, was part of a Pakistani plan to increase the Taliban’s international prestige. He categorized the emerging situation as one in which elements within the Pakistan government had a grand design of using the peace process as a means to undermine the Afghan state and set up little fiefdoms around the country in which their most important strategic asset, the Taliban, would play an influential role. Ahmadi said despite hopes the new Nawaz government may curb meddling in Afghan affairs, Kabul now felt the civilian administration was aiding the double game played by the military and the ISI. However, Pakistan’s foreign ministry spokesman Aizaz Chaudhry denied any suggestion of ceding territory had been made during the meeting between Sartaj Aziz and Ahmadi. Afghan President Hamid Karzai weighed in with concern about Pakistan’s motives in the peace process during a press conference with British Prime Minister David Cameron in Kabul on Saturday. He asserted that “delivering a province or two to the Taliban” would be perceived as an invasion by the Afghan people. Relations between the two neighbouring countries, never easy, seem to have plummeted to new lows after the Taliban office in Doha sported a sign saying ‘Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan’ and flew the Taliban flag, neither of which Kabul says were approved as part of the peace process and were subsequently removed by the Qatari authorities. Now this expression of outrage and suspicion about Islamabad’s motives vis-à-vis Sartaj Aziz’s power sharing proposal is the icing on the cake. Afghanistan-Pakistan relations watchers will hardly be surprised. Pakistani intervention and interference in Afghanistan’s internal affairs, stretching over the last four decades, is seen by most Afghans as the root cause of the travails the Afghan people have passed through during this period. Starting with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s government supporting the embryonic Afghan mujahideen after Sardar Daud overthrew the Afghan monarchy and declared a republic in 1973, through the resistance to the communist regime that took power in 1978, the subsequent Soviet invasion and occupation that triggered a western-led international effort to defeat the Soviet encroachment and gave birth to jihadi movements from all corners of the Muslim world and beyond, to the ‘solution’ to the internecine mujahideen civil war that followed the retreat of the Soviets in 1989 and the fall of Najib’s communist government in 1992 by overcoming them with the Taliban launched from Pakistani soil, to giving safe havens and permission to the Taliban to relaunch a guerrilla struggle from Pakistani soil after their government fell to the US invasion in 2001 after 9/11, the track record suggests the Afghans have weight in their suspicions about Islamabad. The original riposte by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to the Daud coup may have been to counter any actual or future support by Pashtun nationalist Daud to the insurgency in Pakistan’s provinces Balochistan and NWFP (as it was then known), but it subsequently took on a life of its own and produced justifications in Islamabad’s power corridors ranging from a possible final solution of the Durand Line conundrum to strategic depth to preventing a ‘pincer’ encirclement by Indian influence in Kabul. The first two ideas may have exhausted their shelf life, but the third still seems to be alive and kicking. In the nineteenth century, the Czarist Russian and new conqueror of India the British Empire finally learnt the lesson that their rivalry for influence in Kabul was costing them dearly and mutually agreed to make Afghanistan a ‘buffer’ state. Peace of sorts did set in until the British finally left in 1947. Since then, Afghan irredentist claims vis-à-vis the Durand Line and claiming the Pashtun areas east of that Line in Pakistan set the tone and tenor of relations between the two neighbours. The Pakistani interventions in Afghanistan over the last four decades have only served to generate hatred towards Pakistan by a majority of Afghans, despite the role played by Pakistan in hosting millions of Afghan refugees over many years. Islamabad’s interests may have been, and could still be, better served by befriending the Afghan people rather than trying to conquer or control them through jihadi proxies. The chances of such a change in the foreseeable future are slim, to say the least, and that promises more trouble post-US/NATO withdrawal in 2014, with the spillover inevitably making things in Pakistan even worse. Our policy makers should read the writing on the wall.