Afghanistan, Pakistan and India

As an explosive-laden car carrying three militants went into the barricade outside the Indian Consulate in Jalalabad, the seven dead out of nine civilians were children in the nearby mosque, thus marking the terror-riddled city in the blood of more innocent citizens of war-torn Afghanistan. Albeit the target was clearly the Indian mission, the blast razed houses, shops and a mosque in the vicinity. The Taliban denied responsibility for the attack. The human loss is tragic, as the lives of seven children were lost whose only fault was being born in a violent region ravaged by decades-long conflict. As India expresses its outrage at yet another attack on one of its diplomatic missions in Afghanistan, where its efforts to project soft power are visible, the Pakistan government has condemned the incident too. For India, that may be too little. India’s infrastructural rehabilitation of Afghanistan at a cost of almost $ 2 billion since the Taliban regime’s fall in 2001 has helped revive India and Afghanistan’s traditional friendship since 1947, which went through some tepid periods during the Afghan wars of the last four decades. The repeated attacks on its consulates/embassy are seen as a facet of the ‘proxy war’ between Pakistan and India on Afghan soil. The 2008 car-bomb attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul, resulting in the loss of 60 lives, the suicide attack again in 2009, the attack on two guest houses in Kabul inhabited by Indians, and the latest blast shows a pattern that is not just highly destructive in terms of human and infrastructural loss but also has a long-term fallout for the region. The Saturday attack comes as the government of Pakistan under Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif plans to re-engage India in talks to work out a friendly relationship between the two countries and work on issues of mutual interest (trade, energy), to which the Indian government seems responsive. The attack evokes finger pointing at a nexus of the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani network based in North Waziristan in Pakistan, ‘remote-controlled’ by the Pakistan military establishment whose ‘strategic depth’ and ‘strategic assets’ have done nothing but wreak havoc on different Pakistani governments’ efforts to have normal relations with its immediate neighbours: India and Afghanistan. The proxy war to wrest ‘control’ over Afghanistan has only given bloodstained dividends to our establishment, from which no lessons seem to have been learnt. The traditional rivalry of Pakistan and India playing out in Afghanistan will do nothing but delineate the hostility in more blood. It is about time the Pakistan establishment took a long and hard look at its deeply flawed policies to seek hegemony in the region, where only one country seems to be the real loser: Pakistan.