The Pakhtun conundrum
By Shahid Javed Burki
Tuesday, 14 Jul, 2009
IT was not empty talk — pure electioneering, as many believed — when Barack Obama declared that he would treat Afghanistan differently if he were to win the election and become America’s next president. He had rejected his predecessor’s approach.
For George W. Bush, the war in Afghanistan was a sideshow; for him the real war was in Iraq. His administration had only limited goals in Afghanistan. After having quickly overrun the country in the fall and winter of 2001, and placed Hamid Karzai as the liberated country’s president, the administration thought the job was done. The main objective then was to keep Karzai in place in the hope that the Afghan president would be able to create an environment in which a limited number of western troops would be able to keep the Taliban at bay.
For some time the strategy seemed to work and Afghanistan — at least compared to Iraq — was in relative peace. There were bombings, killings and kidnappings but these were seen as the products of a violent society learning to adjust to a different way of living and a different way of being governed. The economy began to revive with GDP increasing at double-digit rates. The Afghans once again began to trade with the world outside their borders. The long-standing transit arrangement with Pakistan began to work once again as the traditional route that connected the landlocked country through Karachi with the outside world was revived. The term normal has always been difficult to apply to Afghanistan but the country seemed to be returning towards some kind of normal functioning.
While the central government’s power was limited to Kabul and while the provinces were largely in the hands of powerful chieftains to whom the epithet ‘war lords’ could be comfortably applied, this way of governing was not much different from what the country had known for centuries.
And the Taliban were lurking in the wings. At one time Pervez Musharraf, then Pakistan’s president, had suggested that not all those who chose to call themselves the Taliban should be painted with the same brush; not all Taliban were terrorists. Many were the Pakhtuns who were not happy with the way Hamid Karzai was managing the country. Because of the circumstances of the liberation of Afghanistan from Taliban rule, the share of power held by non-Pakhtuns far outweighed their proportion in the population and their economic strength.
Musharraf argued for separating the Pakhtuns opposed to the Karzai government in two groups: the Taliban whose ideology was clearly not acceptable to any civilised society, and those who could be made to work in the system that was evolving. But by then Washington was accustomed to looking at the world from the perspective of ‘good’ and ‘evil’. This approach only helped strengthen the diehard elements in the Taliban community.
By the time the American election campaign was entering its final phase, Afghanistan had begun to unravel. More foreign troops were dying in that country than in Iraq where the counter-insurgency strategy developed by Gen David Petraeus had begun to work. The main component of this approach was to give space within the new system to elements in the Sunni community, in particular those who had violently opposed the occupation of their country by the Americans.
Once this approach was accepted, it became clear that a large number of Sunni insurgents were prepared to cross the line and come over to the American side. Once the switch was made, the level of violence in Iraq began to decline rapidly.
The same approach could have worked in Afghanistan but for the long-enduring problems between the Afghan governing elite and the political elite in Pakistan. The two had always pursued different objectives. Kabul, under the traditional elite, wished to bring the Pakhtun living on the Pakistani side of the border — the Durand Line — under its control. Pakistan, always fearful of India’s designs with respect to its integrity as a nation state, wished to end the old Afghan-India entente in its favour. This conflict, therefore, gave the Kabul regime under Hamid Karzai the excuse to use Pakistan as an explanation for its own failures.
There was some substance in the Afghan belief that unless the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan was not sealed they would not be able to win the escalating war against the resurgent Taliban. The sealing of the border was needed to stop the Taliban insurgents being pursued by the Americans from withdrawing into their sanctuaries on the Pakistani side of the border. Once there, they could rest, regroup, rearm and attack. But there were elements within the Taliban community that Pakistan did not wish to give up since it was one way of retaining influence in the country against what were perceived as India’s designs.
There are, therefore, four features of the Pakhtun conundrum that need to be addressed in order to bring peace to this area. The first is to recognise that there are many genuine grievances felt by this community concerning the way power has been apportioned by the Karzai regime among different segments of the Afghan society. Second, Pakistan has to show resolve that it will not allow those now generally referred to as stateless actors to pursue their own agendas against the country’s neighbours. Third, it also needs to make sure that the law of the land is respected by all segments of society. This means that the country will not allow itself to be fragmented to accommodate those not happy with the current political and legal orders.
Finally, there must be a clear understanding with India on what are its legitimate interests in Afghanistan. Pakistan has to recognise that India is a regional power with regional interests. At the same time India has to pay heed to Pakistan’s security interests.