By Khaled Ahmed Afghan endgame THE FRIDAYTIMES

Pakistan can certainly spoil an emerging solution in Afghanistan, but it cannot coherently think of a solution on its own

Despite the available polemic in print, the world is marvelling at what Pakistan wants in Afghanistan. Most Pakistanis think the US, India and Israel are working in tandem to 'take out' Pakistan's nuclear assets and that America is looking the other way while India gets a foothold in Afghanistan to challenge Pakistan Army on two fronts. Pakistan backs the Afghan Taliban led by Mullah Umar as its pawn in the Afghan game but also has leverage through the Haqqani network located on its territory in North Waziristan. Does it want the Taliban rule of the 1990s to return, and does it visualise what it will do to Pakistan this time around?

Afghan president Hamid Karzai is playing his own cards on the eve of American and NATO departure from Afghanistan. His latest move is to talk to Pakistan's yet another but equally dubious proxy, Hekmatyar's Hezb-e-Islami, before meeting with American special representative Marc Grossman to discuss plans for bringing the Taliban insurgency into formal talks for the first time. In Qatar, the talks with the Taliban are supposed to be mainly with Mullah Umar's Afghan Taliban, but talking to Hekmatyar seems to be trumping both America and Mullah Umar.
"So close is the identification of some ISI officers with the Taliban that there is some doubt whether the Taliban is acting as Pakistan's proxy or the ISI is acting as the Taliban's proxy" - Anatol Lieven


Hezb-e-Islami, also based over the Pakistan border, has ties to Al Qaeda and has launched deadly attacks on US troops in Afghanistan. Fighters loyal to Hekmatyar also have strongholds in Baghlan, Kunduz and Kunar provinces in the north and northeast Afghanistan. But his past has been murky in the eyes of Mullah Umar, and the old animosity which drove Hekmatyar to a period of exile in Iran, cannot be forgotten. But Hekmatyar remains a favourite of a part of the ISI who ignore Hekmatyar's recent anti-Pakistan remarks and thus indirectly disagree with Pakistan's more moderate approach, whatever that is.

George Perkovich (Carnegie Endowment website 6 Sept 2011) has this to say about Pakistan's basic policy plank: 'The Pakistani army and ISI are obsessed with contesting India's pretensions of superiority and its assumed determination to undo Pakistan. The increased Indian presence in Afghanistan is a more recent motivation of the proxy war. The Pakistani establishment cannot stand India on its eastern flank and claims, with little credibility, that India is using Afghanistan as a platform to supply the Baloch insurgency in Pakistan...India's recent steady rise as a world power presents a tormenting comparison for Pakistan's establishment'.
"Sensible Pakistani officers do not want the Taliban to conquer the whole of Afghanistan, because they would then be free to turn on Pakistan" - Ex-foreign secretary Riaz Mohammad Khan


Writing in The New York Review of Books (9 Feb 2012), Anatol Lieven states: 'Just what the Pakistani security elite is really aiming at is extremely difficult to work out. Quite apart from the levels of opacity and deceit in which Pakistani policy is wrapped, the Pakistani state is weak and soft. Even in the military, lines of command have become blurred. The ultimate power of decision on Pakistan's Afghan strategy lies with the chief of army staff and the high command; but the ISI, and even cells within the ISI, appear to have considerable autonomy.

Since the ISI has been working with militant groups for more than four decades, some of its cadres have developed strong personal and ideological affinities with them. They may still dream of a victorious jihad in Afghanistan sweeping the Taliban to rule over the whole country. Indeed, so close is the identification of some ISI officers with the Taliban that there is some doubt whether the Taliban is acting as Pakistan's proxy or the ISI is acting as the Taliban's proxy'.

Pakistan's ex-foreign secretary Riaz Mohammad Khan, in his recent book Afghanistan and Pakistan: Conflict, Extremism, and Resistance to Modernity (2011) while criticising Pakistan Army's doctrine of 'strategic depth', thinks that a Taliban capture of Kabul and the north is impossible. Moreover, sensible Pakistani officers do not want the Taliban to conquer the whole of Afghanistan, because they would then be free to turn on Pakistan by giving their support to their Pashtun brothers who are in revolt against Pakistan as part of the Pakistani Taliban of Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP.

The hardline American reaction is portrayed in the book The Wars of Afghanistan by Ambassador Peter Tomsen, President Bush's special envoy to the Afghan resistance from 1989 to 1992. He attributes all the real guilt for what has happened in Afghanistan over the past twenty years to Pakistan and its 'proxies'. Pakistan gives the impression of controlling Mullah Umar's Taliban but there are instances that demonstrate that Mullah Umar doesn't take orders from Pakistan easily. The reason for this behaviour is that Pakistan has not gained the upper hand in its fight against its own Taliban who consider Mullah Umar as their leader.

How much can Pakistan deliver to a solution in Afghanistan? So far it seems that while Pakistan can certainly spoil an emerging solution it cannot coherently think of a solution on its own because of the aligning of its own Pashtun and Punjabi Taliban - and an entire madrassa network and nonstate actors - with Al Qaeda.

What is seen dimly behind this incoherence is Pakistan's unexplained and violent move away from the US after the May 2 attack in Abbottabad which got rid of Osama bin Laden. By decoupling itself from American policy it seems to be propitiating Al Qaeda to compel it to punish Pakistan a little less. Mullah Umar's recent advice to the Taliban not to kill innocent Pakistanis has fallen on deaf ears. The threat finally is not so much from the likes of Raymond Davis sniffing around for Pakistan's nuclear assets but Pakistan's softness in the face of a growing Al Qaeda clout inside Pakistan. It is as if Pakistan were getting ready for an Al Qaeda pax by cutting itself off from the US and its global allies.

George Perkovich reveals: 'Diplomat and journalist Maleeha Lodhi recently explained the tragedy of the Pakistani state as a case of domestic under-reach and external over-reach. Denial is the last psychological defence against painful realities and there is still plenty of it in Pakistan, sometimes of a tragic-comedic nature'.

The domestic 'under-reach' mentioned by Maleeha Lodhi refers to the inability of the state of Pakistan to control much of its territory and to make populations there live under normal law and order. This has led to the flight of capital in face of destructive attacks on property, kidnapping for ransom, and the general tendency of the population to live on a subsistence level. The national economy is in a state of collapse under a bankrupt government even as the Pakistan Army fights the Taliban - which the officials at times perversely portray as proxies funded by the US and India - in the Tribal Areas. While in this dire strait, Pakistan has aggressively absented itself from international conference in Bonn on Afghanistan, probably in order to win the sympathies of the terrorists it cannot defeat.

Some observers think that Qatar talks will focus on the following: 1) complete withdrawal of all US troops according to a fixed timetable; 2) exclusion of other international terrorist groups from areas controlled by the Taliban; 3) a government in Kabul headed-at least nominally-by men the Taliban would see as good Muslims and Afghan patriots; 4) negotiations on a new Afghan constitution involving the Taliban and leading to the transfer of most powers from the centre to the regions; 5) de facto-though not formal-Taliban control of the region of Greater Kandahar, and by the Haqqanis of Greater Paktika; 6) a return to the Taliban offer of 1999-2001 of a complete ban on opium poppy cultivation and heroin production in the areas under their control, in return for international aid.

Pakistan is still to digest the consequences of this solution in its present state of international isolation. It is insufficiently prepared economically to face up to the blowback of another Taliban government in Afghanistan. The Northern Alliance - not as weak this time around as the last time when Pakistan saw an earlier manifestation of it in Mazar-e-Sharif ruthlessly crushed - will have other neighbours backing it. This means there will be a much bigger civil war in Afghanistan with fighters using Pakistan as their area of retreat and regrouping.