A difficult neighbour

[humayun "The King"]

A difficult neighbour
By Shahid Javed Burki


AFGANISTAN has been Pakistan’s uneasy neighbour for nearly 60 years. It was the only country that refused to recognise Pakistan as an independent state when the British left South Asia and handed over power to a Hindu majority India and a Muslim majority Pakistan.

The Afghans disapproved of the British act. They wanted London to redraw the boundary it had drawn between the areas it ruled and the areas that were left to be governed by Kabul. They did not want the Durand Line — the border between Afghanistan and British India drawn arbitrarily by the British in 1893 — to not become the permanent border in the post-colonial world. By withholding recognition from Pakistan, the Afghans believed that they could undo the injustice that was done to them by the British decades earlier.

Afghanistan believed that it was wrong for the British to split the Pashtun population into two halves while they governed India and it was even worse to perpetuate that mistake after they left India. The rulers in Kabul felt that the Pashtuns should be kept as one and not separated by an artificial boundary drawn by a colonial power to serve its imperial interests. Ideally, Kabul would have wanted the entire Pashtun community to live in Afghanistan. If that were not possible, it wanted to create a new political entity it called “Pashtunistan” that extended all the way to the right bank of the Indus River. If Pashtunistan was to end at the Indus, from where should it start? Should it include the Pashtun areas in Afghanistan as well?

If a political entity such as Pashtunistan were to be created, what should happen to other ethnic communities that lived in this area? What about the Pashtun areas in Balochistan, another ethnically mixed Pakistani province? Should they also be brought into Pashtunistan? What should be the status of the Hazaras who were members of the Shia community, or the Hindko who spoke a language different from Pashto, or the Punjabis who had lived for decades in the Pashtun area? Should there be another ethnic cleansing of the type that occurred after the partition of British India?

None of these questions were raised, let alone answered, by Kabul as it continued to campaign for the establishment of Pashtunistan. Afghanistan’s stance only served to sour relations with Pakistan for over three decades.

With this unhappy beginning, Afghanistan remained a difficult neighbour for Pakistan. It went on to cultivate close and friendly relations with India in the time-worn belief that ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’. India was happy to oblige the Afghans, once again operating according to the same principle. By working closely with Kabul, New Delhi sought to sandwich Pakistan between two difficult borders. To defend both, became Islamabad’s most important strategic concern.

Pakistan gained some relief from this constant anxiety in the 1980s when it joined the United States and Saudi Arabia to engage a group of Pashtuns to fight the Soviet troops who had invaded Afghanistan. A large number of these fighters, called the Mujahideen by their sponsors, came from the seminaries that taught the form of Islam which resonated little with the one that normal Pakistanis were comfortable with.

This form of Islam sanctioned violence against those who believed differently. It also, mistakenly and arrogantly, gave a low status to women and a high status to clerics who claimed a vaster knowledge of the Quran. However, once the Soviets had vacated Afghanistan in 1989, the Mujahideen groups could not reconcile their differences. Chaos ensued and a worried Islamabad cultivated another Pashtun group to bring order to the troubled country.

Called the Taliban, Pakistan helped this group to gain power in Afghanistan. The brief period during which the Taliban governed Afghanistan was the only time that Pakistan felt secure on its northern frontier. But this security was lost when the Al Qaeda, that had been offered a sanctuary by the Taliban in Afghanistan, decided to launch a jihad against the United States. Pakistan was forced by Washington to join the anti-Taliban coalition which quickly demolished the Islamic regime and established a new, pro-West and more secular political order in the country. The rest as they say is history.

This new period in the Afghanistan-Pakistan relationship could have brought comfort to the two countries. But for that to happen required some fundamental changes in the way policymakers on both sides of the border looked at their common problems. They also needed to recognise that some opportunities were available on the basis of which they could build a better future for their two countries.

That was not done. In letting their relations deteriorate to the point that the heads of the two governments cannot even have a civil dialogue in public, Kabul and Islamabad have created a situation that will benefit only those who have no interest in the social, economic and political development of the area the two countries share.

The rise of militant Islam is the most challenging problem for the two countries. The two need to work together to ensure that this development does not inflict long-term damage on their societies. It is shortsighted for the leaders in Pakistan to believe that they can use the proponents of Islamic extremism to serve their purpose and to look the other way as the remnants of the Taliban begin to reassert themselves in the southern districts of Afghanistan. Likewise, it is wrong for Kabul to maintain that the Taliban are gaining strength in many parts of their country because of the help and encouragement they believe the insurgents receive from Islamabad.

Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan is right in demanding that Pakistan should do more to help his country deal with the rise once again of Islamic fundamentalism that threatens Afghanistan’s quest for stability. But the help that he should be seeking from Islamabad should not just be the use of force to stop the movement of people across his border with Pakistan. Islamabad can call his bluff and strengthen the Durand Line in a way that goes against Kabul’s long-standing demand for not tearing apart the community of Pashtuns. This is precisely what Pakistan is now threatening to do.

In late December 2006, Islamabad announced that it planned to mine and fortify with a combination of a wall and a fence its 2,400 km border with Afghanistan. Pakistan was acting in the belief that such a move would satisfy those critics who think that the Taliban were reestablishing themselves in parts of Afghanistan because it had allowed them sanctuaries on its side of the border and had allowed them to penetrate Afghanistan. Kabul was not happy with the suggestion by Islamabad that it was going to construct a physical barrier along the border. The Afghans went back to the old stance — that the Pashtun population should not be split into two parts.

Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan is equally right in demanding that Kabul should deal first with the problems it has created for itself. Kabul has managed the country’s economy and has developed the political system in ways which have made Talibanism an attractive alternative for a large and growing segment of the population. Kabul, in dealing with its many problems, is looking at the short-term scenario; it is opting for an approach that cannot possibly be in its long-term interest.

An example of this is Kabul’s willingness to work with the warlords once again to bring security to some of the troubled provinces. Many warlords recruited for service in the evolving political system are using the cultivation of and trade in drugs to enrich themselves and their supporters.

There is also not much understanding of the nature of the Afghan problem among the governments that are helping President Karzai and his political associates to bring order to their troubled country and society. Pakistan is getting plenty of advice from the West, in particular from those who claim to have knowledge of the situation in Afghanistan. Much of the advice starts with the assumption that Islamabad is not lending a helping hand in stopping the resurgence of the Taliban. According to the reading of the situation by some of these experts, Islamabad is not doing all it should to prevent the return of Afghanistan to anarchy. It has adopted this approach for a variety of reasons that include the continuing attraction of the country’s intelligence services towards the goals of Islamic extremists and because of the continuing preoccupation with India and the perception of the threat that New Delhi poses to Pakistan’s security.

Some of these experts believe that Afghanistan’s problem can only be taken care of if pressure is put on Islamabad, the type of pressure that brought Pakistan to the American side right after 9/11. As President Musharraf revealed while launching his book, he was told that his country would be bombed back into the Stone Age if it did not give up its support of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and helped Washington to bring about a change of regime in Afghanistan.

In an article contributed to The Washington Post, Richard A. Clarke, who had served as national coordinator for terrorism in the National Security Council under President Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, the Afghan-Pakistan situation was one of the seven global crises that the Bush presidency had not paid much attention to because of its preoccupation with Iraq. The others include global warming, Russian revanchism, Latin America’s leftward lurch, various wars in Africa, arms control freeze and transnational crime.

Of these seven crises, he attached great significance to the Afghan-Pakistan dispute. “If there is a solution, it lies on the other side of the Khyber Pass where a sanctuary has emerged, a Taliban-like state within a state in western Pakistan. Dealing with that problem is more than Washington has been willing or able to handle, for it flows into the complex issue of who governs nuclear-armed Pakistan and who controls the nuclear arsenal.”

In other words, Washington would be inclined to put pressure on the government of President Pervez Musharraf but is reluctant to do that, fearful that it might weaken his position and unwittingly contribute to a takeover of the government by people who are sympathetic to Al Qaeda. Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal could thus fall into the hands of those who are the sworn enemies of the West.

“Thus far Washington has accepted Gen Pervez Musharraf’s half-hearted measures for dealing with the nuclear proliferation network of A.Q. Khan, addressing the terrorist involvement of Pakistani intelligence and controlling the Taliban/Al Qaeda bases in Washington. Getting Pakistan to do more would require a major sustained effort by senior US officials, including addressing the longstanding tensions with India. Because of Iraq, Washington’s national security gurus do not have the hours in their days to manage that — or the troops to secure Afghanistan,” he continues.

But for 2007 to produce peace along Pakistan’s long border with Afghanistan will take more than American pressure on Islamabad. It will require a complete rethinking in the way both Kabul and Islamabad have dealt with the restive Pashtun tribes on both sides of their common border. It will take economics to find an enduring solution to this long-festering problem. Exactly how economics can help will be the subject for next week.

[Wounded Healer]

oh very good stuff ji..........bravo

[CsS gUiTaRiSt]

its a very nice debate ,having detailed history of tenures of taliban,there mistakes causes of there down fall and also our relationship wid afghanistan in past nd now..

I say right now india has a v gr8 influence on afghanistan and also one thing I want to add iz a statement given by alamgir khan-editor news post afghanistan . He waz talking to hamid meer in capital talk ,saying each n every afghan will never forget wat pakistan did to talibans nd wat pakistan did to us .he added we had a very deep friendship frm a decade nd now we'll never trust pakistan..he says these r the veiws of common ppl of afghanistan ..

wat I say abt this iz, afghan ppl should think abt a fact that wat pakistan did waz according to UN RESOLUTION .. Pakistan waz not told by america to go against afghanistan but it waz told by UNITED NATIONS.. and in that case pakistan could not do anything but to go according to UN...

THis is a fact that now our pak afghan border iz not safe as it waz before now..

REgardz...

[I M Possible]

Durand line is a matter of controversy for Pakistan since long but now it is like a thorn in the flesh. It does not seems that the day will coe when tihngs will be ok again. Pakistan is not accountable for it in any way but Afghanis keep censuring us for all bad tings happening in their country.

We are very unfortunate to have neighbours likeIdia and Affghanistan. They are never happy with us. They are difficult to be contended. Well this is not our responsibility to make them happy but we still co-operate with them.

Good work Humayun, keep sharing.

[CsS gUiTaRiSt]

Afghanistans attitude towards pakistan is getting really worst..the hot issue of fencing iz being debated these dayz.. They r opposing the pakistans suggestion of fencing at pak afghan border nd saying that this iz a one sided effort,y not we start vehicles patrol at each side..

But now as canada has offer us a latest technical equipments for border security is a very good news..this would be a joint effort of canada and pakistan..

I m happy abt this news cz how other developed countries r going wid us is meaningful...

REGARDS: