What does Pakistan want in Afghanistan?

By Najmuddin A Shaikh( foreign secretary from 1994-97 and also served as Pakistan’s ambassador to Iran (1992-94) and the US (1990-91))

People in Pakistan realise that the country needs to keep its relations with the United States, its western allies and its Arab friends in the Gulf on an even keel. This is because these countries are the markets for our meagre export, and the source of the remittances which, along with aid from these countries, is what keeps our fragile economy afloat. What is not equally well realised is that in Afghanistan, particularly at this time, we have convergent interests. America wants to have a modicum of stability in that country as it prepares to withdraw its troops. Perhaps, its proposed agreement with Afghanistan for a troop presence for a decade after 2014 has some sinister purpose but, for the moment, it seems that if reconciliation and then stability come to Afghanistan earlier, the Americans will withdraw before the decade is out.

Pakistan, too, needs that stability to be able to send the Afghans — refugees and insurgents — now in Pakistan, back to their country in order to reassert state control on the territories that the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban have occupied. There are, by my reckoning, at least five million on our soil — 1.7 million registered, an equal number unregistered and another 1.5 million who have fraudulently acquired Pakistani documents.

Pakistan needs stability to be able to gain the economic dividends of its geostrategic location, by acting as the transit route for South Asia’s trade with Central and West Asia, and to utilise the expensively constructed Gwadar port. On this stability depends TAPI — the gas pipeline from Turkmenistan, bringing sorely needed energy to Pakistan — which will yield substantial transit revenues as it moves to India and the CASA 1,000 project, the high voltage transmission line carrying Tajik and Kyrgyz hydel-power which would also ease our power shortage. Afghanistan itself has the potential to generate exports. Despite the problems it is having, Afghanistan has been able to secure Chinese investment for the Aynak copper mine and Indian investment for exploiting the Hajigak iron ore deposits. For the product of both these projects and for the many others that will come on stream as the world seeks to take advantage of the $1 trillion worth of minerals that are said to exist in Afghanistan, the logical route for getting them to the market is through Pakistan’s Gwadar port. If south and east Afghanistan remain disturbed, other routes will be seen as more attractive.

Pakistan needs that stability to be able to check the rampant smuggling and the misuse of the Afghan transit trade facility that, by my estimate, brings more than five billion dollars worth of smuggled goods and 33 per cent of Afghanistan’s opium production into Pakistan. We have consistently ignored the impact of the opium trade, perhaps complacent in the belief that all the opium or heroin that enters our borders is sent on to Europe or other destinations.

On the security front, the 350,000-strong national security apparatus that the Americans hope to have in place by the end of 2012 would, if maintained at that level, be the realisation of our security establishment’s worst nightmare. Such a force, drawn largely from the ethnic minorities — the Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks — whom we regard as our adversaries, would be an ideal tool for ‘encirclement’. This force to justify its continued existence, will have to find a cause and that could be the undoing of the Durand Line as the border with Pakistan. To survive, it will need external financing and, as and when American aid ceases, as it must, this force, which will become a dominant political force in Afghanistan, will look towards regional allies to make up the deficiency. Stability will enable us to discuss with the Afghans the folly of trying to maintain the monster-size security force and help the Afghan administration, to cut this number down to the ethnically balanced 25-30,000-strong force that the Afghan economy will need and can support.

Should these clear advantages be seen as less important than the feared bogies that have led us towards skewed policies?


Source: What Does Pakistan Want in Afghanistan?

What does Pakistan want in Afghanistan? (2)

By Najmuddin A Shaikh

Since April, 1978, when the Saur Revolution brought down President Daud’s regime, Afghans have been at war against the local communists, against invading Soviet forces and then, against each other. This last power struggle caused greater material losses than the decade-long Soviet occupation. Taliban rule was a continuation of the same strife. The internecine war and then the Taliban ascendancy both had ethnic overtones — massacres of Hazaras by the Tajiks and then the Taliban, the killing of Uzbeks and then the slaughter of the Taliban in Mazar Sharif.

Pakistan was seen as the root of all of Afghanistan’s problems by the Northern Alliance. Ahmad Shah Masood masterminded the attack on our embassy in September 1995, in retaliation for the assistance that Pakistan had allegedly rendered to the Taliban in conquering Herat.

In fact, Pakistan recognised the danger of continued ethnic strife, its impact on our tribal areas and on our domestic polity. (In August, 2001, just a month before 9/11, Deputy Secretary of State Armitage talked of a new relationship with Pakistan based on preventing the ‘Talibanisation of Pakistan’.) In 1992, we tried to get the Mujahideen parties to agree to a power sharing arrangement pending elections. This effort was frustrated partly by the personal ambitions of the Mujahideen leaders and partly because the right ethnic balance could not be struck — the Iranians stressed that 30 per cent of the posts should go to the Shias even while the Hazaras, the principal Shia group in Afghanistan, represented no more than eight per cent of the population and Hikmatyar, our protégé, refused to accept even temporarily a lead role for Rabbani’s Tajik Jamaat-e-Islami.

In 1996, after the Taliban conquest of Kabul, we proposed a ceasefire, an exchange of prisoners and an eventual power sharing arrangement between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance. This foundered on the rocks of Taliban intransigence which owed in part to ideology, in part to their belief that the Pakistani effort was not backed by all power centres in Pakistan and in part to the conviction that outside powers supporting the Northern Alliance would sabotage good faith negotiations.

When the Taliban ruled most of Afghanistan and were seen by the rest of the world as wholly dependent on Pakistan, we discovered the limits of the influence we could exercise. They dismissed any notion of formalising the Durand Line, claiming that “between the ummah there could be no borders”, rejected our pleas to spare the Bamiyan statues and perhaps, most importantly, refused to hand over Pakistani extremists such as Riaz Basra who had sought shelter in Afghanistan. After 9/11, they dismissed yet again our pleas that they should surrender Bin Laden and spare their country and ours the devastation that was otherwise bound to come from a vengeful US.

After 9/11, Pashtuns in the north of the country became the victims of reprisal attacks by the Tajiks and Uzbeks. At the Bonn conference, the Pashtuns were politically marginalised in a country in which, contrary to currently accepted figures, they were a majority and not just a plurality. This gave the Taliban the chance to rebuild a base of support based not on their rigid and alien ideology but on their self-assigned role of being the flag-bearers of Pashtun nationalism. Yet at no time during the 33-years of strife did any Afghan leader ever suggest that Afghanistan be split into two or more parts.

This necessarily selective recollection of Afghanistan’s political history has lessons to offer for determining what Pakistan can and should want in Afghanistan. First and perhaps most important, no Afghan leader is prepared to endorse or countenance the break-up of the country on ethnic lines but the days of Pashtun let alone Taliban domination cannot be resurrected. Second, a power-sharing arrangement will come only when the Afghans can sit together and be sure that there will be no external interference. Third, no Taliban or other Pashtun leader will easily give ground on the irredentist claims against Pakistan. The Taliban limit their ambitions to Afghanistan but their definition of Afghanistan includes large parts of Pakistan. Fourth a dominant Taliban presence on our borders will be an ideological threat. Today we may believe there is a distance between the TTP and the Afghan Taliban. We may be right in suggesting that the TTP largely comprises criminal elements and derives support from inimical external agencies. But let us not forget that most of them proudly proclaim their sworn loyalty to Mullah Omar and profess to want the imposition of the same Taliban ideology in Pakistan.

Source: What does Pakistan Want in Afghanistan

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