The New Nation - Internet Edition

Tanvir Ahmad Khan

President Pervez Musharraf conceded the other day that more than a thousand Pakistani soldiers have lost their lives in the long tribal belt adjoining the border with Afghanistan. They were members of a formidable force of 90,000 troops deployed by Pakistan to deny the Taliban sanctuaries amongst kindred tribes on the Pakistani side of the Durand Line. Initially, this deployment, which contravened the solemn assurance given by the father of the nation, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, that unlike the imperial British Indian Empire, the successor Muslim state of Pakistan would refrain from sending troops into the six autonomous tribal agencies, was considered to carry a very low risk. It had no hostile intent towards the Pushtun tribes who had been fiercely loyal to Pakistan; its main purpose was to ensure that the Taliban and other resistance groups in Afghanistan would not use Pakistani soil to disrupt the parliamentary and presidential elections envisaged in the Bonn agreement as the building blocs of a post-Taliban democratic Afghanistan. Unfortunately, the Bonn blue print unravelled fast as the institutions created by it - the presidency of Hamid Karzai and the parliament - were unable to bring about the intended pacification.

The resurgence of the Taliban in early 2006, produced divergent explanations and bouts of bitter recriminations as western capitals, Kabul and Islamabad played the blame game. The Karzai Government and the US tended to shift the emphasis from the military, political and economic failures inside Afghanistan, to interference in that country from Pakistan's "Texas-sized" tribal belt. The National Intelligence Estimate made by sixteen or more intelligence services in the US in 2006, not only attributed the resurgence of the Taliban to Pakistani sanctuaries but also, rather dramatically, held Pakistan responsible for the resurrection of Al-Qa'ida in the mountain fastnesses of its north western territories.

Nato sources often reinforced Kabul's contention that home-grown terrorism did not have the strength and resources to prop up a major uprising in a country protected by sizeable foreign military forces armed with highly sophisticated weapons.

Considering that a vastly larger and better equipped occupation army is being worsted by an indigenous insurgency in Iraq, this was a highly disingenuous approach. In any case, it ignored the basic elements fuelling the resistance. The American invasion overturned the ethnic basis on which the Afghan state had been organised since mid-18th century. The Taliban were the children of Pushtun tribes which felt dispossessed by the occupation army. As Nato revealed plans for an open-ended military presence, the Taliban were able to turn this initial ethnic cause into a national struggle against alien rule. They were able to challenge the rhetoric of liberty by convincing the Afghans that it was another great game being played ruthlessly by governments, oil and gas multinationals and intelligence services. If an over-riding ideological factor was still missing, it was provided by western politicians and ideologues who tend to frame every conflict in the region as part of a long drawn battle against militant political Islam.

Once the insurgency was formulated in these Manichean terms, the logical war aim became a total extermination of the Taliban. The American resolve not to negotiate with any group from amongst the loosely defined Taliban and to keep them out of the mainstream of Afghan politics as a legitimate political force strengthened the hands of the hard-line leadership and enabled it to widen the arc of hostilities. The insurgency has also been helped by half-hearted reconstruction campaigns and rampant corruption in the use of foreign assistance. The inadequate Nato forces, some of which work only in non-combat areas, led to indiscriminate use of US air force and special forces causing a large number of civilian casualties.

Pakistan finds itself caught between a rock and a hard place. President Musharraf's reversal of the policy of supporting the Taliban in 2001, had alienated a large section of his own people. Collective memory, shared ethnicity and traditions, bound the Pakistani border tribes to the Taliban. Pakistani troops were now seen to be assisting foreign occupation of a land mythologised during the long sub-continental Muslim struggle for independence as a zone of succour and relief. For the first time in nearly six decades, the Pakistan army faced an armed resistance on its side of the border. Instead of bringing peace to Afghanistan, Islamabad ended up importing the Afghan conflict which has led to deadly combat in a difficult mountainous terrain as well as suicide attacks all over Pakistan.

Pakistan is often portrayed as having pursued an Afghan policy based on a faulty doctrine of strategic depth. The reality is more complex. Pakistan's role in defeating the Soviet Union blurred the normal distinction between two separate states and its strategists began to conflate the security of the two countries. Secondly, Pakistan has all along wanted a friendly government in Kabul as its dream of reaching out to the emerging Muslim states of Central Asia, and its ambition to become an energy corridor of the region - a veritable land bridge between Central Asia and South Asia - depend heavily on Afghanistan.

Pakistani planners visualise Afghanistan as a major highway of the regional economy. Even in the present strained situation in the tribal belt, Pakistan is Kabul's lifeline providing the Afghans with a substantial portion of their day-to-day needs and material for reconstruction.

The Nato powers are anxious to maintain an Afghan-Pakistani coalition to bolster the war effort but show little inclination to let the two neighbouring countries make any significant policy contribution to the grand strategy. A conflict that Nato statesmen are willing to stretch over a whole generation can only be a major factor of instability for the two countries.

Pakistan and Afghanistan have their destinies as intertwined today as 2500 years ago but they are as yet incapable of persuading the western coalition that a better policy would aim at turning Afghanistan into a friendly but fully sovereign state making its decisions without an alien shadow. This would mean a redefining of war aims and perhaps a deliberate decision to keep Afghanistan out of the structure of direct power projection by the US in the Eurasian landmass, the Gulf, South Asia and China.

(Tanvir Ahmad Khan, Former Foreign Secretary of Pakistan)