Pakistan’s Afghan policy- arsonist or fireman?
Pakistani officials claim that the Afghan
jihadists have gone back to Afghanistan while the information from the ground
suggests they have been redistributed over Kurram, Orakzai and Khyber tribal
agencies
Former US Ambassador Peter Tomsen was almost prophetic when
he warned in his 2011 book The Wars of Afghanistan, “If Pakistan hews to its
fireman and arsonist policy in Afghanistan, the Obama administration will
likely make little progress in Afghanistan.” He accurately noted:
“The most valuable contribution that America can make to Afghan peace
lies not in Afghanistan but in Pakistan”. Sadly, voices like Ambassador
Tomsen’s were not heeded in Washington DC in a timely fashion and Pakistan
successfully dragged its feet on taking action against the Afghan jihadists of
three main varieties, i.e. Mullah Omar’s Quetta Shura Taliban, the Haqqani
terrorist network and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hizb-e-Islami, till the bulk of US
and NATO combat troops were out of Afghanistan.
The Pentagon’s report, ‘Progress towards security and stability in
Afghanistan’, submitted to the US Congress last month, has once again pointed
out that Pakistan continues to maintain these jihadist safe havens. Pakistan
has since rubbished the report, issued a démarche to US Ambassador Richard
Olson and was subsequently able to squeeze kudos out of Lieutenant General
Joseph Anderson, a senior US officer in the NATO-led force in Afghanistan, for
tackling the Haqqani network.
The fact is that the death of not even one of the 1,200 or so terrorists
that Pakistan claims to have killed in Operation Zarb-e-Azb in North Waziristan
could be independently confirmed. The Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR)
has issued no names either. Not a single Haqqani network commander has been
arrested or killed. Contrarily, the prime minister’s national security advisor,
Sartaj Aziz, has raised a furor by telling the BBC Urdu service: “Why should we
target those extremists who do not target us...why should we willy-nilly make
the US’s enemies our enemies?”
He also conceded that the Haqqani network had been operating from
Pakistani soil but claimed that now the “infrastructure has been eliminated”. A
Pakistani foreign office spokesperson has since stated that Mr Aziz’s comments
were reported out of context. Interestingly, Mr Aziz has also said what North
Waziristan locals also frequently say, i.e. many terrorists fled way before
Zarb-e-Azb started. In fact, locals say a curfew was clamped in many areas of
North Waziristan before the operation and then transportation mysteriously
appeared and carried away the Haqqani network hordes.
Pakistani officials claim that the Afghan jihadists have gone back to
Afghanistan while the information from the ground suggests they have been
redistributed over Kurram, Orakzai and Khyber tribal agencies and even Khyber
Pakhtunkhwa areas adjoining FATA. Independent media is still not allowed by the
military in North Waziristan and it arranged only one escorted tour for
journalists since the inception of the Zarb-e-Azb operation about six months
ago. Whatever the veracity of the claims in the North Waziristan operation, the
bigger picture is that the Quetta Shura of Mullah Omar and Hekmatyar’s men are
safely outside the scope of Zarb-e-Azb.
The course correction vis-à-vis harbouring the Afghan jihadist rebels
that the Chief of Army Staff (COAS) General Raheel Sharif is trying to persuade
the Afghans and the US about is at best partial. Quetta remains off limits to
any foreign diplomat except perhaps the Houbara Bustard-hunting Arabs. Pakistan
does not appear to be taking any serious action whatsoever against any of the
three prongs of the Afghan Taliban insurgency that it harbours.
The Pakistani security establishment appears to
meticulously be repeating its November 2001 drill when it retracted and
preserved its Afghan Taliban proxies only to launch them with a vengeance in
2004-2005 when the US took its eyes off the ball. This time the game plan seems
to be to play nice till the US takes both eyes and hands off the ball in
Afghanistan before letting the jihadist killers loose again. The line that
General Raheel Sharif seems to be taking in the US is that Pakistan has cured
the 66-year-old jihadist cancer in less than six months of Operation
Zarb-e-Azb. It would be incredibly naïve of US officials to fall for this
without due diligence, which must span years, not months. Issuing a clean bill
of health prematurely will imperil not just the Afghans but the Pakistanis too,
who have suffered tremendously from jihadism’s blowback.
Former Afghan President Hamid Karzai has said in a blistering interview
with the Prague-based Mashaal Radio that Pakistan not only sheltered jihadist
insurgents but also pressed Afghanistan to accept the Durand Line as the
permanent border, make peace with the Taliban (on its/their terms) and tried to
dictate Afghan foreign policy by telling it to curtail ties with India.
Mr Karzai said that accepting any of this would have meant compromising
Afghan sovereignty. He blamed the US for a duplicitous policy where it
acknowledged that Pakistan harboured terrorists but did nothing to stop it. Mr
Karzai also indicated that the US wanted him to accommodate Pakistan’s perverse
demands on how the Afghans should handle their relations with India. Just days
before Mr Karzai made these remarks, his successor, Mr Ashraf Ghani, made his
maiden visit to Pakistan, including to its military’s general headquarters. The
visit ended on the optimistic note that both countries were ready to reset
their relations favourably.
While the suave Mr Ghani has to exhaust this diplomatic song and dance,
just like his rough and tough predecessor, he too will not be able to concede
to a single one of Pakistan’s demands. Pakistani media made a big deal of Mr
Ghani coming to Pakistan before going to India but Mr Ghani is not the first
Afghan leader to do so. In 1958, Afghan King Mohammed Zahir Shah also visited
Pakistan before he went to India.
During its 1965 and 1971 wars with India, the Afghan government sided
with and helped Pakistan. The India-Afghan relationship is a red herring that
Pakistan has consistently deployed to dupe the US. Hegemony over Afghanistan is
still the Pakistani security establishment’s goal. It yearns for the days when
the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) ran at least eight large centres in
Afghanistan during the 1990s Taliban regime and its men served as advisors in every
single ministry there.
Whether or not the US continues to fall for the Pakistani
establishment’s dual policy, Afghanistan’s other neighbours, including China,
seem to be developing a consensus that a slide back to the 1990s is not an
option. The US can leave the region but Afghanistan, its neighbours and India
do not have that luxury. The region has no appetite for Pakistan hewing to its
fireman and arsonist policy in Afghanistan. Pakistan’s honeymoon period with
the new Afghan government will be short; it will have to clean up its act
quickly and transparently.
The writer can be reached at mazdaki@me.com and
he tweets @mazdaki
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