Pakistan’s Afghan Policy

From the BOARD of EDITORIAL ADVISORS, Ms NASIM ZEHRA gives a brilliant exposition of Pakistan’s Afghan policy.

Perhaps what easily qualifies as one of Pakistan’s most widely criticized policy, by some vocal groups at home and powerful governments abroad, was discussed at length during the three day long envoy’s conference. Indeed Pakistan’s Afghan policy has yielded no immediate diplomatic or economic advantages for Pakistan. Instead it continues to be identified as the main cause for the internationally and partially domestically feared Talibanisation phenomenon. Those fearful of or antagonistic towards Talibanisation understand it as a worldview promoting irrationality, intolerance and oppression. During the envoy’s conference Pakistan’s Chief Executive encouraged  the front-line promoters of Pakistan to speak their minds on what is now Pakistan’s six year old Afghan policy. During the concluding session General Pervez Musharraf intently heard the critics as he did the supporters of the policy. For the critics Musharraf could hold out no hope of any policy shift; only of improving the conduct of the current policy by adding to it additional dimensions.

Pakistan’s Afghan policy is a high cost policy. Abroad it is no doubt a ‘hard sell’. Three factors have ensured that there exists in the dominant discourse conducted in the international corridors of power and in opinion-making circles, a near consensus against the taliban regime. The three factors are: one, the Taliban’s inexperience with government affairs, their tribal ethos and their reactive excesses committed against their own people in the name of religion and security; two, Washington’s one-point ‘get Osama Bin Laden’ Afghan policy and three, Moscow’s dangerous determination to apply military force, in partnership with Iran and to a lesser extent with India, to ‘roll-back’ what it maintains is the root cause of ‘Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism’ in its ‘zone of security’. However, the currently dominant players of the international community may choose to legitimize its policy of seeking Taliban’s political demise or at least political weakening, whether in a human rights or political representation framework it is easy to decipher its reality.

These politically ‘useful’ frameworks are deployed as tools for promoting foreign policy objectives when either other means fail or those being applied run the risk of being unpopular. Moscow’s concern at Taliban-supported terrorism hits the media headlines, not its current project of raising a 20,000 strong Ahmad Shah Massoud led and heavily armed force to fight the Taliban in the coming months. Indeed it is a recipe for tearing apart if not militarily butchering the Afghan people. Afghanistan-based Afghans have seen over a million of their own die in Afghanistan’s  killing fields. Naturally, Washington has chosen to go along with this military plan worked out in the famous October 25-26 Dunshanbe meeting at which the Russian Defence Minister and the Iranian Foreign Minister too were present. The UN Security Council Resolution 1333 imposing a second round of Taliban government specific sanctions, including an arms embargo, provides a candid view of the international community’s real objective in Afghanistan. With all the Russian weapons and Iranian support flowing into Ahmad Shah Massoud’s camp, the SC resolution calls for an arms embargo against the Taliban. Perhaps to further reinforce the myth that weapons are being supplied from Pakistan. The fact remains that like the aerial photographic evidence of the Pakistani involvement in Kargil, the Americans could have done the same for Afghanistan. Technology today can pick up even a hair-pin sized moving object. Naturally there isn’t much to concretely build the Pakistani military involvement case on. Yet the myth lives on. And also of the UN’s neutrality in helping resolve the Afghan conflict. 

Defending Pakistan’s policy in such an environment is very hard. Nevertheless by the sheer results it has achieved within the region it is a defensible policy. Turkmenistan, Kazakistan, Iran, China and even Uzbekistan are engaged at varying degrees with the Afghan government. Engagement has yielded trade interaction in some cases and removal of misunderstandings in other cases.  Americans too remain engaged in an active dialogue with the Afghan government. The option of trying Osama with the involvement of three Muslim countries including Saudi Arabia is an offer that has come from the Afghan government after its many rounds of dialogue with American officials. The Osama problem is far from being solved. Yet dialogue helps in helping any two adversaries better understand each other’s position.

Beyond the regional countries UN humanitarian agencies agree that engagement and patience with the Afghan government has encouraged positive change in the Afghan government’s approach towards social development issues. To project this attitude change goes against the interest of Washington and hence the discrepancy between what the UNDCP claims that the Afghan government has actually achieved in poppy eradication and what Washington laboriously denies. Similarly the exaggerated role of the Afghan government in promoting so-called ‘terrorism" and ‘fundamentalism’ defies ground realities. A window into the ground realities of how this ‘fundamentalism’ bogey is born and used was most recently illustrated in a report written by John Kifner in the New York Times of January 24 quotes from photographer Ron Haviv's new book, ‘Blood and Honey: A Balkan War JournalÓ (TV Books/Umbrage Editions"). Writing about the Serb paramilitary leader  Arkan’s storming into a mainly Muslim town Bijeljina along with his Tigers militia,  "They were going house to house, looking for fighters and things to take," Mr. Haviv remembered. "Inside a mosque, they had taken down the Islamic flag and were holding it like a trophy. They had a guy, they said he was a fundamentalist from Kosovo. He was begging for his life."

All this maybe appear removed but it is all linked to the context in which the Pakistani Afghan policy needs to be conducted and projected. Against heavy odds. Defending Pakistan’s Afghan policy is a  particularly complicated and challenging issue. With relation to Afghanistan the demands and the perceptions of the currently dominant military and economic players are different from that of Pakistan. This difference cannot dictate a change in our policy. Supporting the Afghan government and supporting all UN’s genuine efforts at finding a political solution to the Afghan civil war, even if restricted to less than 20% of the territory, must remain the two diplomatic pillars of our Afghan policy.

Pakistan’s current Afghan policy is not an ideal policy. It does not ‘make us look good’ supporting men of old and even what we may consider not Islamic ways. It is also true that Pakistan has supported the Taliban in every respect. Yet did Pakistan have a choice?  In the nineties the mess of an ill-thought-out policy of the eighties jointly authored by the Pak-US, began to unfold. Pakistan witnessed the intra-Afghan blood-shed within Afghanistan and the influence-lynching at all costs, through all means by the neighbouring countries. The power game became ugly. Shifting alliances and ally-purchasing abound. Pakistan with a 2040 kilometer long and porous border and hosting over 2.5 million Afghan refugees too played its hand. The Taliban have continued to remain in power in the fifth year. Their troubles on the social development and even on the military front may, however, increase.

Whatever Pakistan’s history of support, it has limited influence over Pakistan. During the envoys conference some envoys urged the Chief Executive to make Pakistan’s support to the Afghan government conditional on its responsiveness to Pakistan’s advice. Musharraf himself produced a list of advice he gives to visiting Afghan officials; not harbour terrorists and close down terrorist camps if they exist, extradite terrorists, if evidence is provided against them to their countries of origin, open schools and colleges for girls, continue ban on poppy cultivation and not ban UNSMA’s mission not to be abandoned.

For many vocal Pakistanis the real trouble with Pakistan’s Afghan policy is on the home ground. Our Afghan policy, like our Kashmir policy does have a high domestic fall-out; refugee influx, increase in religious extremism, decrease in sectarian harmony and klashnikovization of Pakistani political space. Some envoys too reflected this concern. It ranged from a Taliban victory encouraging sectarianism and religious extremism to spreading violence. At the official level two issues that have repeatedly raised with the Afghan government are the sectarian and the smuggling-related problems. Some informal agreement has been made to deal with the problem of smuggling. On the question of harbouring terrorists a list of 120 men involved in sectarian killings and present in Afghanistan have been provided to the Afghan government. The Afghans have taken no action over the issue. Maybe many of them like Osama have been their partners in jihad against the Soviets and now against Massoud. The Pakistani Minister of Interior hopes to raise the issue again during his end January visit.

The validity of these concerns notwithstanding the fundamental solutions to these problems lie within Pakistan. After all the movement of terrorists within Pakistan itself is not being controlled as is the sale of smuggled goods not being stopped. When smuggled goods are being sold in the heart of the Pakistani capital and the religious parties violate laws like no display of weapons with abandon in key cities then the problem is not the half-functioning and starving and struggling Afghan government. It is the failure of the Pakistani state to establish rule of law. If 20 judges, out of fear refuse to listen to the Sadiq Ganji murder case the problem is on our own home-front.

The ostriches among us may maintain that only 5-10% of Pakistanis subscribe to religious extremism  and hence the problem of religious extremism should not be exaggerated. However, if those 5-10% occupy public space then they become many times more relevant in a society’s power equation compared  to the privately functioning 80% of ‘moderates’.

Simple but the core of our many problems. Similarlly if there is increase in religious extremism in terms of its support, funds and organisations then the problem is again more of a crisis of legitimacy of the political class, the state and the elite of this society and of perhaps using ill-thought out means to promote legitimate national security policies. Not of a war torn Afghanistan. For them the so-called religious extremism has helped them to deal with the pain and plunder of a foreign invasion, of civil wars and often interference by outside predatory powers. For Pakistan religious extremism is providing a balm to the society’s  excluded and marginalized. Ironically a factor that we can fully comprehend when we explain at international seminars the failure of development models but which we are unable to factor into our understanding of our own unfolding political chaos, to better understand its causes.