Page 2 of
2 Outsourcing the Afghan
problem By M K Bhadrakumar
from Afghanistan and Pakistan to find a
solution to the violence is running aground.
Islamabad is pitching for jirgas restricted
to tribal leaders, whereas Karzai seeks
broad-based jirgas that will also include
parliamentarians, local politicians and elected
representatives, civil society and
non-governmental organizations.
Karzai's
intention in making the proposal on the
jirgas was to turn the Afghan clock back to
the innocence of the 1970s before the
ideologically motivated
mujahideen, charioted by political Islam,
sidelined the traditional communities and then
what remained was left to the Taliban to trample
on. But Islamabad doesn't favor such revisionism
in Pashtun power play. The Taliban will not allow
it, either. The Taliban now threaten that unless
they are invited to the proposed jirgas in
their capacity as Afghanistan's "biggest political
and military power", the entire effort will be
pointless.
Karzai finds himself in a
quandary. The Taliban's hint that they may
consider taking part in the jirgas is a
double-edged sword. On the one hand, like the
proverbial camel and the tent, [1] the Taliban's
very presence may overwhelm the jirgas -
and Karzai himself in the bargain. Certainly, the
Taliban have by far outgrown the institution of
jirgas. Tradition, after all, must give way
to the compelling modernity of political Islam. At
the same time, the US may well envisage that the
Taliban's likely willingness to tiptoe toward an
intra-Afghan dialogue cannot be allowed to pass.
There is no clarity, even after the
searing experience of the asphyxiation of
secularism in Iraq, as to where exactly the
Anglo-American coalition in Afghanistan stands
with regard to this elaborate play of pantomimes
battling out on the center stage of Pashtun
politics. It doesn't even seem to occur that, in
some ways at least, the discord over the Durand
Line that divides Pakistan and Afghanistan is
linked to the shadow play.
But from
Islamabad's perspective, there is great clarity.
It is Karzai who remains the problem. In recent
days, Pakistan has ratcheted up the pressure on
Karzai in the nature of two new proposals to
"cooperate" with Kabul in checking the
cross-border activities of the Taliban.
First, Islamabad declared that with a view
to checking the Taliban's movements, Pakistan was
"seriously considering" mining its porous borders
with Afghanistan. Second, Islamabad wanted the
Afghan refugee camps on the border to be relocated
on the Afghan side and the 3 million Afghan
refugees to be repatriated to Afghanistan during
the next three-year period. Equally, a new
stridency was apparent in the Pakistani stance
during the annual debate on Afghanistan in the
United Nations General Assembly in New York last
Thursday.
Karzai's dilemma is acute. He
may find himself elbowed out incrementally in the
event of the Taliban embracing intra-Afghan
dialogue. His best allies would be the Northern
Alliance leaders, who shared his antipathy toward
the Taliban. But Karzai was instrumental in
cutting them ("warlords") down to size and
systematically dispatching them to political
oblivion. They no longer make worthwhile allies in
balancing the Taliban. Even their erstwhile
mentors of the 1990s have lost interest and
drifted away. In fact, visiting Pakistani Foreign
Minister Khurshid Mehmood Kasuri had a "frank and
open" conversation last weekend with Younis
Qanooni, the lone Northern Alliance survivor in
Kabul. Pakistan's message would now be stark -
"cooperate, or perish".
Karzai's sense of
dismay is, of course, shared by some of
Afghanistan's neighbors. The Russian Foreign
Ministry in a statement cautioned the
international community against the
"inadmissibility of any flirting or deals with the
Taliban". Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr
Mottaki, during a visit to New Delhi last month,
expressed concern about the Taliban's threat to
regional security and stability. Indian
intervention at the UN General Assembly debate in
New York last week firmly rejected the raison
d'etre of any deal-making with the Taliban and
instead called for the use of force in eliminating
the Taliban's support base.
These are hot
words. For a variety of reasons, however, these
regional powers are hardly in a position to object
if an ISG-style "change tack now" mindset were to
prevail in Washington over Afghanistan. They would
have welcomed Chirac's initiative on the "contact
group" on Afghanistan. They would have hoped that
Washington stepped out of the sequestered, highly
secretive US-British-Pakistani nexus at work. The
Bush administration, on the contrary, might well
have estimated that it had no choice but to
"outsource" from Islamabad, if the potential for
success in the "war on terror" in Afghanistan were
to be actual success.
Note 1. If the camel once
gets his nose in a tent, the body will soon
follow.
M K Bhadrakumar served
as a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service
for more than 29 years, with postings including
ambassador to Uzbekistan (1995-98) and to Turkey
(1998-2001).
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