Peace
doves hover over Islamabad By
M K Bhadrakumar
A momentous week stretches
ahead as Afghan President Hamid Karzai arrives in
Islamabad on Saturday for the inaugural session of
the joint Afghan-Pakistani commission for
reconciling the Taliban. The Pakistani army chief
as well as the Inter-Intelligence Services head
will be sitting on the commission and investing it
with an unmistakable halo of prestige and
authority.
For the first time, the
Pakistani military becomes an open, formal
participant (and implicitly, a guarantor) in the
process of the reconciliation of the Taliban.
If that isn't still enough to make
Karzai's visit a defining moment, during his
two-day stay in Islamabad an historic
Afghan-Pakistani trade and transit agreement is
becoming operational, which the two countries have
been negotiating for several decades, whereby
Pakistan is allowing Afghan
traders to access the Indian market through the
land border at Attari-Wagha in the Punjab
provinces of Pakistan and India.
These are
by themselves major developments. The big question
is whether trumping all this, the Pakistanis will
go the extra league and arrange something very
special for Karzai - say a meeting with another
Afghan of great standing? This may sound
preposterous, but only to the naive or the timid.
Anything becomes possible now.
From the
Pakistani perspective, Karzai has become as
important an interlocutor as the Americans, if not
more. An "Afghan-led" peace process is the mantra
for all regional powers, and even the United
States. And all protagonists know that Karzai has
a key role to play in steering the peace process
as and when it takes off.
US in tearing
hurry Besides, the equations between Kabul
and Washington, which have never been easy, are
more delicately poised than at any time as
negotiations over the strategic partnership
agreement that determines the direction of the
US's long-term presence in Afghanistan are
entering a critical stage. Islamabad will be
keenly watching the outcome of these negotiations
and will be pleased if Karzai drives a hard
bargain with the Americans, as he seems to be
doing.
Meanwhile, developments on the
ground are also engendering a momentum of their
own. Former Afghan president and head of the
Afghan High Council for Peace, Burhanuddin
Rabbani, revealed over the weekend that his
members had held preliminary talks with the main
Taliban group led by Mullah Omar and the so-called
Quetta shura in Pakistan and that "multiple
channels" were indeed "getting momentum".
Who would have believed until this week
had they been told that representatives of the
Haqqani network visited Kabul "very recently" -
conceivably, with the Pakistani military's
knowledge and possibly help - and held discussions
with Afghan officials?
Nothing surprises
anymore. Visiting French Foreign Minister Alain
Juppe privately told a small group of journalists
in Washington on Tuesday just as he was heading
for talks in the State Department and White House
that the United States was engaged in tripartite
talks with the Taliban and Pakistan; that it
wanted the Taliban to be part of the solution but
was having difficulty in finding credible
interlocutors on the Taliban side who were willing
to talk peace and that talks were underway "as we
speak".
Juppe explained that the situation
in Afghanistan had become quite grim. Despite the
US's surge in troops a year ago, and
notwithstanding claims of progress by the US's and
the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's generals
commanding troops in Afghanistan, Juppe said
actual progress against the Taliban was
inadequate.
"The strategy doesn't succeed
as well as we expected on the ground," he
reportedly said. Juppe even doubted claims of
gains against the Taliban and pointed out that
diplomats and generals were speaking in entirely
different voices.
He admitted that France
doubted the feasibility of the transition that was
being planned in July as the Afghan army and
police were ill-prepared to assume responsibility
for security. Juppe estimated in a telling
illustration of the huge uncertainties that
according to what Paris had heard, the US drawdown
this year could be anywhere between 3,000 and
30,000 troops.
US President Barack Obama's
desperate hurry to shake off the albatross' cross
in Afghanistan is understandable. A poll by the
ABC-Washington Post on Tuesday shows that the
American people are in an unforgiving mood about
the state of the US economy and the euphoria and
jingoism over the killing of Osama bin Laden has
quickly evaporated.
It came up with the
shocking result that Obama is in a dead heat with
Republican challenger Matt Romney - with the two
candidates on 47% each among the Americans
surveyed.
During the US Senate Foreign
Relations Committee's "nomination" hearing on
Tuesday, ambassador-designate to Afghanistan Ryan
Crocker, a distinguished diplomat who brilliantly
served American interests at a similar
transformational period in Baghdad, was
nonetheless severely grilled by senators,
including John Kerry, about the unsustainability
of the Afghan war in the current US budget
environment.
Crocker was "grim" and gave
the senators an "unvarnished assessment" of the
Afghan situation, according to the New York Times.
He made it clear that the accent of US policy had
shifted from the military to the political track.
He admitted that his assignment in Kabul was going
to be "harder" than his tour of duty in Iraq, but
he sensed that it was not "hopeless".
Pressures on Pakistan These are
highly revealing remarks, coming as they are
within days of the expected announcement by the
White House regarding the extent of US troop
drawdown in Afghanistan. Things are happening
almost entirely as the Pakistani military would
have expected and the Taliban predicted - time is
on their side, not Obama's. The killing of Bin
Laden ironically puts Obama in a greater hurry
because in popular perceptions, the Afghan war has
been "won", the reason for the US to go into the
Hindu Kush has been fulfilled and the 9/11 attacks
have been avenged.
On the other hand,
Pakistan is also under immense pressure from many
quarters. The international community, including
China and Russia, are urging Pakistan to have a
paradigm shift in its Afghan policy. Two, Pakistan
needs to cultivate Karzai's goodwill. Three, the
security situation within Pakistan is alarming and
the blowback of terrorism underscores the dangers
of using terrorist groups as "strategic assets".
Four, with Bin Laden's departure, a window of
opportunity arises to detach the Taliban from
al-Qaeda and "foreign fighters", and bring them to
the negotiating table.
Most important,
Pakistan's longstanding demand for reconciliation
of the Taliban now finds almost complete
acceptance in the US establishment. This puts the
onus on Pakistan to bring the Taliban to the
negotiating table.
In short, Karzai is
undertaking his visit to Islamabad after a great
deal of preparatory discussions and on the
assumption that Pakistan is capable of taking a
new turn in its Afghan policies. The farewell
visit by US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates last
week to Kabul was conspicuous for its complete
absence of any rhetoric against Pakistan by either
the American or the Afghan side.
Again,
the main pre-condition from the Taliban side for
entering into peace talks is going to be met
shortly, possibly in the coming week. This
concerns the removal of the Taliban from a United
Nations list of terrorists so that they can travel
and openly take part in talks. The Afghan
government has proposed a list of 50 Taliban
figures to be "delisted" on the basis of their
non-involvement in any terroristic activities in
the recent period.
Simultaneously, a range
of changes is being considered to the UN's
so-called "1275 list", which comprises about 450
terrorists belonging to al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
The idea is to bifurcate the list and "separate"
the Taliban from al-Qaeda so that Karzai can
decide which Taliban figures need to be still kept
on the watch list.
The justification being
given for this bifurcation is that al-Qaeda and
the Taliban belong to two "different fields of
action" insofar as, unlike al-Qaeda, which is a
global organization, the Taliban are
Afghanistan-centric. The supreme irony is that it
needed over 10 years of fighting for the US to
recognize this elemental truth. At any rate, June
17 has been set as the date for the UN Security
Council to approve the proposals leading to the
return of the Taliban to mainstream Afghan
political life.
Moscow gaining
influence Without doubt, Karzai's arrival
in Islamabad a week ahead has been carefully
timed. As the Wall Street Journal noted:
The coordinated push to end the
international isolation of Taliban leaders comes
as the administration of US President Barack
Obama is joining Mr Karzai in ramping up efforts
to secure a solid peace deal that could bring an
end to a decade of war in Afghanistan ... As the
US prepares to scale back its military presence
in Afghanistan this summer, the Obama
administration is making peace talks a new
priority. But Afghan and American officials have
so far had a difficult time finding legitimate
Taliban leaders willing to talk.
A
kind of regional consensus is also emerging that
the Afghan war is endangering everyone's security.
Things can change if in the downstream of a
settlement the Taliban try to grab power in their
hands. But the probability is low, given the
movement's present weakened strength, lack of
unity and the remote possibility that the
Pakistani state would once again jump into the
fray and commit huge resources in the full glare
of international scrutiny. Therefore, regional
powers are not losing sleep over the prospect of a
civil war ensuing from reconciliation with the
Taliban.
Karzai's visit is taking place
just ahead of the summit meeting of the Shanghai
Cooperation Organization (SCO) in Astana next
Wednesday, which is expected to see the induction
of Afghanistan as an "observer" and the granting
of full membership to Pakistan.
The
participation of the two countries in the
processes of the single-most influential regional
security organization cannot but impact on the
overall climate of Afghan-Pakistani relationship.
Suffice to say that for the first time,
Afghanistan-Pakistan cogitations over the peace
process will have one more facilitator or
moderator or monitor - depending on one's
perspective - other than the US.
The big
push by the Kremlin to give verve to a strategic
partnership between Russia and Pakistan as well as
Moscow's "return" to Afghanistan becomes yet
another new template of Afghan-Pakistani
interactions. So far, only Washington has enjoyed
special proximity with Kabul and Islamabad. It is
entirely conceivable that Russia is placing itself
for a similar status in the coming period.
What's more, all indications are that
Moscow is moving in close coordination with
Beijing. Both Russia and China (and Pakistan) are
determined that beyond 2014, the US does not keep
a permanent military base in Afghanistan. On his
part, Karzai wants continued US assistance and
involvement, but the issue of American military
bases will be far too delicate for him not to put
before a specially convened loya jirga
(grand council), as he has promised, given the
strong current of Afghan mass opinion militating
against any form of foreign occupation of their
country.
A battle of wits In
sum, everything points toward a favorable backdrop
for Kabul and Islamabad to kickstart a peace
process, finally. Both capitals profess that
Washington will be a participant in such a process
- and neither is exaggerating the fact. Indeed,
they will be downright unrealistic to visualize
that there can be an Afghan settlement without the
US's involvement and backing.
But neither
is likely to seek or offer a "larger-than-life"
role for the US in the peace process or hand over
the steering wheel to it. Their trust deficit with
the US runs far too deep, thanks to flawed US
policies over recent years - bullying Karzai and
humiliating him and even seeking his replacement
on the one hand, while on the other hand sowing
the seeds of doubt in the Pakistani mind about
American intentions toward Pakistan.
If
the Afghan presidential election of 2009 remains a
searing memory for Karzai, the "debriefing" of the
key US intelligence operative Raymond Davis
through two full months of gruelling interrogation
in Lahore has stunned the Pakistani military about
the dangerous ramifications of the US's covert
operations for Pakistan's security and stability.
The US is desperately trying to make amends, but
it is all happening too late. An engrossing
three-way battle of wits is about to commence on
Saturday.
Ambassador M K
Bhadrakumar was a career diplomat in the
Indian Foreign Service. His assignments included
the Soviet Union, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Germany,
Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kuwait and
Turkey.
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