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2 Afghan
endgame has Pakistan shuddering By Brian M Downing
The war in
Afghanistan has been stalemated for several years
now and eyes are turning to a negotiated
settlement. In recent weeks, talks between the
United States and the Taliban have come and gone,
but they will almost assuredly return.
As
welcome as these bilateral talks are, they all but
ignore the vital interests of regional actors such
as Russia, China, India, Iran and perhaps most
importantly, Pakistan. All of them will let their
interests be known, directly or indirectly,
cleverly or clumsily.
The Pakistani army
and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) have
considerable influence with the Taliban and with
many other militant groups along the Durand Line
that separates Afghanistan
and Pakistan. Having cut off US and
International Security Assistance Forces (ISAF)
supply lines through their country, these
Pakistani security institutions feel they have
expertly maneuvered the US into a corner.
The generals will be in an important
position once negotiations restart, but how
artfully they use it and what a settlement will
bring are up in the air. Negotiations and a
settlement could present the generals in their
Rawalpindi compounds with major problems.
Generals and mullahs The
Taliban emerged in the mid-1990s amid the chaotic
aftermath of the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 and the
collapse of the communist government in 1992 when
former mujahideen groups formed from madrassa
students regathered to fight warlords and bandits.
Their success won support from many war-weary
Afghans but also from Pakistani generals. The
generals wanted a strategic partner to the north
that would expel Indian influence and safeguard
commerce between the new Central Asian republics
and Pakistani ports.
The generals and the
mullahs shared the amalgam of religious and
political creeds taught in Deobandi
madrassas (seminaries), which opposed
Hindus and Shi'ites alike and endowed Pakistani
national security with a religious aura. Indeed,
the uprisings against the Soviet-backed government
in 1979 were to a considerable extent orchestrated
by the Pakistani army in conjunction with the
United States Central Intelligence Agency. This
led to the Soviet invasion and decades of
intermittent war and instability.
The
generals are in a position to influence the
Taliban by withholding supplies, arresting members
of the group's council in Quetta and Karachi, or
most drastically giving the whereabouts of
principals to US intelligence and awaiting the
inevitable. The generals will doubtless seek a
settlement that restores Pakistani hegemony in
Afghanistan and lucrative commerce with Central
Asia. They will insist that the Taliban hold fast
to the anti-Hindu agenda and see that India is
expelled from the north or at least limited to
enterprises that benefit Pakistan, such as the
export of ores through Karachi.
India has
won support from non-Pashtun peoples in the north
who loathe the Taliban and see Pakistan as
supporting the insurgency and the assassination
campaign against northern leaders. India will find
support from Russia, which seeks to check Islamic
militancy along the Durand Line and Chinese
influence in Central Asia. Iran too will support
India as it sees the Taliban as a Sunni cult with
ties to Saudi Arabia, with which it is vying for
dominance in the Persian Gulf.
This could
mean that Pakistani interests, as construed and
advanced by its generals, will complicate
negotiations and possibly even bring them to an
impasse. Another complicating if not ruinous
matter is the Kashmir question, which is central
to Pakistani nationalism. News reports and school
teachings assert that India stole the parts of
Kashmir now under New Delhi's control and Pakistan
must wrest all of Kashmir from Hindu dominance.
Few historians outside of Pakistan agree with this
position and few Kashmiris wish to trade India's
rule for Pakistan's. But no matter, Kashmir is an
id้e fixe in the Pakistani imagination.
Detaching Kashmir from Indian control is a
veritable creed in the Pakistani army. It
commingles with notions of institutional honor and
national mission, which enhance the ardor devoted
to the creed. The army trains several militant
groups to operate in Kashmir and conducts
diversionary operations to aid their infiltration
across the frontier. It has fought two wars over
it (1965 and 1971) and lost them both, infusing
their creed with the need to avenge humiliation.
The generals almost undoubtedly see their
support of the Taliban, their constriction of US
supply lines, and their parleys with China as
masterful movements that will culminate in
settling the Kashmir question in their favor.
Failure would bring more dishonor. Further, it
would cause the militant groups trained to
liberate Kashmir to turn against their state
sponsors. So zealous are many in these groups such
as Lashkar-e-Toiba that when the generals counsel
restraint, they demand to be set loose and even
vent their wrath by attacking Pakistani generals
and politicians.
Pashtun
ascendance For all their strategic and
religious affinities, the Taliban and the generals
in Rawalpindi are distinct entities with interests
that overlap, at least for a while, but are not
identical. Fissures may already have surfaced. Two
years ago, Pakistan arrested and detained a
handful of Taliban principals thought to be on the
verge of unsanctioned talks with the US.
Pakistan's concern with India's presence
in the north may exceed the Taliban's concern,
anti-Hindu though they are. This could lead to a
harder line than the Taliban shura would
want. Pakistan may seek to have the preponderance
of Afghan resources shipped from its ports on the
Arabian Sea (rather than north into Russia or west
into Iran) and to impose hefty transit fees as
well.
Further, Pakistani generals see the
Taliban-controlled areas in southern and eastern
Afghanistan as a redoubt in case of war with India
and will seek a presence there. The generals will
see those provinces as an autonomous region of
sorts strongly influenced from their headquarters
in Rawalpindi.
The Taliban have been
misjudged by almost all powers as Pashtun
bumpkins, unsophisticated in matters of the world
around them. Their artful communiques and
effective campaigns indicate otherwise. Pakistan
may be the latest power to take them lightly.
The past three decades of fighting foreign
armies and non-Pashtun peoples has brought greater
interaction and a somewhat stronger Pashtun
identity. The Pashtun in Afghanistan have fought
Russians, Tajiks, Uzbeks, and now the Americans
and their allies, though they have also fought
each other.
Some Pashtun tribes served
with the Russians against the mujahideen, later
allied with the old Northern Alliance against the
Taliban, and are now supportive of the
Western-backed Hamid Karzai government in Kabul.
Nonetheless, the Taliban have coalesced a sizable
cluster of tribes in the south and east, through
parley, force, or apparent inevitability.
The Pashtun across the frontier in
Pakistan see their language forcibly supplanted by
Urdu in newspapers and schools - a formula for
ethnic resentment. Many Pashtun tribes south of
the Durand Line have revolted against Islamabad's
presence and its alliance with the US. They have
formed the Tehrik-e-Taliban (Pakistan Taliban -
TTP), an umbrella organization of Pashtun tribes,
which has stalemated the Pakistani army and which
executes horrific bombing attacks on a regular
basis.
The wars have led to tribal parleys
and alliances that have brought a measure of
common purpose to some of the disparate tribes
that compose the Pashtun nation on both sides of
the frontier. The Taliban are not at present a
Pashtun nationalist movement, though their
movement has very little support from non-Pashtun
peoples in the north and indeed the Taliban's
staunchest domestic foes are their non-Pashtun
"countrymen" - a formula for nationalist
sentiment.
The Taliban claim to be an
Islamist movement, above the petty claims and
mundane prejudices of tribalism and nationalism. A
settlement, however, would leave them in official
control of at least some Pashtun regions - and
force them to contend with the petty claims and
mundane prejudices therein. Islamist ideology does
not offer meaningful guidance on improving
harvests, developing mineralogical resources, or
finding export routes.
Pakistan's
territorial integrity The border between
Afghanistan and Pakistan is an arbitrary creation
of the British that is spottily demarcated and
rarely respected. Pashtun old-timers and members
of the middle classes will remember Afghanistan's
vehement but powerless opposition to granting
Pashtun lands to Pakistan. They are considered
integral parts of Afghanistan unjustly wrested
from them by the British army long ago and held
today by their sepoys. Many favored being part of
Hindu-dominated India rather than part of a
Punjabi-dominated Pakistan. [1]
After the
Indian partition in 1947, Afghan governments
officially supported creation of an independent
Pashtun embracing what is now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa
(previously known as North-West Frontier
Province), the Federally Administered Tribal Area,
and curiously enough, the western Pakistani
province of Balochistan. The Balochs are not
Pashtun; Kabul was simply playing upon Baloch
resentment upon losing its autonomy to the
Pakistani state.
Pakistan recognizes a
double threat in Pashtun and Baloch aspirations.
Balochistan already has a low-level insurgency
against Pakistani administration, which is
oriented around resource extraction and harsh
repression. Baloch attacks have been part of
China's reluctance to build a naval base in Gwadar
and proceed with economic projects - rich though
Balochistan may be in gold and hydrocarbons.
Lingering Afghan claims, an ascendant
Pashtun movement, and an increasingly hostile and
perhaps vengeful US make for anxiety in Pakistan,
as Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan constitute
about 60% of the country's land mass. And
territorial integrity has been of paramount
concern since losing East Pakistan (now
Bangladesh) in 1971.
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