Afghanistan and ‘Pakistan’s foreign policy elite’

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Afghanistan and 'Pakistan's foreign policy elite'

 S Iftikhar Murshed
Sunday, September 18, 2011


The Jinnah Institute and the United States Institute of Peace have
published a report titled, "Pakistan, the United States and the End
Game in Afghanistan: Perceptions of Pakistan's Foreign Policy Elite."
The phrase "endgame" has a sinister connotation and implies
endorsement of external interference in Afghanistan while the phrase
"foreign policy elite" is as hallucinatory as it is amusing. The
magnum opus contains the distillate of six roundtable sessions
involving 39 discussants and interviews with several political leaders
between last March and July.

Fifty-three participants, several of whom are known to be loquacious
and opinionated, were involved in the project and, understandably, not
all the views expressed during the deliberations were included in the
report. Many of the "foreign policy elite" have never set foot in
Afghanistan or interacted with the main stakeholders in that country,
and their expertise is at best theoretical.

What emerged was a regurgitation of known perceptions, not one of
which was distinguished by the priceless virtue of originality.
Despite this, the authors of the report were able to collate the
overall trend of thought with remarkable precision. The exercise was
useful in the sense that it unwittingly exposed yet again the
fundamental flaws and contradictions in Pakistan's Afghan policy. The
most important of these is interference in the internal affairs of
Afghanistan.

This is evident from the two "overriding objectives" identified in the
report. The first envisages an Afghan settlement that does not have
negative fallout on Pakistan and generate "resentment among Pakistani
Pakhtuns." The second is the obsession with ensuring that the
government in Kabul will "not be antagonistic to Pakistan."

The emphasis on establishing "an inclusive" Afghan dispensation with
"adequate Pakhtun representation" smacks of double standards. It
implies that Islamabad arrogates to itself the right to advise the
Afghans about the ethnic composition of their government. Reciprocity
is a fundamental element of diplomatic practice and one wonders
whether "the foreign policy elite" would concede a similar right to
the Afghans.

Of the six countries that have contiguous borders with Afghanistan, it
is only China that has never interfered in its internal affairs.
Pakistan has been pilloried often enough for its monstrous fantasies
and misshapen dreams of establishing strategic depth in Afghanistan,
but similarly intrusive policies of the other states in the region
have been largely ignored.

The extent of Tehran's interference in Afghanistan with the complicity
of the Central Asian republics has been huge and was exposed, to cite
just one example, when an entire trainload of Iranian weapons was
detained by the Kyrgyz authorities at the border town of Osh in the
autumn of 1998. The train had travelled from Iran and was allowed to
pass through Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan but was impounded at Osh
because the Iranians had not bribed the Kyrgyz customs officials.

The previous year, during a meeting with Ahmed Shah Masood in the
Farkhar Valley, I saw several warehouses full of crated weapons and
ammunition with the Persian inscription in bold ink, marg bar Amrika!
("Death to America!") These Iranian weapons supplies could only have
been possible with the connivance of the Central Asian republics.

These intrusive policies, ignored in the Jinnah Institute study, have
been entirely counterproductive. The Iranians came to grief with the
massacre of their consulate personnel in Mazar-e-Sharif after the
Taliban's capture of northern Afghanistan in August 1998. On Nov 4,
1998, Col Mehmoud Khudoybordiev, an Afghan Uzbek commander loyal to
Abdul Rashid Dostum, captured the Khojand area of Tajikistan briefly.
The following day the Tajik foreign minister, Talbak Nazarov, admitted
that the turbulence in his country was being stoked by elements in
Afghanistan and the weapons that Khudoybordiev had used were sent to
the Northern Alliance from his country.

But it is Pakistan that has suffered the most by its reliance on proxy
warriors in the pursuit of its regional ambitions. Through a process
of reverse osmosis the non-state actors that it previously sponsored
pose the greatest contemporary threat to its own security. Instead of
fretting about the type of government that should or should not be in
place in Kabul, Pakistan should set its own house in order. The
efficacy of a country's foreign policy is directly proportional to its
internal strength and stability.

Pakistan's obsessive concern about the need for a friendly
dispensation in Kabul is myopic and an outcome of a static view of
external relations. There is no permanence in friendship or, for that
matter, enmity in foreign policy. The only element that is permanent
is national self-interest, but even this mutates with the perpetually
transforming geopolitical realities.

The art of diplomacy, like that of the alchemist, is the ability to
turn dross into gold. Even if a particular government in Afghanistan
is "antagonistic," it is the function of diplomacy to reduce tensions
and build areas of mutually beneficial cooperation. A point missed out
by the "foreign policy elite" is the element of geography in the
Pakistan-Afghanistan equation. No government in landlocked Afghanistan
can afford to sustain hostility towards Pakistan over an extended
period. In this sense the two countries have a gravitational pull
towards each other which no amount of Indian influence in Afghanistan
can dilute.

The participants in the Jinnah Institute project were convinced that
"the main Taliban factions," and in particular "Mullah Omar's 'Quetta
Shura' and the Haqqani network," would have "to be a part of the new
political arrangement." This is easier said than done, because Mullah
Omar styles himself as Amir-ul-Momineen and believes that he is the
permanent ruler of Afghanistan. The obvious implication is that the
present Afghan constitution has no place in Mullah Omar's Islamic
Emirate of Afghanistan.

The longest-ever public statement from Mullah Omar was in the form of
an Eid-ul-fitr message on Aug 28, in which he: (i) admitted that there
had been negotiations with the US, but insisted that these were
confined only to the release of prisoners; (ii) demanded the immediate
withdrawal of all foreign troops and ruled out any possibility of US
bases in Afghanistan; (iii) held out the assurance that all ethnic
groups would be included in the future government; (iv) urged
government officials not to cooperate with the "invaders"; and (v)
dismissed the forthcoming Bonn meeting on Afghanistan as
inconsequential.

Mullah Omar's rule in Afghanistan came to an inglorious end on Dec 7,
2001. In the decade since then the Taliban organisation has fractured
and it is uncertain how much influence he wields in the country.
However, from the tenor of his message it is apparent that he still
considers himself the undisputed leader of Afghanistan and this
implies that any future intra-Afghan dialogue will be on his terms.

The participants in the Jinnah Institute initiative "perceived the
bloated size" of the Afghan army as "unsustainable and a threat to
Pakistan's interests." But none of them mentioned the increasing
number of defections. Statistics compiled by Nato show that between
January and June there were 24,000 desertions, and in June alone the
number was 5,000, or nearly three percent of the 170,000 force. The
trend has grave implications for the post-2014 stability of
Afghanistan.

It must have been with tongue in cheek that "Pakistan's foreign policy
elite" identified Afghanistan's modest revenue collection capacity,
high levels of corruption, the linkage between external financing and
job creation, the slow start of public infrastructure projects and
President Karzai's lack of credibility, which was an "impediment in
ensuring good governance," as the maladies afflicting that country.
Seldom has there been a more outrageous example of the pot calling the
kettle black and the Afghans would be perfectly justified in retorting
"Physician, heal thyself!"