The writer is a senior journalist.
The attack on the Torkham post by Afghan border forces is perhaps the worst ever since the Pakistani side increased its efforts to enforce border management across the Durand Line – resulting in casualties and closure of the border post for the second time in recent days. Is this the beginning of yet another phase of the decades-old hostilities between Pakistan and Afghanistan or should both help consolidate their interdependent stability?
The bloody legacy of Afghanistan and the Indian subcontinent’s history, the Afghan-British-India rivalry-cum-appeasement and Afghan-Pakistan treacherous relations carry a burden of distrust and reversal of roles for major actors at various turning points of the changing geo-politics. The nature of relations continued after the creation of Pakistan, after the overthrow of Zahir Shah’s monarchy, the rise and fall of the Saur revolution and the successive jihads and counter-jihads in Afghanistan.
If the Afghans failed to create Pakhtunistan and greater Balochistan, Pakistan too did not succeed in retaining the loyalty of the dozens of proxies it had propped up to secure strategic depth while faced with the principal threat on its eastern border. Despite suffering tremendously due to the destabilisation of Afghanistan and giving refuge to millions of Afghans for decades, Pakistan has continued to fail in winning over the Afghans, thanks to underlying ethnic overlapping and perpetual distrust.
Encouraged by the increasing US pressure on Pakistan in the concluding year(s) of the war against terrorism and Pakistan’s isolation both in the region and the world, even a shaky Afghan Unity government seems to be taking a tougher line. Whenever Pakistan tried to regulate movement across the Pak-Afghan border, Afghan governments did not see it as our legitimate right since they refuse to accept the Durand Line as a permanent dividing line.
Even though there are various agreements to effectively manage a 2250 kms porous border to thwart terrorists’ movement across the border, the Afghan side remains adamant in regulating the cross-border movement of goods and people. The story of this dispute goes back to the British colonial rule and it continued even after the creation of the dominion of Pakistan.
But Afghanistan refused to recognise Pakistan for a long time and continued to make a claim over the territories inhabited by the Pakhtuns of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the so-called British Balochistan, who have now been integrated into Pakistan’s mainstream. Afghanistan continued to harbour the bogey of Pakhtunistan for decades in light of the Bannu Resolution passed by the Khudai Khidmatgar or Red Shirt movement led by Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, known as Bacha Khan or the Frontier Gandhi, who was buried outside Jalalabad during the Najeebullah government.
Except for very brief interludes, relations between the two countries remained bitter due to Afghanistan’s irredentist claim on Pak territory. For the divided Pakhtun tribes across the Durand Line, both sides, however, entertained the concerns of the other side in dealing with such tribes – for whom the border did not exist for all practical purposes.
Afghanistan served as a buffer between British India and Czarist Russia (and later the Soviet Union). The southern outer belt of Russia and the Soviet Union was considered the latter’s soft belly and Great Games were played to thwart Russia’s access to warm waters. The so-called buffer status of Afghanistan was, however, broken by the Saur revolution by the indigenous Khalqis and Perchamis. Later, the intrusion of Soviet forces into Afghanistan provoked the US and its allies, who – with help from Pakistan and volunteers from across the Muslim world – launched a protracted undeclared jihad against the communist rule in Afghanistan.
Earlier, thanks to a military operation launched by Gen Ziaul Haq on the orders of the then prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Pakhtun and Baloch nationalist leaders were provided asylum in Kabul. And Bhutto encouraged Maj-Gen Naseerullah Babar to persuade the religious dissidents of a nationalist Dawood government to cross over to Pakistan. These people later became the leaders of the Afghan mujahideen who fought for over a decade against the communists (who were later joined by the Soviet forces at the peak of the cold war period).
The fall of the Najibullah government brought all our mujahideen proxies into power. Instead of bringing peace, they again pushed Afghanistan into an internecine conflict among various hostile jihadi groups, destroying the nation-building undertaken by the communists and the Soviets. With the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the cold war, Afghanistan was left to the destructive power struggles among its holy liberators. That created a unique opportunity for even more puritan Taliban to take over much of Afghanistan – again with the help of Pakistan which immediately recognised Mullah Omar’s rule during the second Nawaz Sharif government.
It is interesting to note that the then prime minister Nawaz Sharif was stunned to watch (on TV) his foreign minister Gohar Ayub declare recognition of the Taliban government in the National Assembly. Later, according to a sitting minister, when asked by the PM on whose direction he had done that, Gohar Ayub told his PM that he had declared it on the instructions of a colonel who was ordered by the GHQ to do so.
Overwhelmed by their easy victory, the Taliban not only enforced a tribal-medieval code of life, but also provided sanctuaries to various terrorist and sectarian groups from Pakistan, the Arab world and Central Asia, including Al-Qaeda. During their rule, the Taliban patronised terrorists wanted by Pakistan; and Mullah Omar reportedly refused to sign an agreement to recognise the Durand Line in the last days of his rule.
The Taliban’s barbaric honeymoon came to an end with 9/11. And yet they refused to ask Osama bin Laden to leave Afghanistan, or hand him over to the powers that be – despite last-minute desperate efforts by the top officials of the military government of Gen Musharraf. In a reversal of roles, Pakistan had to align with the US and its Nato allies when President Bush attacked Afghanistan and overthrew the Taliban government. Like Gen Zia, an isolated Musharraf got international backing when he chose to side with the Americans. Interestingly, the then ISI chief General Mehmood was the first one to coalesce in.
General Musharraf followed a policy of running with the hare and hunting with the hound. The Afghan Taliban leadership was preserved for the end-game, even though this policy of using proxies backfired and Pakistan had to pay a heavy price. Jihadis trained and patronised by us turned their guns on us resulting in over 50,000 deaths and martyrdom of more soldiers than in all the Indo-Pak wars. Our defiant proxies have become a major hurdle in the way of a stable backyard. Two factions of the Taliban are making the best use of the cleavages between the two countries.
At this decisive juncture, by picking a fight with the ‘opportunist Americans’, pushing Afghanistan once again into India’s lap and alienating Iran, we will be jeopardising our existential war against terrorism. What Afghanistan and Pakistan must realise is that, regardless of their past enmity, peace in both countries is dependent on each other. They must not let freelance terrorists and outsiders spoil the broth. http://www.thenews.com.pk/print/128143-A-quagmire-of-mutual-treachery
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