Pakistan’s foreign policy is devoid of any history and sense of changing dynamics. We are stuck somewhere in the fault lines of the cold war era with no indication of ever-evolving and emerging regional and global realities.
This is best summed up in the disastrous Afghan policy and the comment of the former DG ISI Gen Faiz Hameed after the fall of Ashraf Ghani govt, “Don’t worry everything will be alright,” which, of course, was far from being a pragmatic or true assessment of the situation.
The duplicity in our policy towards one set of Taliban in Afghanistan and another in Pakistan TTP envisaged by many as fundamentally flawed unfolded once again in the shape of the recent Karachi police station attack and deadly Peshawar Mosque bombing. The spike in terrorist activities post-Taliban takeover in Afghanistan in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Baluchistan might be the tip of the iceberg. and also indicate our disastrous misadventure in Afghanistan and things far from being stable on our western borders.
Our policymakers naively anticipated that enjoying very close-knit relations with Afghan Taliban, they will certainly sway under Pakistan pressure and not allow their territory to be used against Pakistan. Hopefully, this misconception comes to an end among our security establishment now.
Our policymakers naively anticipated that enjoying close-knit relations with Afghan Taliban will certainly sway under Pakistan pressure.
Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan has changed the dynamics of the power equation between Pakistan and their ideological brothers TTP.
We tried to adopt a policy of engagement towards the TTP, which led to a temporary ceasefire, however, the truce collapsed, and it is believed that the TTP used that period to organise and rearm itself.
It indicates we have no strategy regarding dealing with TTP, and with this disastrous calculation, we now have a fully fledge arrived TTP in Pakistan. What part of our policymaking failed to understand is that terror outfits not only challenge the concept of the modern nation-state system but by killing more than 150 children in Peshawar in 2014, they are devoid of all rights of negotiation and resettlement in the country.
Our policy also failed to comprehend that expectation and support for Afghan Taliban in 2021 is bound to backfire, since it is not 1996 and there is still a semi-dormant insurgency in their backyard, and the insurgents want the same goals which have been achieved more or less by Afghan Taliban in Afghanistan
Many voices from the merged districts of Pakistan feared the revival of the TTP after the takeover of the most regressive ideological regime in Kabul and they constantly alluded to impending doom in the region. However, those voices were ignored.
Pakistan mainstream celebrated the fall of the Ashraf Ghani govt and the takeover of the Taliban in Afghanistan as a good omen for the bilateral relations and forgot that we have to deal with TTP whose leadership was either in hiding in Afghanistan or languishing in Kabul jail under Ashraf Ghani govt. The depth of the TTP-Afghan Taliban understanding became clear when all those were freed by the Taliban. TTP chief Noor Wali Mehsud and his commanders are believed to be roaming freely in Kabul and operating with greater freedom out of their Afghan bases since the Taliban takeover.
One also speculates what makes Pakistan policymakers think that they have the leverage over a terror-inflicting regime of the Taliban. After the Peshawar Mosque bombing, Interior Minister Rana Sanaullah Khan talking to a local channel proclaimed that Taliban rulers of Afghanistan must stand by their commitment to the international community to not allow anyone to use their soil for attacks against another country.
To this date, Afghan Taliban have yet to honour their promises to the international community, allowing girls education, human rights, governance, and security and in return, they can potentially have their frozen billion dollars released while we are in our unprecedented economic chaos not much to offer. Complex foreign policy situations can produce different interpretations of which policy choices are in the “national interest.”
However, with more than another 100 dead and 200 wounded in the deadliest attack in a decade in Peshawar Mosque along with the Karachi police station attack, the question the establishment must be asking themselves that what is in the national interest of this state and its people and how far we are willing to let the concept of “collateral damage” dominate our debate. While foreign policy analysis, discussions and debates seek to replicate successes, we continue to replicate failure and myopic decisions at a crucial juncture of our history.
The writer is from the merged districts of the former FATA.