Daily Times

In the agenda he announced
for his hopefully-third-time-lucky government, the new prime minister’s focus was on some of the most immediate measures needed. Justifiably so. But there are also longer term imperatives that need at least a conceptual understanding. Core among these is the impending departure of US forces from the Afghanistan theatre.

US governmental circles have used the term ‘AfPak’ for the two neighbouring states of Afghanistan and Pakistan, a term that has caused many among us to bristle with outraged national pride at being so banded to the other entity. But is it so unreasonable an appellation, given history as it has actually developed? After all, for more than 2,000 years, from the time of ancient Gandhara until the British Raj annexed Punjab in 1849, the regions of Kabul and Lahore were ruled by the same power. Given the realities of geography, this is hardly surprising. The present day national borders, after all, are very much a present day creation.

However, the preservation of these national borders is important to us as Pakistanis. Therefore it is important that we comprehend both our Afghan neighbour and ourselves, so that we can define a more valid relationship between our Siamese-twin states.

Consider Afghanistan. This particularly unfortunate stretch of earth — one of the two or three most backward countries — was for a long time relatively unknown to the world outside the narcotic haze of the so-called ‘hippy trail’. Harry Truman’s notorious “Afghanistan-Bananistan!” comment exemplified the foreign affairs perceptiveness of many Americans at the time. The point is that our national neighbour seems no less an area of darkness in the minds of many of our countrymen today as in that of President Truman all those decades ago.

It is first necessary to appreciate that there are two quite distinct natural regions within Afghanistan, divided from one another by the great mountains of the Hindu Kush (‘Indian Killer’) range and its spurs. To the north of this range, the Northern Plain is continuous with the Central Asian steppes; it has historically been known variously as Aryana (homeland of the so-called Aryans so important to Brahmin priests and European racists), Bactria to the Greeks, and as the Khorasan province of Persia. The Southern Plateau, mostly bordering Pakistan, is a semi-arid region of high plateaus, linked from the days of ancient Gandhara down to the end of the Moghul Empire with the history of what is now Pakistan. The two regions of Afghanistan are ethnically differentiable, the south being predominantly Pashtun and the north having a Tajik majority; Uzbeks and numerous smaller ethnic entities also exist in each region. The city of Kabul sits at a strategic location a little south of the passes that penetrate the Hindu Kush.

Afghanistan was a centre for the creative, artistic splendours of ancient Gandhara and of the more recent Persian, Ghaznavid, Ghaurid, Timurid and Moghul Empires. It has gifted the Muslim world with such outstanding intellectual figures as Jalaluddin Rumi, Firdowsi and Jamaluddin Afghani, among many others.

Contrary to the myth of Afghan unconquerability, it was divided or conquered by first one empire, then the other, until the rise of Ahmed Shah Abdali in 1747. His descendants are known as the Durranis.

Under Abdali’s less able successors, this kingdom lost its south-western provinces to the Kajar Shahs of Iran and portions of its northern regions to Czarist Russia, leaving approximately the Afghanistan of today. Through the 19th century’s Great Games, there was continual external meddling in Afghanistan, successfully by the Punjab of Ranjit Singh, less successfully by the Russian Czars and the British Raj. Despite external meddling, the state entity of Afghanistan remained remarkably intact for two centuries. This is in sharp contrast to each and every one of its neighbouring states.

The state of Afghanistan, as it had taken shape under the Durrani kings, did not possess any of the features of a modern nation-state. Geographically and culturally divided, it was, right up until the overthrow of Zahir Shah in 1973, a monarchy, centred at Kabul, in which the king was liege-lord to a multitude of tribal chieftains of varying ethnicities, who shared in his sovereignty.

It was this status that was brought to an end with the destruction of Durrani sovereignty by Daoud Khan’s coup d’état in 1973. The communist-inspired ‘Great Saur Revolution’ of 1978 put the last nail into the coffin of the Durrani monarchy. The subsequent 30-odd years of warfare and disorder have amply confirmed its demise.

The point I would like my readers to consider is that the present state configuration that centres on Kabul, and of which Hamid Karzai is the president, is an artificial entity, contrived and assembled by the Bonn Accords of 2001. It has, by all available evidence, failed to find roots amongst the people and is held together only by the will of the outside world. In the context that the armed strength behind that external will has failed to eliminate the Taliban-al Qaeda challenge, and is in fact retreating from the region, it will not take long for the Afghan state, a collapsed monarchy, to disintegrate.

The question is: with the collapse of the Afghanistan state into mutually warring components — some governed by the Taliban and their proxies, some by the Tajiks or Uzbeks, and others by local warlords and by factions and gangs that we have not heard of yet — will Pakistan also be sucked into the entropic chaos of this Central Asian Black Hole?

What then should a neighbour like Pakistan do? We have been ruinously damaged by the multi-dimensional backlash of our former interventions in Afghanistan. We are deluged by drugs, Kalashnikovs, the terror campaigns of the TTP and their violent insurgency. We could ourselves face a massive spreading of the anarchy emanating from the collapsing state of Afghanistan. The best policy would be to sort out our own problems — including the war we are in denial about being ‘our’ war — and leave Afghanistan to its own destiny. Seal the border, physically fencing it if need be, and studiously avoid the possibly fatal mistake of once again involving Pakistan in Afghanistan’s affairs.

There is a real danger that the term AfPak, popularised by the late US diplomat Richard Holbrooke, could indicate the embrace in which these two states are entwined, the mutually fatal embrace of two failing states.

The writer is a marketing consultant
based in Karachi. He is also a poet