Daily Times

In his speech while inaugurating the Kabul process meeting on June 6, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani had asked pungently, “Our problem, our challenge, is that we cannot figure out what it is that Pakistan wants”. That might be our problem too. Because there’s very little that makes sense in Pakistan’s Afghan policy right now.

The situation in which Afghan government is operating is in itself a large part of the problem. President Ashraf Ghani is co-heading the coalition National Unity Government (NUG) after a massively rigged and controversial elections held in April 2014. This was the time when Pakistan’s Zarb-e-Azb operation in North Waziristan had been launched.

The election controversy was ‘handled’ by then Secretary of State John Kerry with his timely and effective intervention. As part of that settlement, the ethnic balance was reflected through an extraordinary measure of introducing the position of chief executive in parallel to the presidency. That brought the Tajik Abdullah Abdullah to share power with the Pashtun Ashraf Ghani who laid off his tribal surname (Ahmedzai) just before assuming power.

The Ghani administration had inherited deep distrust of Pakistan’s role, from its predecessor Hamid Karzai’s tenure. Our constant denials notwithstanding, there had been a virtual consensus among the international community that the Taliban and their affiliated Haqqani Network had support and sanctuaries in Pakistan as a matter of policy.

Just before his retirement, the then chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, had described the Haqqani network as a ‘veritable arm’ of the ISI and asserted that Pakistan was using ‘violent extremism as an instrument of policy.’

Even after the embarrassing Abbottabad operation by the US forces that took out Osama Bin Laden from his purpose-built compound, Pakistan’s skillful diplomacy – that mostly revolved around constant public denials of support to Taliban while using their existence as an unbeatable leverage on the table, and massive civilian casualties of terrorism within Pakistan as an evidence of us being victims of terrorism -deflected all US pressure to ‘do more’ and Karzai’s cajoling of Pakistan into giving up support for the Taliban without addressing our’ strategic concerns’ in Afghanistan.

Ashraf Ghani had started his term as Afghan president by reaching out to Pakistan

Karzai milked the hyper nationalist cow bystanding up to Pakistan and the United States, but this could not do much in bringing peace to his country.

Meanwhile, as per Obama’s announced plan for the drawdown of US troops from Afghanistan, the number of US troops till January 2014 had come down to around 40,000 from a whooping 77,000 in 2012. This was the time we started our military operation in North Waziristan that the US had been demanding for several years. The time of ‘our choice’ corresponded with the drawdown and Afghan elections. The consequence of the timing of this action was that there was a huge influx of Taliban (Pakistani and Afghan) in Afghan areas along the Pakistan border. Not only that, the long drawn political debate about whether to talk to TTP or not before the ZeA and subsequent talks process delayed the operation enough to give Taliban and the Haqqanis, a comfortable time span to relocate safely in new havens.

This was the inherited mess Ghana and Abdullah assumed the leadership of. Ghana, however, started his term by reaching out to Pakistan. His policy got a severe backlash from multiple political actors within Afghanistan but he continued till a series of bombings in Kabul and other areas from August to November 2014 when he had to curtly call out Islamabad for stopping Taliban from violence and bringing them to peace table. Pakistan’s COAS had to go to Kabul in the wake of a devastating attack on children of Army Public School in December that year. That was the time when both the countries should have buried the bitter past for good and have shunned their proxies to save innocent civilians on both sides. Unfortunately it didn’t happen.

The Heart of Asia process and subsequent Quadrilateral Talks (involving Pakistan, Afghanistan, USA and China) were in full swing when the news of Mullah Omar’s death was leaked and the entire process fell flat. Meanwhile, Afghanistan continued blaming everything bad that happened in Afghanistan, directly on Pakistan. There were reports within the ‘think tank circles’ in Afghanistan about how the Afghan intelligence agency, National Directorate of Security (NDS), was looking the other way when the locals reported to them of the presence of TTP in border areas. Neither the Afghan forces nor the US drones helped Pakistan get to the terrorists of TTP who were playing havoc in Pakistan. Afghan and Pakistan security agencies are not ready ever since, to acknowledge their own responsibility in dismantling the support structures of their terrorists who operated from the other side of the Durand Line.

Marvi Sirmed is a staff member and can be emailed at marvisirmed@gmail.com, accessed on Twitter @marvisirmed

Published in Daily Times, June 24th, 2017.