History was in the making on the afternoon of Friday, November 14, 2014. Throwing aside diplomatic norms, Ashraf Ghani, on his first state visit to Pakistan after being sworn in as Afghanistan’s president, visited the GHQ immediately after landing in Islamabad. Former Pakistani Ambassador to Kabul Rustam Shah Mohmand commented that a foreign head of state heading straight towards a military headquarters on arrival carries a lot more than ceremonial importance: “The Afghan president means business; he knows where the real power rests.” He does indeed!
With the Pakistani Prime Minister (PM) still winging his way back from the UK, Mian Nawaz Sharif’s point man for Afghanistan, the PM’s national security and foreign affairs advisor, Sartaj Aziz, who met Ashraf Ghani soon after his inauguration as president, represented the cabinet. Ashraf Ghani remarked that he had immediately made up his mind to accept General Raheel Sharif’s invitation to visit the GHQ when the Chief of Army Staff (COAS) had visited Kabul a few days earlier. These visits, along with that of newly appointed Director General Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Lieutenant General Rizwan Akhtar only two days after assuming office, triggered a visible change in Kabul’s attitude towards Pakistan.
A pragmatic and detailed GHQ briefing outlining the developing regional security environment post-2014, in particular the emerging IS threat, evoked a spontaneous and warm response. Paying tributes to the sacrifices made by our soldiers, President Ghani said his unprecedented GHQ visit underscored a firm resolve for strengthening bilateral security and defence ties. His delegation therefore included the entire range of the Afghan civilian and military hierarchy: First Deputy Chief Executive Mohmand Khan and Abdullah Abdullah’s number two man, Ahmad Zia Masood, Special Envoy to the Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani’s closest confidante and National Security Advisor Mohammad Hanif Atmar, Afghan Defence Minister General Bismillah Muhammadi and the Chief of the General Staff General Sher Muhammad Karimi. Not physically present, Vice President General Rashid Dostum and Gulbaddin Hekmatyar were represented. All decisions would have the full backing of all political and military leaderships of Afghanistan.
Among major decisions taken during the GHQ meeting were real time intelligence sharing, brigade strength training for Afghan defence and security personnel and avoiding unnecessary recrimination through the media or through any third party, facilitated by a hot link between the two armies, etc. Army chief General Sharif emphasised that a peaceful and stable Afghanistan was in the best interest of Pakistan and that the only way to ensure regional security was to treat terrorism “as our common enemy”, preventing militants in sanctuaries on either side from crossing the porous 1,500 mile long border. Afghan Defence Minister Bismillah Muhammadi went even further with “a proposal for a joint military” that was also floated to “likely become a reality soon”.
Terming the full-fledged and multi-faceted talks between the Pakistani PM and himself an enormous achievement, the Afghan president summarised them as “a shared vision to serve as the heart of Asia, ensuring economic integration by enhancing connectivity between South and Central Asia through energy, gas and oil pipelines becoming a reality and not remaining a dream. In the narrative for the future for our people, the most neglected of our people are going to become stakeholders in a prosperous economy and in stable and peaceful countries. Our faiths are linked because terror knows no boundaries.” In statesmanship par excellence of the kind that people living across the divide of the Durand Line have been bereft of during the Karzai decade of venom and hatred, Ashraf Ghani commented, “We have overcome obstacles of 13 years in three days. We will not permit the past to destroy the future.”
The danger of destroying the future comes from ‘spoilers’ with a vested interest to protect their nuisance value by keeping the region unstable. Elements in the Pakistani media were activated on short notice with sentiments such as: “How come the Afghan president visited the GHQ directly without being accompanied by (or having met) the president, PM or any senior cabinet minister?” With militants fighting against Pakistan likely to lose their Afghan safe havens, their religious proxies are already going to town against our security establishment. Both Afghanistan and Pakistan have to be very watchful about incidents and instigation; an all-out effort will be made to create problems. Take for example the remarks wrongfully attributed to Sartaj Aziz on how “militants posing no threat to Pakistan should not be targeted”. Taken out of context it was a blatant misrepresentation meant to embarrass the army chief during his US visit.
With Hamid Karzai singularly fixated on anti-Pakistan rhetoric, bilateral ties had remained quite frosty. Once Ghani took office, his most important step was cancelling the arms deal his predecessor had concluded with India. Pakistan does not protest India’s friendship with Afghanistan but that cannot be used as a platform against Pakistan. Determined to have honest cooperation and friendship, the new Afghan president seems bent on bringing about a paradigm change for the better. Given the genuine open-heartedness and bonhomie seen and felt during the visit, there has never been an opportunity as favourable as exists today.
The day after the GHQ visit, the Indian media went berserk, reacting adversely to the rather sudden and unexpected rapprochement between the Afghan and Pakistan security establishments. The decades of vitriol that India had instilled within the Afghan military psyche took less than two hours to dissipate. By the time the MI-17 helicopter carrying the Afghan president took off from the GHQ at around five pm, the ‘great game’ had undergone a 180-degree sea change. The visit of COAS General Sharif to the US thus gained added importance. The US can only feel relieved and satisfied that the rapprochement it has been trying to initiate for the last decade to stabilise the region has finally taken place. In the face of the developing IS threat, the Pakistan army’s role is of critical importance to the peace and stability of the region. Which other army in the world has taken on jihadists successfully?
Even given the historical affinity, the love-fest realpolitik will dominate emotions, a cold calculated pragmatic realism based on economics. Dependent upon ‘revenue’ from those passing through their geographical location for centuries, Afghans stand to make billions of US dollars from royalties on gas pipelines, power transmission lines and traffic on the Central Asian Corridor. Economically, Pakistan may not need Afghanistan as much as Afghanistan needs Pakistan but without gas and power, our economic resurgence will remain moribund. Both countries stand to gain exponentially.
Accolades are appropriate for the Sharif government for a most significant major foreign policy success and (one dare say) a political and economic force multiplier. For the first time in three decades we can look with some hope towards peace and stability in the region. Mian sahib must now look inwards and carry out the electoral reforms vital for both political and economic emancipation of the masses.
The writer is a defence analyst and security expert