At precisely the conjuncture when Pakistan is in the process of attempting to recreate a new avatar for itself as a 'peacemaker' in Afghanistan, the startling incident of the Afghan Ambassador's daughter's abduction and physical assault in Islamabad has queered an already difficult pitch even further. In response to the incident, and despite the Pakistan Foreign Office holding out all sorts of assurances of getting to the bottom of the matter and beefing up the Ambassador and his family's security, the Afghan government has decided to recall its Ambassador and senior diplomats. Pakistan has expressed its regret at the decision, reiterated its promise of a swift investigation and bringing to book the perpetrators, and hoped the Afghan government would reconsider.
These attempts by Pakistan to keep the Afghan authorities on board in the larger interests of the current delicate state of affairs inside Afghanistan has not been helped by Interior Minister Shaikh Rashid's casting shadows of doubt on the Afghan Ambassador Najibullah Alikhil's daughter Silsila's version of the incident. Someone in our Foreign Office or higher up needs to suggest to Shaikh Rashid to curb his tendency to shoot off at the mouth, especially when things are as precariously balanced in the Afghanistan-Pakistan relationship as at present.
While one resists conspiracy theories, there may be room for investigation whether the incident has political overtones. When Silsila took a taxi, another man barged into it. On her protesting to the taxi driver over the intrusion, the interloper yelled: "Shut your mouth...you're the daughter of that bastard communist...we won't leave him and catch him some day." He then assaulted her physically. She fainted and when she recovered consciousness, found herself dumped on a roadside. She then called a friend who conducted her home after medical attention at a hospital.
The Afghan government has announced it is sending a security team to Islamabad to review the safety of its diplomatic mission and staff.
This assault on Silsila was delivered barely a day after Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and Prime Minister Imran Khan 'clashed' at an international conference in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. Ashraf Ghani squarely blamed Pakistan for the escalating violence in Afghanistan since the US troops' withdrawal began in May 2021. Imran Khan tried to defend Pakistan by calling the accusation "extremely unfair" in the light of Pakistan's all-out efforts to ensure peace in Afghanistan and the region. Imran Khan may well be sincere in his sentiments, but what his statement fails to address is the history of Pakistani intervention in Afghanistan. A brief recap may help.
Pakistan's Independence celebrations in 1947 saw a discordant note from Kabul, whose government of subsequently overthrown King Zahir Shah reiterated Afghanistan's long held position that the Durand Line demarcating the border between the two neighbouring countries was a British colonial imposition that had split the Pashtuns on either side of the dividing line. Kabul claimed, on the basis of this rejection of the 1893 Durand Line, that the Pashtun areas of then NWFP (now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) and Balochistan should revert to Afghanistan. On the basis of this irredentist claim, Afghanistan was the sole country to oppose the newly founded Pakistan state's entry into the UN.
This historically determined conflict embittered relations between the two countries, a rift that drew Kabul closer to India, presumably on the age-old basis of my enemy's enemy. Thus the foundations of a three-cornered relationship were laid early. In 1973, Sardar Daud Khan overthrew the monarchy and declared a Republic. Well known from his previous stint in the 1950s as King Zahir Shah's prime minister as an ardent Pashtunistan supporter (i.e. the return of Pakistan's Pashtun areas to Afghan sovereignty), Daud Khan's seizure of power followed on the heels of the crisis engendered in Pakistani Balochistan and NWFP by then Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's dismissal of the Sardar Ataullah Mengal ministry in the former and the protest resignation of Maulana Mufti Mahmud's ministry in the latter (Maulana Mufti Mahmud was Maulana Fazlur Rehman's father). Bhutto feared the Pashtunistan supporter Daud would assist the nationalist insurgency that broke out after the dismissal in Balochistan as well as the resistance in NWFP. In a pre-emptive counterstroke, Bhutto charged Maj-General Naseerullah Babar (retd) with the task of taking the Islamist professors and student leaders of Kabul University who had fled to Pakistan after Daud's coup under his wing and, with the help of the nascent ISI, train them as proxies for Afghanistan. Ahmad Shah Masoud soon balked at this arrangement and returned to lead the Panjsher movement, while Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Professor Rabbani and others enjoyed the ISI's hospitality and training.
This was the embryonic emergence of what later became the Afghan Mujahideen, first against Daud, then against the Afghan Communists who seized power in 1978, and finally (with enormous US/western assistance) against the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan from 1979. That conflict exacerbated the internal contradictions of the Soviet Union to the point where, within two years of it leaving Afghanistan in 1989, the USSR imploded in 1991.
The Soviets had departed but the Communist regime of Najib was still in power. Eventually (within three years, by 1992) it fell but the Mujahideen then fell into an internecine civil war that only ended (largely) with the unleashing and victory of the Taliban (ironically, again under retired MajGeneral Naseerullah Babar's tutelage). The rest, as they say, is history.
This brief encapsulation of this complex and blood drenched history of conflict shows that Pakistan has been intervening in Afghanistan through proxies for the last 48 years (and counting), including the safe havens to the Taliban since 2001 and the necessary military and financial assistance to them to bring them today to the brink of a historic victory. It also indicates why there is so much suspicion in Kabul about Pakistan's motives and intent. On the other hand, on the verge of a military victory, the Taliban's version of a 'political settlement' (a la their current leader Haibatullah Akhundzada) is the 'peaceful surrender' of the Afghan government and its forces. The Taliban, contrary to much mealy-mouthed arguments about them having 'changed', will re-impose the authoritarian rule the world witnessed in 1996-2001. The only difference this time may be their attempts to 'reassure' the world that they will tread 'softly, softly' this time round, in the hope they will receive recognition and aid from a world and region adjusting itself in classic real politic terms to an unavoidable necessity to keep themselves and their allies safe and in the process promote their respective interests (often against each other through respective proxies).
This emerging potpourri promises anything but peace. The Afghan government forces will probably, despite their recent setbacks, not go down without a fight. Ethnic militias will join the fray against the Taliban. A country wracked by a multi-sided civil war will inevitably deliver a crop of instability, refugees, and likely spillover of terrorism to neighbouring countries, especially Pakistan.
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Copyright Business Recorder, 2021
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