The Asian Outlook.com

Musharaf is going in the right direction?

- Najam Sethi

Pakistan’s obsession with a strong Pashtun state in Kabul also flies in the face of history.
Until 1973, when Afghanistan’s king, Zahir Shah, a Pashtun, ruled in Kabul, the Afghan
government was pro-Soviet and friendly to India. But because it was politically broad-based
and decentralized, it posed no serious threat to Pakistan, which was pro-US. In fact, despite
pressure from India, Zahir Shah declined to open a front against Pakistan during the 1965 and1971 Indo-Pakistan wars

Until recently, the ISI was set on helping the Pashtun Taliban clinch total victory in Afghanistan. But today we are told that the “ground reality has changed” and a broad-based,
multi-ethnic government is the name of the game. Fair enough.

Until yesterday, it was treasonable to mention the name of ex-Afghan king Zahir Shah in the
corridors of the ISI Headquarters in Islamabad. Today no less than the COAS/CE/President of Pakistan says that the ex-king may yet have a role to play. Good enough.

In fact, former foreign minister Assef Ahmad Ali and former president of Pakistan Farooq Leghari have now come out in support of the idea that Zahir Shah should be asked to play his due part in the establishment of any future government in Afghanistan. Even former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, during whose last tenure the Taliban were midwifed by interior
minister General (retd) Naseerullah Babar and nourished to manhood by the ISI, seems wiser after the event.

As for former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, it was during his first stint in office that a great
opportunity was lost in 1992 when the then Pashtun president of Afghanistan, General Najibullah (allied to the Uzbek commander Rashid Dostum), offered to facilitate, and hand over power to, a broad-based Afghan government supported by Pakistan. But the ISI under General Javed Nasir,a born-again fundamentalist handpicked by Mr Sharif, spurned the “communist” offer, preferring instead to spur its favourite Pashtun Islamic commanders to hunt Najibullah down. In the furious melee that followed, Ahmad Shah Masood, the Tajik commander, rushed to seize Kabul, compelling Pakistan nine months later to acquiesce in the nomination of Burhanuddin Rabbani, a Tajik, as president, Ahmad Shah Masood as defense minister and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a Pashtun, as prime minister of a new government. But the arrangement was doomed to fail because neither side trusted the other and the ISI was overly partial towards Hekmatyar.

It may also be recalled that when in 1997, during Mr Sharif’s second stint in office, the ISI
prodded the Foreign Office under foreign minister Gauhar Ayub to formally “recognize” the
Taliban government following the fall of Mazar-i-Sharif, the Pakistani prime minister was
gallivanting in Central Asia. In fact he was only informed of his government’s recognition of
the Taliban regime as the lawful government of Afghanistan after the announcement had been made on Pakistan TV and radio. That put paid to secret attempts by Mr Sharif, through the good offices of his chief minister in the NWFP, to negotiate with Mr Masood in quest
of a stable and broad-based government in Kabul. It also compelled the Rabbani government to seek a firmer alliance with the Uzbeks and Hazaras and consolidate sources
of support from Iran, India and the central Asian states. After Mr Masood paid a trip to India, the die was cast.

How was Taliban policy shaped and why has it never been adequately explained? Perhaps General Nasim Rana, who presided over the ISI from mid 1995 to the end of 1998 — a period straddling two civilian governments which dared not oppose the ISI — can enlighten
us. General Rana retired after COAS General Jehangir Karamat was eased out by Mr Sharif in 1998. He resurfaced as defense secretary after the October 1999 coup d’etat.

In the meanwhile, we may explore the viability of every Pakistani government’s declared aims and objectives vis a vis Afghanistan. Since the Soviets were kicked out of Afghanistan in 1988, Pakistan has tried to cobble and prop up four governments in Kabul and failed. All but one, including the Taliban, were led by ethnic Pashtuns. What was Pakistan’s interest in such dispensations?

Pakistan has a natural interest in wanting a friendly government in its backyard. We are ringed by India, which is Hindu and hostile, and Iran, which is Shiite and aspires for regional
dominance. Pakistan therefore rightly feels that a new government in Kabul dominated by the Northern Alliance, whose constituent Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara elements have received economic and military assistance from both Iran and India, would hurt its national security.

Unfortunately, however, another notion has confused the issue. This is the idea of “strategic
depth,” first articulated by Pakistani army chief Gen. Aslam Beg. Gen. Beg believed that in the event of a long, drawn out and difficult war with India, Afghanistan’s friendly territory could
serve as a strategic zone, providing secure operating bases for Pakistan’s air force and army. During the 1965 war with India, Pakistan sought to protect its smaller air force from Indian air attacks by parking some of its American-supplied fighter aircraft in Iranian airfields near its western border.

But times have changed. Given the development of nuclear weapons and the deployment of ballistic missiles and faster jet planes, it has never been clear what Pakistan might want to “park” in Afghanistan, or why, in the event of another war with India. More critically, Pakistan’s strategic thinkers have refused to learn lessons since they began cultivating close relations with the Taliban in 1996: a rigidly ideological government such as the Taliban’s with a narrow worldview cannot be a reliable partner in the defense of Pakistan’s interests.

Therefore Pakistan’s current predicament follows two decades of misplaced "interventionism” in Afghanistan. This was based on a policy of picking Pashtun “favorites”
and trying to install them in power in Kabul. Over time, however, this transformed Pakistan’s natural requirement for a friendly neighbor into an unyielding obsession for a client state. Consequently, Pakistan has ended up alienating Afghanistan’s ethnic minorities such as the Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras, and driven their leaders into the lap of India or Iran or Russia.

But this benign Afghan attitude changed after Sardar Mohammad Daoud, a Pashtun nationalist, deposed the king and seized Kabul in 1973. He established a strong, centrist state and began to foment Pashtun nationalism and separatism among the Pashtuns of Pakistan. After Daoud was overthrown by leftists in a 1978 coup, the Durand Line was aggressively challenged by communist presidents Nur Mohammad Taraki and Hafizullah Amin, both die-hard Pashtuns. Thus, strong and centralized Pashtun governments in Kabul have either pandered to Pashtun nationalism in Afghanistan by supporting Pashtun separatism in Pakistan, or tried to export Pashtun-Islamic fundamentalism to Pakistan’s border provinces like the Taliban have done in recent years.

This should have suggested to Pakistan’s defense establishment that a strong Taliban-led state in Afghanistan would eventually pose a threat to the territorial integrity and political
solidarity of a multi-ethnic Pakistan because it would combine the worst elements of ethnic
nationalism with violent religious sectarianism. But it didn’t. Instead, when the Taliban arrived on the scene in 1994 rather unexpectedly, and demonstrated a degree of public support
in war weary Afghanistan, Pakistan leapt into the fray and gave unstinting economic and military support to them to the exclusion of all the other ethnic contenders for power.

Unfortunately, however, the Taliban’s military successes made them progressively confident and rigid, thereby diminishing Pakistan’s political leverage with them. Now Pakistan is being held accountable for befriending the Taliban and being made to count the costs of not ditching them earlier. Where does Pakistan go from here?

The plan for the future of Afghanistan should not be too difficult to fathom. Afghanistan faces
an American offensive meant to soften up the Taliban’s militia so that its components peel off gradually as the pressure of war and isolation increases. The Taliban are, in effect, composed of those Pashtun elements of the government-in-exile established by Pakistan in Peshawar in 1989 after the exit of the Soviets from Afghanistan. The Pashtun commanders
of the various militias, once numbering 6,000, are either with the Taliban or have their men fighting in the ranks of the Taliban. They also contain elements of the Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan last ruled by President General Najibullah and these constitute the engineering and military brains of the militia. Experts also point to a Durrani-Ghilzai tribal divide in the Taliban regime which could be exploited. There is also no doubt of the wide variety of ideological opinion that prevails in the dominant Pashtun matrix. The pressure of war is bound to increase the fissures within the Taliban, therby undermining their unity and paving the way for the notion of broad based governance.

It is this possibility that has attracted the opponents of the Taliban to Zahir Shah, the king
who was ousted in 1973 and later favoured by five out of the seven militias that Pakistan was
supporting against the Soviet invasion. This support stemmed from the fact that the militias had little cohesion at the time because they had been subjected to splits in order to facilitate
Pakistan's handling of the situation in Afghanistan. His long absence from the scene has
certainly diminished that early support but he remains the one figure around whom the Afghan cities might conceivably rally, somewhat like the kings who returned to the Balkans after long years of chaotic nationalist conflict.

The anticipated victory against the Taliban, however, should not lead to the dominance of the
Northern Alliance in which the main party is Burhanuddin Rabbani's Jamiat-e-Islami whose regime in Kabul was disastrously cruel and paved the way for the victory of the Taliban without much fighting. Pakistan has rightly warned that a government dominated by the Northern Alliance would be counter-productive, against its national security interests and therefore unacceptable to it.

Fortunately, there is a tacit acceptance of Pakistan's interests in Afghanistan among the
Western powers lined up against the Taliban. It is also realistic to link the broad-based future
government in Kabul to the ratios that determine the ethnic map of the country. The Pashtuns are over 45 percent of the population but there are large chunks of Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras and Turkmen who must be represented. The concept of the Loya Jirga has always been at hand but any kind of realignment of forces will depend very much on the efforts made by the world to rebuild the destroyed country, revive its economy and resettle its uprooted population. The best roadmap through this period should be drawn within the framework of the United Nations, under the aegis of a carefully selected UN force that descends on Afghanistan after the Taliban have been replaced. Some kind of loose federal order must prevail in Afghanistan in line with 'consensual' laissez faire governance under Zahir Shah before the Soviet obsession with centralisation destroyed it under Presidents Nur Mohammad Taraki and Hafeezullah Amin. To achieve this, all the neighbouring states with interests in Afghanistan — Iran, Pakistan, China, Russia, Central Asia – must come to an agreement without necessarily abandoning their own national security priorities. In turn, Pakistan, the most affected party, must trim its policy in light of the relief it will get from the sectarian terrorism and violent fundamentalism that has “blown back” from Afghanistan over the past decades. This will be essential to keep the new broad-based government going in tandem with an attractive economic deal that keeps the funds flowing into Afghanistan.

Thus, firstly, nation-building in Afghanistan must rely on a truly loose and federal arrangement
in which the various ethnic nationalities are fully empowered. Second, it must be an
international, as opposed to a national, affair. Third, it must be recognized that the Taliban,
even after they have been defeated, cannot be eradicated because they are part of the ground reality, in or out of power. Thus they would have to be represented in any future set-up. Finally, it should be noted that while kings can provide powerful symbols in certain extreme situations that need swift balancing solutions, they can only play a limited role and that too in a transitional sense in which the final outcome is determined by the complex manipulations of internal and external forces.

Zahir Shah could provide such a transitional umbrella under U.N. supervision. The new
government’s job would be to “clean up” Afghanistan with Western support – get rid of al Qaeda terrorist training camps and elect a representative governing body for Afghanistan.

The Western powers could then ask Pakistan to assist them in the reconstruction and
rehabilitation of Afghanistan, thereby giving it a strategic foothold in Kabul, and eventually
opening access to Western oil and gas pipelines from Central Asia to Pakistan and beyond.
Transit royalties from the pipelines alone would swiftly pull Afghanistan out of its abject
economic misery. Is this a far cry from the rage and passion and bloodshed of today?

It is. The conflict could be long and difficult. Many people will be dead before it is over.
Pakistan’s religious parties are digging in for a final battle for the soul of the Afghan and
Pakistan states. The Taliban remain defiant. Increasing civilian casualties in Afghanistan will
enrage Muslims everywhere, with unpredictable consequences. And Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda jehadis will fight to the last. But no matter. In the final analysis, as General Musharraf has admitted, “the Taliban’s days are numbered”. The ISI has a new head. Zahir Shah’s emissary has been invited for talks in Islamabad. The OIC is being harnessed to bolster the anti-Taliban coalition. General Pervez Musharraf could not have done better than take such first steps in the national interest of Pakistan