Indo-Pakistan Rivalry In
Afghanistan IntensifiesBy M B Naqvi
06 September, 2005
Inter Press ServiceKARACHI , Sep 2 (IPS) - Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai's fervent wish for improved regional cooperation among India, Pakistan and his own country, expressed during the Indo-Afghan summit at the beginning of the week, may be doomed to remain just that, given the state of sub-continental rivalry.
Karzai's fervent wish, made at the Kabul summit on Aug 28, was calculated towards improving regional relations, especially his demand that Pakistan provide transit facilities for better Indo-Afghan trade and road links.
The context was Pakistan's well-known position reiterated recently by the Pakistan Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz that India's transit trade to third countries (including Iran) would be linked to satisfactory progress on the Kashmir dispute.
This throwing of cold water on Afghan hopes has a clear reference to history as observers and analysts here would readily testify.
Afzal Mahmud, a retired career diplomat traces the ''running acrimony'' between India and Pakistan to the days when Afghanistan stood out as the ''sole country that voted against Pakistan's entry into the United Nations in 1947.''
''Governments in Kabul have always been to close to India and through the decades between the 1950s and 1970s Indian diplomacy has sought to drive a wedge between Afghanistan and Pakistan,'' said Mahmud in an IPS interview.
But, equally, said Mahmud, Pakistan played a cold war game by ''cultivating Afghanistan's Pashtun tribes (that are close to Pakistan's Pashtuns) and created a lobby of their own.'' Pashtuns form about ten percent of Pakistan's 165 million people.
''The ups and downs of this Pak-Afghan cold war have been marked by several bloody incidents, beginning with 1956 when Pakistan's Jalalabad consulate was set on fire by Afghan mobs. Since then many Afghan attacks have taken place on Pakistan's consular offices, not excluding the Pakistan embassy in Kabul, on which several attacks were mounted at different times,'' Mahmud said.
The Indo-Afghan summit in Kabul on Aug 28 was therefore viewed in Pakistan with particular interest. During the summit, India, which had already given Afghanistan 500 million US dollars for reconstruction, extended another 100 million dollars as Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh sought to take Indo-Afghan ties to a new high.
Karzai touched upon the ongoing efforts for Indo-Pakistan entente and hoped it would expand into the future and by this he involved Pakistan in the evolving equation.
On the one side Karzai affirmed that a good Afghan-Pakistan relationship existed but tactfully avoided mention of the less than friendly argument between U.S. and Afghan officials, over renewed Taliban attacks from Pakistan territory especially on foreign targets in Afghanistan.
In his own deft way, Karzai underlined the importance of friendship between Pakistan and India in improving regional cooperation that could improve Afghanistan's chances of reconstruction after the devastation wreaked by decades of cold war and post cold war conflict.
Afghanistan has always been a part of foreign great power rivalry and even if the dramatis personae have changed Kabul remains at the centre of different 'Great Game' conflicts of whatever shape and scope.
Today's great powers are either already in Afghanistan as in the case of the U.S. and its allies or on Afghanistan's door step and among these may be counted China, Russia, India and Iran.
Pakistan regards itself great enough to have a say in Afghanistan's being and becoming. Although today's Great Games are subsumed in a number of bilateral rivalries or cold wars that need recognition.
There is the up and coming cold war between those well-entrenched (in Afghanistan) and the incipient challenge from the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation that groups together Russia and China with several Central Asian republics. Also important are the interests of India and Iran that would seem to be opposed by Pakistan.
The origins of Pakistan-Afghan and Pakistan-India cold wars in and over Afghanistan arise from the attempts to create lobbies and areas of interest within Afghan society by both India and Pakistan.
Pakistan enjoys a degree of advantage because of affinities between Afghan and Pakistani Pashtuns. At least 10 percent of Pakistan's 165 million people are Pashtun but concentrated in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) and Balochistan.
Pashtuns have always played a political game of their own. They neither alienated Kabul nor allowed Pakistan to be seriously hurt by Afghanistan's proposal for an independent 'Pakhtoonistan' as a zone of independence or as an autonomous part of Pakistan for Pashtuns living on the Pakistani side of the British-drawn, Durand Line that presently defines the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
Although what Kabul really wants was never entirely clear, Pakistan-Afghan tussles have always centred around the very legitimacy of the Durand Line going back to the days of Pakistan's creation from larger India. Kabul has questioned and many Pakistani Pashtuns continue to question today the validity of the Durand line.
Kabul has always shown interest in the rights of Pashtuns in Pakistan and it is now Pakistan's turn to question what the Afghan Pashtuns plan now that they feel less than well-adjusted in the new regime imposed by the U.S. on Kabul. With elections around the corner these issues have only grown sharper.
But Islamabad's interest is not loudly articulated. It is widely suspected by outsiders that Pakistan wants a say in Afghanistan through its Pashtun lobbies that seem unhappy with Karzai's Afghanistan.
As of now, India enjoys support in Kabul from not only Karzai and his cabinet but many political elements that fought the Taliban, especially the Northern Alliance that was supported by Iran, the U.S. and its allies and continues to be friendly towards India.
And this is where Pakistan is suspected by Kabul of playing a spoiler's game.
Without Pakistan's willing support, the Karzai government cannot consolidate itself, nor can it adequately defend Afghanistan from renewed attacks by the Taliban. Many Afghan officials and ministers as well as U.S. officials, accuse Pakistan of not restraining the Taliban.
As Sultan Jilani, a noted commentator on Afghan affairs here, said, ''The Pakistan, Afghanistan and India triangle would always be a troubled one. Apart from the superpower and quasi-superpower (Russia), there are others (China and Iran) which have their fingers in the pie''.
Karzai, added Jilani, is ''quite right in thinking that improvement of India-Pakistan relations would be the key to solving various Afghanistan problems''.
It was with the help of Pakistan, that Washington could oust the Russians presence in Afghanistan but this has been at a very high cost.
''The Moscow-propped regime collapsed spectacularly but then various warlords took over. This was because Pakistan could not control the various anti-Soviet warring factions and they all became warlords and divided themselves along ethnic and ideological lines", Jilani observed.
''Pakistan tried to regain the initiative by producing Taliban (nearly synonymous with Pashtun) out of its hat and proceeded to making Afghanistan safe for Taliban. But India, Iran and Russia never allowed the Taliban to overrun the northern areas.
''Karzai's task now would appear to be to conciliate Russia, Iran and India in a way so as to be accommodated without detriment to the Pakistani interest of the Pushtoon community within Afghanistan that amounts to maybe up to 40 percent of the (29 million) population,'' Jilani concluded.
Right now, India is on a strong wicket because of Hamid Karzai's sympathy, because of the northern warlords' inclination toward Iran and India and because of Washington's restraint on Pakistan. ''The big thing for India would be free transit through Pakistan to Afghanistan and through there to Central Asia and Pakistan would not concede this without some compensatory benefit given by India on Kashmir. It must seem substantial and credible,'' said Afzal Mahmud
There are other matters where substantial concessions can be given by India, particularly water disputes. But that looks unlikely to happen according to both Mahmud and Jilani.
