The Afghan Folly We Seem All Set To Repeat - Ayaz Ameer

Let’s not get too worked up about the Taliban talks’ tamasha. Nothing will come of it, take a poor sinner’s word on this. This drama can only succeed if General Headquarters (GHQ) is willing to commit hara-kiri and negotiate a one-sided surrender.

Since this is unlikely we can only savour the spectacle of the Taliban’s media apologists getting more and more worked up as they try to infuse some life into this dead horse of a peace process…what they call peace but is actually one-way concessionism. In other climates this would be called appeasement. We yet have to discover a native equivalent for this word, and this state of mind.

Let’s also not worry too much about the prime minister and the nearest thing Pakistan has to a Rasputin, his interior minister. The latter is incurable and so can be left to do what he does best: boring the National Assembly to death. Previous National Assemblies stood dissolved under the impact of 111 Brigade’s constitutional manoeuvres. This National Assembly can be counted upon to wither away under the impact of the interior minister’s rhetoric.

One must marvel at his stamina. His shortest contribution to brevity is never less than 60 minutes, and that’s when he is being charitable, otherwise he can go on and on forever, imparting new meaning to the term ‘going around in circles’. 

But as I say this drama is a distraction, a costly distraction to be sure, enabling the TTP to recover breath and strength and be ready for the next round against the Pakistani state. However, with the prime minister being who he is, and with his deep take on geo-strategy, we have to endure this distraction and this molly-coddling of the Taliban as best we can. But our minds should be on other things, principally post-withdrawal Afghanistan. For what happens across the mountains will affect us profoundly, as it has affected us profoundly these past 30 years.

What was our Afghan folly then which we are likely to repeat again? The military mind was afflicted with a strange obsession: wanting influence in Kabul by helping install a Pakhtun regime there. This was after the Russian withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989. Najibullah was the Soviet-installed ruler in Kabul and whereas his regime did not control the countryside, it was in control of all of Afghanistan’s cities. The Afghan army was a better fighting force then than it is now, despite the billions the Americans have poured in to give it some kind of fighting shape.

But Pakistan was opposed to Najibullah, army and ISI championing the cause of the so-called ‘mujahideen’, looking upon them as God’s own warriors.

But there’s always a problem with such holy warriors. Just as you can never get a roomful of maulvis to offer collective prayers together – you can pluck turtles from the deep ocean but not get any self-respecting maulvi belonging to one sect to pray behind the devotee of another sect – it was impossible to get the seven ‘mujahideen’ organisations to act together, each wanting to be cook and master in his own domain. Their fractiousness and the civil war on which they soon embarked destroyed Afghanistan and made a ruin of that once beautiful city, Kabul, and paved the way for the emergence of the Taliban movement.

Now if we had eyes to peer into the future and if we had fewer generals and geo-strategists trying to wave the banner of jihad over Afghanistan, we should have realised that our best interests were served not by supporting the thugs who came arrayed in the garments of jihad but by supporting Najibullah and seeing to it that his regime survived. The Najibullah regime was of course doomed when Russia under Boris Yeltsin became a buffoon’s republic – Yeltsin a joker always high on vodka – and aid to Kabul was stopped. Still, it was not in our interest to undermine that regime.

Benazir Bhutto should have known better. But even she was persuaded by the ISI to support an assault on Jalalabad. It was a fiasco, much to the chagrin of the ISI’s brilliant planners, but it revealed once again the deep-seated prejudices informing our entire approach to Afghanistan.

I can bet anything that to GHQ and the foreign office nothing would be a greater anathema than the thought 20 odd years later that we should have supported Najibullah, this running wholly counter to the philosophy in which they have been schooled. But if they only care to pause for a moment and reflect over the past, Afghanistan under supposedly anti-Pakistan regimes – Zahir Shah, Daud – never hurt us. Their Pakhtunistan rhetoric was the only problem we faced. But the poison of extremism in our national veins came not from those regimes but from our American and Saudi-aided obsession with jihad. It is that poison which has disfigured Pakistan’s face and distorted the thinking of its various ruling classes. 

All this is the past. What should we do now? Whichever Afghan president is elected in the April presidential election, whichever government is in place when the Americans pull up their flags and depart, we should support that arrangement, no matter how ragtag and flea-ridden it may be. If the strategic depth warriors of GHQ and the foreign office are once again afflicted by the Pakhtun syndrome, that we must have the Qandharis and the Haqqanis, or whoever seizes our imagination, in power across the Durand Line then we will be fated once again to go through the same horrors we went through before – Afghanistan in the throes of another civil war and the flames of extremism blowing in our direction, and the TTP becoming more powerful, and Pakistan more vulnerable to all these harsh cross-winds. 

We can’t do this supporting alone. The US, China, Russia and Iran must also be involved and, strange though it may sound to Pakistani ears, India too. Afghanistan, we must get this into our heads, should not be seen by us as a cockpit of regional rivalry, a proxy battleground between us and India, but as a factor which, if once again out of control, can cause grave harm to our stability and well-being. Of what concern to us if Indian aid goes to Afghanistan or Tata buses ply in Kabul? We should be able to live with these. Our focus should be on the extremist threat. Everything else is secondary.

Our Afghanistan we have read through British eyes. Our Russian prejudices, all this nonsense about reaching out to the warm waters of the Indian Ocean is not our thinking. We inherited all this claptrap and all the lore about the Great Game from our former masters. The Great Game was between them and Tsarist Russia. The Mughals never had a problem with Russia, indeed weren’t even aware of it, the Khanates of Central Asia coming in between.

These acquired ideas were drilled so effectively into the official Pakistani mind that Pakistan found it easy, almost considered it natural, to align itself with the west in the initial days of the Cold War. True, our leaders were anti-Indian. But let’s not forget that they were also deeply anti-communist. All this only changed when we found an opening to Red China. Then insofar as China was concerned we forgot our anti-communism. But insofar as Russia was concerned we continued to believe fervently in Russian malevolence – aided of course by the circumstance that Russia was friends with India.

But all this is gone. The Great Game is over. A new game has us in its grip and to this we must bring some fresh thinking if we are not to repeat the old blunders.

Email: winlust@yahoo.com

From: TheNews