Nothing illustrates the contradictory United States policy towards Afghanistan and Pakistan better than reports in the Wall Street Journal, on ABCNews.com and also in The New York Times about American officials meeting with the Haqqani Network on the one hand and the secret meeting between US National Security Advisor Thomas E Donilon and Pakistan Army Chief General Ashfaq Kayani last week in which reportedly Donilon delivered a tough message to Kayani about taking out the Network.
Is this a game or confusion? American officials say the policy is compartmentalised and therefore seems contradictory. There are people assigned to talk to whoever they can find and there are others who want to bludgeon the Network and think it is beyond the “pale of reconciliation”.
Recent meetings with former US NSA Stephen Hadley, former ambassador and president of the Brookings Institution Richard Armacost and President of Henry L Stimson Centre Ellen Laipson who has considerable experience of intelligence work from her National Intelligence Council days corroborate this impression. Too many people coming to Pakistan and speaking on and to Pakistan with different voices; an election year coming up; a weak president; a policy that flips here and flops there and we have what some would call royal confusion, others a grand conspiracy.
Either way, there are consequences. And the state at the receiving end is Pakistan. The problem for Pakistan is exacerbated because of opacity and because Islamabad (a reference to the civilian as well as the military leadership) has failed to present its side of the story.
Partly, this is an institutional problem; partly, it is owed to the deep scepticism with which even the Pakistanis receive Pakistan’s narrative. Take the example of what DG-ISI Lt-Gen Ahmed Shuja Pasha said about contacts with the Haqqanis. All intelligence agencies have those contacts, including the Americans and they [Washington] know it. Not many believed him. Now what he said has been corroborated by the US media. And Defence Secretary Leon Panetta now says he doesn’t know for a fact that what Admiral Mullen said is right!
In the end, as should be obvious, the issue is not American confusion or perfidy. The issue is, do we have a response to a given situation because that situation is unlikely to change miraculously? The answer is no. Those in Pakistan who believe that Islamabad should just simply let Afghanistan be and ignore India’s footprint or even let America do what it wants to, seem to think that Pakistan is the only proactive player and all others are merely reacting. If only Pakistan will fall in line, all else will fall in place. This is either naïveté or a deliberate misrepresentation of a very complex reality.
Far from being proactive, Pakistan is reacting. Not just that, it is reacting from event to event instead of having a comprehensive policy and engaging other states on the basis of that. That would require, beyond spelling out the mantra of a stable Afghanistan, to getting down to the task of looking at the situational web strand by strand and informing other actors of what can and cannot be done. And then, just like it happens in the US, there should be selective ‘leaks’ to the media about what is going on and who said what to whom.
Now that the meeting between Donilon and Kayani has been reported, let me say that there was another, similar, nearly 8-hour-long meeting between Kayani and Senator John Kerry in the Gulf. This was post-Abbottabad raid and Senator Kerry was told in no uncertain terms of the negative impact of that action. But on the other hand, as another senior former US official told a group of analysts, both the Bush and Obama administrations had made clear to Pakistan that if and when Osama bin Laden appeared on the US radar, Washington would act unilaterally. If he is right, and this has also been said by other currently serving US officials, why was this agreed to, if at all? And if it was not, why was this not leaked to the media at that time?
Pakistan is right when it says that it can’t act because it doesn’t know what America wants in the run-up to the endgame of this cycle in Afghanistan. As one official put it to me, “If we try and help them they will use that as evidence that we have contacts with the Taliban; if we don’t, they accuse us of not facilitating a transition.” And he said this before the story came out that Pakistan helped arrange talks between the Americans and the Haqqanis.
Aside from this dilemma is the problem of the nature of contacts. How much control does Pakistan exercise and on whom? Are the Taliban a cohesive body in pursuit of a strategic objective; or are there groups within the larger Taliban movement that may not be in direct, effective control of the Taliban leadership?
These questions are important because answers to them would determine who might have killed Burhanuddin Rabbani and to what end.
It has already put paid to President Hamid Karzai’s effort to talk to the Taliban internally as well as through a bilateral track with Pakistan. Sources confirm that he decided after the Rabbani killing to visit New Delhi and sign a strategic partnership with India.
The signal won’t be lost on Pakistan. While Afghanistan, as a sovereign country, has the right to deal with any other country, outside of this theoretical statement lie hard realities and one of them has to deal with Karzai’s ‘twin brother’ Pakistan’s concern about Afghanistan’s ‘dear friend’. Karzai’s own statement that Afghanistan has turned towards India because of the latter’s regional clout and fast-growing economy, coupled with clause 2 (a) and (b) of the treaty which deal with developing joint initiatives on key regional and international affairs and Afghanistan’s support for India’s bid for a permanent seat at the UN Security Council will be seen by Islamabad as a clear attempt by the current government in Kabul to put itself in the Indian camp. Add to that the fact that there is a strategic partnership between India and the US and it requires no power of crystal gazing to predict Pakistan’s response.
The US-Pakistan interests are already divergent on the issue of India’s footprint in Afghanistan, not the Indian presence per se but the activities. With Afghanistan putting all its eggs in the Indian basket and going much beyond just cooperation to acceptance of India’s position as the regional hegemon and protector of Afghanistan, Pakistan is being placed in the position where it is expected to help Afghanistan stabilise and accept Afghanistan’s take on its main rival.
The expectation is that fearing isolation Pakistan will either have to accept this position or, if it doesn’t do so, it could be blamed for the violence in Afghanistan and be further isolated and punished. What is being ignored by the US, Afghanistan and India is the fact that the consequences of this treaty would not redound to anyone’s advantage. The US won’t get an orderly withdrawal without addressing Pakistan’s concerns; India-Pakistan normalisation will suffer and Pakistan’s isolation and instability will have consequences for the current government in Afghanistan.
And this comes just when the only way out was trilateral cooperation among Pakistan, Afghanistan and India. If the US interest is to see a stable Afghanistan rather than getting Pakistan isolated and the region destabilised for that reason, a worse hand could not be delivered to Pakistan.
The writer is Contributing Editor, The Friday Times.