If the past is anything to go by, the security agreement between India and Afghanistan is a sign of danger. To think of this agreement as dangerous, one would have to adjust their perceptual framework i.e. one would have to think of India as the ‘traditional enemy’ and one would have to think of this agreement with Afghanistan as ‘scheming’ of said ‘traditional enemy’. To further strengthen this idea, one would also have to recall the agreement between India and the erstwhile USSR which was reached during riots in East Pakistan and after which India attacked East Pakistan and that led to its cessation.
Immediately after independence, we had started to convince ourselves that India had not accepted our creation. We were sure that it was out to get us and we made this perpetual fear the nucleus of all our future plans and policies of which defence came out on top. Sixty-four years later, this fear still persists. We’ve poured all our resources into amassing weapons and building our army. Despite all this, we lost half our country and still have not been able to get independence for Kashmir, which we avow is our jugular. We’ve been living without it for 64 years now and are still alive but we still persist in calling it our ‘jugular’. Our fear couldn’t even be assuaged by making the mighty bomb. We’ve made more than a hundred and the fact that India has now made an agreement with Afghanistan surely necessitates the making of more of these nuclear crackers.
Whenever some peace effort with India failed, I used to say that in our obduracy to remain enemies with India, we won’t be able to do anything to it (and we haven’t been able to) but it can create a lot of problems for us. When the Soviet army entered Afghanistan, I thought that we now had another enemy to fight with. At that time, the Soviets and the Indians were allies and I thought that the spectre of our enemies at the north-western border would compel us to look to avenues of peace. We, after all, weren’t capable of fighting off enemies at both borders.
If Z A Bhutto had been alive, then he definitely would have opened the option for peace given the vast geographical expanse of the region. A leader who had found a hope for peace in the defeat of war could definitely have found peace without getting into the fracas of war itself. The US was well aware of this. This is why before drawing the Soviets into Afghanistan, it installed its pawn in the shape of Zai-ul-Haq in the country.
By making Zia their point-man, America wanted to square off its dues with the Soviet Union. The US exacted revenge on the Soviet Union for Vietnam and was able to break it up in the 90’s. But it left Pakistan with the highly explosive gifts of narrow-mindedness and extremism and left us to our own devices. That explosive material now courses through our veins. We are a powderkeg repeatedly set off by the smallest of sparks. In Karachi. In Balochistan. In Swat. In Fata. In Lahore. In Islamabad. We bleed gunpowder and breathe fire.
Only if we had come back on track after America had left the region after achieving its ends. But the mujahideen – who had been prepared under the aegis of American dollars and a special American-brand Islam – were turned into our strategic assets that were then used to turn Afghanistan into our strategic depth. We armed and trained the Taliban and the plans to capture Afghanistan were made by our own agencies and quarters. The Taliban were successful in capturing a large part of Afghanistan but they refused to become guarantors of peace. Peace depended on coming to a peaceful solution to the Durand Line problem. We time and again asked the Taliban government to come to a bilateral agreement about the demarcation of the Pak-Afghan border.
When the Al-Qaeda started its international terrorist activities, the US asked Pakistan to use its influence with the Taliban to ask them to uproot the Al-Qaeda network in the country. But some genius in the army decided to oust Nawaz Sharif from his seat before this could be acted upon. Nawaz Sharif had been galvanising the international Islamic community to ask the Taliban to expel Al-Qaeda from Afghanistan. The very day Nawaz Shairf was arrested, he had convinced Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al Nayhan to form an association of Muslim countries under the leadership of Saudi Arabia to ask the Taliban to dissociate themselves from Al-Qaeda. The Taliban leadership would’ve found it hard to refuse the Saudi leadership and if the comity of Muslim countries had succeeded, the horrendous war started after 9/11 could have been averted.
But the military mindset knows of only one thing. To get more arms and money, whether by hook or by crook. After 9/11, when the US asked of Pakistan’s military ruler to convince the Taliban to delink itself from the Al-Qaeda, our military leadership did the opposite. They told Mullah Omar to stand their ground in the support of Al-Qaeda and that the US would not be able to harm them. It is my belief that the offensives on Afghanistan by two superpowers were totally facilitated by Pakistan’s military rulers. The Soviet invasion happened by an American conspiracy that was aided and abetted by Zia. And the American invasion took place because of the plan hatched by Musharraf and his cronies. They wanted that America land in the region and we hit a jackpot; that is exactly what happened. We got arms, we got money and we got an assurance of a counterweight to Indian aggression. We also got the chance to prove to the world that Pakistan has been able to put the US in a corner in Afghanistan.
When the US asks us to move against the Haqqanis, our rulers laugh at how they’ve got hold of the world’s only superpower – as if by a bull ring. They know that the US is at wit’s end, not because of the Haqqanis but because of Pakistan’s ‘war strategy’. Our rulers are somehow convinced that America will have to leave Afghanistan with its tail between its legs and the subsequent government will be under our influence. This military mind disregarded the Soviet-India pact and still invaded East Pakistan. It seems as if history is repeating itself. The same military mind seems to be disregarding the Indian-Afghan pact and its implications.
When such pacts are agreed upon, they lead to many years of analyses and drafting of new strategies in light of the new details. The 1971 pact between India and the Soviet Union took place so that the Pakistan army (aka America’s ally) could be driven out of Bengal. America knew that it was difficult for its ally to remain there and it tried to dissuade our generals but they would not budge. India has only made two security pacts in its history. One with the Soviet Union and the other with Afghanistan with now. The former and latter were both formed keeping Pakistan in mind. If we want, we could seize the chance which this pact presents to look for peace or we could embroil ourselves in another bloody war, whose outcome will not be to our liking. What are the ways we could benefit from this agreement? An expert on foreign affairs, Akram Zaki, has alluded to them in one of his articles. If possible, next time I will say something about that keeping Mr Zaki’s ideas in mind.
The writer is one of Pakistan’s most widely read columnists.