Unravelling?
Ironically, the final axe on the Afghan peace talks came not from Taliban’s Doha or Quetta offices, or somewhere near Kandahar (their stronghold), but from the presidential palace in Kabul. President Ghani has effectively called off the Murree process unilaterally. And his threats and warnings after the unfortunate Kabul airport attack the other day certainly did not seem like the words of a friend; especially one who had staked his career on a thaw with Islamabad. While that is certainly a victor for Taliban cadres who wanted to continue fighting, it is also no small win for the now out-of-government Karzai group, not to mention the Abdullah Abdullah faction of the government, and NDS with its links with Pakistan’s insurgents, etc.
Ghani is clearly frustrated. Yet ditching Pakistan at this point is hardly a rational reaction. Already this Spring Offensive is the strongest on record. And there are rumours that Mullah Mansour, struggling with legitimacy, called for a few daring hits to score jihadi points among unimpressed pockets of the Afghan Taliban. Kabul may well buy such chatter, given the circumstances, along with the automatic assumption that such a departure from the original plan might well have been green-lighted by Pakistan; hence the angry chest thumping.
Soon enough Ghani will realise that Afghanistan cannot really, for all intents and purposes, handle this on its own. The wars between Pakistan and Afghanistan are too deeply interlinked to be played out in isolation. We can influence their bad guys, and they hold considerable sway over ours. And now that Pakistan has pushed quite hard, and Afghanistan has already carried out operations at Pakistan’s request, this cannot be the moment when the hard work is made to go waste. That will be a far bigger victory – symbolic and material – than the airport strike itself. Hopefully the Afghan delegation visiting Pakistan will take these factors into account and the partnership will not cave in to momentary pressure.