Pak-Afghan strains

And US pressure

 For some time now Islamabad has not been acting, or even reacting, fast enough to keep pace with developments on the Afghan front. Strangely, there was hardly any stir even as Kabul pulled the plug on the talks and sent the QCG into a tailspin. And the Sartaj Aziz-Tariq Fatemi split – which typifies Nawaz Sharif’s minister-less foreign ministry – only increased the confusion, as usual, after Afghanistan’s obvious snub at the Quadrilateral’s meeting last Wednesday in Islamabad. If there are no talks, and there is still no action (against the Taliban), then there’s not much in the QCG for them, they plainly said.

Yet Sartaj quickly followed with ‘Taliban are not yet ready to talk’ while Fatemi said what he always says, that ‘Pakistan is doing everything possible to bring both the Haqqanis and the Taliban to the talks’. Neither impressed anybody, of course. The US House of Representatives, too, has tied aid to far more concrete ‘do more’ than before. Either show the Taliban, or show some Haqqanis, and let go of Dr Afridi, along with a lot more, or the National Defence Authorisation Act 2017 (NDAA) will block $450m of aid due to Islamabad.

Now, of course, the situation is further complicated by the apparent assassination of Mullah Mansour. Taliban are again headless; which has its advantages as well as disadvantages. The Americans seem confident of progress now. But the Afghans simply expect Pakistan to hand-pick another commander. Islamabad must move quickly to dispel this notion. If Pakistan has really gone the extra mile for the QCG, it has done a bad job of selling it. And its clueless representatives do not make its position any better. Surely the government, and the establishment, realises well that the Afghan outcome will determine the future with America. A lot, therefore, is at stake. If all our partners have viewed our ‘sincere efforts’ as mere stalling so far then a major policy appraisal, at least, is urgently due. And regardless of how much others might have misunderstood us, nobody can deny the need to put our own house in order.