The failure of talks between Islamabad and Kabul in Istanbul, mediated by Turkiye and Qatar, has once again highlighted the complexity of Pakistan-Afghanistan relations.
At the bilateral level, there is perhaps no other country which can have closer relations with Pakistan than Afghanistan because of its close historical, ethnic, cultural, economic and commercial ties with Pakistan. Unfortunately, relations between the two countries have historically been marred by Kabul’s rejection of the Durand Line as the legal boundary between the two countries and by its irredentist claims against territories in Pakistan in the form of its demand for Pakhtunistan. More recently, the issue of the use of the Afghan soil for terrorism in Pakistan has added another complicating factor in Pakistan-Afghanistan relations.
Although the Durand Line was recognised by Afghanistan as its boundary with British India in 1893 and reaffirmed as such in the 1919 Treaty of Rawalpindi, successive Afghan governments since the 1949 loya jirga have formally rejected the Durand Line as the legal boundary between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Undoubtedly, India has played an active role in encouraging Afghanistan’s irredentist claims at the expense of Pakistan in pursuance of its own nefarious designs against Pakistan.
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 and the US invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001 introduced several new factors bearing on Pakistan-Afghanistan relations. In the first case, Pakistan together with the US-led West and most of the Muslim world sided with the Mujahideen fighting against the Soviet military occupation of Afghanistan. The Afghan jihad was crowned with success when the last Soviet troops withdrew from Afghanistan in February 1989. The Soviet-installed Najibullah government finally collapsed in April 1992 and was replaced by the Afghan government as decided at the Peshawar Accord.
Ideally, we should have refrained from interference in Afghanistan’s internal affairs thereafter. Instead, we actively supported the Afghan Taliban despite their obscurantism, enabling them to occupy Kabul in 1996. With our help, the Taliban were able to defeat the Northern Alliance forces and occupy Mazar-i-Sharif in August 1998. When history is written, those in Pakistan’s establishment and the Foreign Office who actively opposed reconciliation between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance, which might have led to the establishment of a broad-based government in Afghanistan, will have a lot to answer for.
In the aftermath of 9/11, the Taliban rule in Afghanistan was terminated by the US invasion in October 2001. It is ironic, however, that after the longest American war, which lasted for twenty years at the cost of thousands of US casualties and trillions of dollars in expenditure and despite the full support of Nato, the American troops finally withdrew from Afghanistan in August 2021, leaving the country again under the control of the Afghan Taliban.
The US and its Western allies did their best to strengthen and stabilise the rule of the regime established by them in Afghanistan, which was dominated by the elements of the Northern Alliance, thus alienating not only the Afghan Taliban but also the Pashtuns in general. Sherard Cowper-Coles, the British ambassador to Afghanistan from 2007 to 2009 acknowledged in his book, ‘Cables from Kabul’, “that the Bonn settlement that followed (the Taliban defeat) had been a victors’ peace from which the vanquished had been excluded; and that the constitution resulting from the settlement could last as long as the West was prepared to stay in Afghanistan to prop up the present disposition”.
The Americans, thus, by virtually excluding the Taliban from the government, repeated Pakistan’s blunder in reverse. The American-installed government in Kabul suffered from the stigma of being a puppet of the US-led West. In addition, the Americans committed the strategic blunder of relying too heavily on the military dimension of their Afghanistan strategy, neglecting the political one.
It was not until February 2011 that the then US secretary of state Hillary Clinton was able to publicly endorse the diplomatic route for a settlement in Afghanistan in her address to the Asia Society. But this recognition came too late for the US to have the desired effect on the course of events in Afghanistan.
As elaborated by Carter Malkasian in his authoritative book, ‘The American War in Afghanistan’, labelled as a landmark history of the conflict by the Washington Post, two fundamental factors sustained the Taliban in their 20-year struggle against the US and its allies: an indomitable will to resist foreign occupation and a deep commitment to jihad in fighting against the Americans and their allies as infidels. Nothing that the US, its allies or the puppet government in Kabul could do in the fight against the Taliban succeeded, forcing the Americans into an ignominious retreat. The artificial political construct that they had imposed on Afghanistan unravelled in no time thereafter.
There are important lessons in the American debacle in Afghanistan that Pakistan can ignore only at its peril in the fight against terrorism emanating from Afghan soil and in managing its relations with Afghanistan. Pakistan’s long-term goal, of course, should be to develop friendly relations and mutually beneficial cooperation with Afghanistan based on the principles of non-interference in each other’s internal affairs, preventing the use of one country's soil for terrorism in the other and strengthening good-neighbour relations. Despite the Taliban’s obscurantist ideology, we should resist the temptation to interfere in Afghanistan’s internal affairs, unlike what we did in the second half of the 1990s.
Second, while Pakistan should continue to take a firm stand against the use of Afghan soil by the TTP, BLA or any other outfit for carrying out terrorist attacks inside Pakistan with or without Indian support, we should keep the door of dialogue open for resolving the issue peacefully. Learning from history, particularly the Soviet and the American experience, we should not commit the blunder of using our ground forces for any prolonged kinetic action in Afghanistan.
Besides keeping open the door of dialogue with the Afghan Taliban, Pakistan should also develop non-official channels of communication with different political groups and nationalities in Afghanistan to convey our point of view to the people of Afghanistan. We should, in particular, use the services of our religious scholars and leaders with influence among the Afghans for this purpose.
Finally, in the face of intransigence on the part of the Afghan Taliban on the issue of terrorism, we should convey our point of view effectively at different regional and global forums as well as within the Muslim world to build up political pressure on the Afghan Taliban. Thus, our Afghan strategy should be informed by a judicious combination of firmness and flexibility.
The writer is a retired ambassador and author of ‘Pakistan and a World in Disorder – A Grand Strategy for the Twenty-First Century’. He can be reached at: [email protected]
