Yasser Arafat’s recent initiatives to help negotiate peace talks in Afghanistan directly between the Kabul regime and the Mujahidin merit serious consideration. It also appears that prime minister Benazir Bhutto is not averse of encouraging him to try his luck with the Mujahidin in Peshawar, Gen Najib in Kabul and the rebel factions in Iran.
But the Americans do not seem to be terribly interested, just yet, in talking peace with Najibullah. By all accounts, they are egging on the Mujahidin in Peshawar to have another go at Jalalabad or Kandahar. That is why Vorontsov’s perfectly good formula for negative symmetry, as a first step in the right direction, has fallen on deaf ears in Washington. That is also why Peter Tomsen, their newly established envoy to the Mujahidin, is in Pakistan traipsing around the camps, assuring the Mujahidin that the arms pipeline will continue to flow, certainly until they have had another chance to capture Jalalabad or Kandahar in the next few weeks.
By all accounts it is clear that another adventurous military assault on either of the two cities by the divided and demoralised Mujahidin is bound to flounder. Independent foreign journalists, who have recently visited Afghanistan and met with officials of the Najibullah regime, have assessed the military situation on the ground of the two adversaries. They report that the morale of the Kabul regime’s soldiers is high, desertions have stopped, food and weapons are in abundance and a military victory for the Mujahidin highly unlikely in the short run. Additionally, the Iranians have only recently established a cosy relationship with the Soviets, who have promised to give President Rafsanjani an aid package of over US $ 6 billion. Chances are that the Iranian Mujahidin will be persuaded to settle for peace rather than support American efforts to prop up Mr Gulbudin Hekmatyar & Co and prolong the war, despite Mr Hekmatyar’s trip to Teheran last week to win the Shias over to his side. Finally, recent developments in the hierarchy of the Pakistani ISI, which used to call the shots in the Afghan war, may make it difficult for the Bush administration to have its own way completely, regardless of the consequences for Pakistan.
“The United States government has only one policy on Afghanistan,” says Mr Robert Flaten, director of the State Department’s office in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh. “We support efforts toward a political settlement of the Afghan issue”. So, what then, do the Americans hope to achieve by sanctioning yet another military attack on Jalalabad or Kabul? Mr Vorontsov is right when he says that they hope to capture a city or two so that, when, eventually, all the parties sit down to talk some time in the future, their bargaining position is stronger. But, by the same token, if the military tactics fail, it is obvious that their final bargaining position will be weaker than it is now.
There are no options for Pakistan except to support all efforts to secure peace in the region. We must encourage proximity talks among the warring Afghan factions as a first step toward direct talks between the Mujahidin and Najibullah. This bloody war has gone on for too long and it is time the refugees went home. If some Mujahidin leaders are afraid of free and fair elections in Afghanistan in which all the warring factions, including the present regime in Kabul, can participate under a neutral authority, then they can always exercise the option of flying off to Switzerland to spend their ill-gotten war spoils.