General Pervez Musharraf was supposed to pay a visit to Kabul many months ago, ostensibly to try and talk some sense into the Taliban leaders of Afghanistan. But General (retd) Moinuddin Haider, the interior minister, is going instead on “mission impossible”.
Iran was once provoked to consider flattening the Taliban. But it changed its mind when the enraged Taliban swarmed to the Iranian border instead of retreating to Kandahar. Then President Clinton rained cruise missiles on them for hosting Osama Bin Laden. But this was like water off a duck’s back. Meanwhile, President Putin of Russia has blown hot and cold over the destabilizing impact of Talibanism in Chechnya and some central Asian republics but it has not made an iota of difference in Kabul. Now the Taliban face a host of American sponsored UN sanctions that will make life uncomfortable for everyone in Afghanistan. But they remain defiant. Indeed, they are hoping that the US will eventually engage with them, recognize them as the legitimate government of Kabul and do business with them.
Meanwhile, the supergenerals of Pakistan have trotted out a list of dos and don’ts for Mullah Umar, partly because Islamabad pretends to be concerned about the blowback effects of Talibanism as manifested in the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in general and Islamic sectarianism in particular in Pakistan and partly because it is posturing (“we’re doing our best to moderate them”) for the sake of appeasing the international community. What is right or wrong with Pakistan’s Afghan’s policy?
The supergenerals maintain that Islamabad has always played favourites in Afghanistan because it needs an unequivocal ally in Kabul who provides “strategic depth” to Pakistan in its regional framework. But no one has ever explained what this high sounding “strategic depth” is really all about. If it means a friendly state in Pakistan’s backyard where we can park a couple of airplanes in time of war with India, no one can quibble with that. But an anarchist friendly state in Kabul with a crippling blowback impact on Pakistan’s civil society at the expense of an old and civilisational friendly state like Iran is hardly good strategy. Nor does it make sense for a country with a critically ailing economy like ours to alienate the oil-and-gas rich central Asian republics (who yearn for a mutually profitable relationship with Pakistan) for the sake of friendship with a highly dubious and impoverished regime in Afghanistan.
But the supergenerals may have another notion of “strategic” interest in mind when they view the pros and cons of supporting the Taliban of Afghanistan. Indeed, General Musharraf may have been thinking of some such strategic notion when he recently said that Pakistan had to be friends with the Taliban because they were comprised of ethnic Pakhtuns who formed the main ethnic community of our own NWFP that borders Afghanistan. This leads us to postulate the supergenerals’ strategic thinking that a strong Pakhtun state in Afghanistan would suit Pakistan immeasurably more than a weak Pakhtun on non-Pakhtun state. Is that right?
No, it isn’t. First, we need to make the distinction between a strong and weak state in Afghanistan irrespective of its ethnic composition. Then we have to ask whether a strong state in Afghanistan suits us more than a weak one. Thus a weak state in Afghanistan which is dependent on Pakistan is surely better from our point of view than a strong state which competes with us for regional influence or makes bold to ally with other powers in the region. Finally, we have to ask whether a strong Pakhtun-dominated state in Afghanistan suits us more than a weak, non-Pakhtun dominated state in Afghanistan. For those who haven’t followed the march of history, a weak non-Pakhtun dominated state in Afghanistan has never posed any threat to Pakistan because it has neither had any ideological bearings or religious extra-national ambitions nor any ethnic or sub-nationalist stirrings. On the other hand, whenever there has been a strong Pakhtun dominated state in Afghanistan, whether secular-centrist as under President Daud or secular-leftist as under President Nur Mohd Taraki or Hafizullah Amin or Najibullah, its government has been compelled by the logic of its own composition to pander to ethnic nationalism by supporting Pakhtun separatism (refusal to accept the Durand Line) or try and export religious fundamentalism (Talibanism) to the NWFP and Balochistan. If Mr Ajmal Khattak, who was the first politician to be graced by a meeting with General Musharraf, knows all about the first sort of anti-Pakistan, Pakhtun Afghan state, Maulana Samiul Haq knows all about the latter sort of potentially anti-Pakistan, Pakhtun Afghan state. This would suggest that a strong Taliban state in Afghanistan, which combines the worst elements of ethnic Pakhtun nationalism and religious exclusivism, would eventually pose a threat to the territorial integrity and political solidarity of multi-ethnic, multi-sectarian, democratic Pakistan.
Afghanistan under the Taliban therefore poses a greater potential danger to Pakistan than it does to any other country in the world. But while the world is up in arms against a regime that provides sanctuary to all the religious extremists of the modern century, our supergenerals insist upon lecturing us about the necessity of the Taliban. How completely, utterly wrong they are.