The US-Pakistan relationship in Afghanistan could become choppy. Each player has intrinsic national interests. Some of them are unpalatable to the other. Thus far there have been no antagonistic contradictions but things are heating up and may have serious repercussions.
The US had three quick objectives in Afghanistan: to defeat the Taliban, to establish a puppet regime, and to exit with men and materials into Iraq. In the event, the Taliban regime is no more and a puppet “Afghan” regime is in place. But President Hamid Karzai’s regime isn’t stable because of warlordism and resurgent Talibanism. Nor is it national, dominated as it is by non-Pashtuns. Thus NATO has had to intervene and hundreds of millions of dollars are now in the pipeline for constructing an Afghan nation-state. Clearly, the emphasis has shifted. The main aim now is to construct an Afghan national army and a democratically elected national government in the next nine months that can be billed as at least one foreign policy “success” in President Bush’s election year.
This American short term goal is dependent on several swift achievements: a presidential constitution; sanctioned by a representative loya jirga; followed in June 2004 by free, fair and credible national elections, in which Mr Karzai is duly elected as president; and a national army that can enable his writ to be established across Afghanistan. In pursuit of this composite goal, Washington has launched two major offensives: Operation Avalanche is the biggest “Get Taliban” military operation since 2001; and Pakistan is coming under pressure to flush out troublesome anti-Karzai elements in the borderlands.
This quick-nation-building approach in Afghanistan tailored to specific Bush interests in 2004 is problematic for Afghanistan and Pakistan and therefore for America itself. Afghanistan is no longer the “nation” it once was, having splintered into warring tribes, ethnicities and sub-nationalities since foreign intervention triggered off “the great game” all over again in 1979 and subsequently rent the Afghan state asunder. Creating a functioning national state in the current situation and in this nine month time frame is impossible. The Afghan “national army” is all of 6000 soldiers; the Afghan civil bureaucracy in Kabul is run by imported Afghans; and the international money that was promised to underpin this effort has stalled. Nor is there any certainty that the promised constitution will materialize without rigging the loya jirga and that the run up to the elections will be smooth.
Powerful voices against this artificial and hurried American approach are already being raised by neutral and discerning observers. For example, Mr Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN Special Representative to Afghanistan, has said that “the elections scheduled for June 2004 should be postponed until the right conditions have been created to hold them”. Among his concerns are critical facts: the Kabul government that will underwrite the proposed elections, and the official media that will propagate them, and the army that will provide the umbrella, are all factional rather than national in character, which means that representative and democratic results can be ruled out in the current circumstances. Thus while the American emphasis on a national Afghan entity is very welcome and American moves are in the right direction, the time frame and the methods whereby these are to be accomplished are all wrong. The strategy is tailored to the Bush administration’s own electoral needs next year rather than the long term interests of the Afghan people objectively. Therefore the end is most likely to be subverted by the means.
But Washington is not currently inclined to see matters this way. Indeed, at least one powerful think tank (Council on Foreign Relations, New York) has opined that unless Islamabad actively helps the Americans flush out Taliban and anti-Karzai elements operating out of safe havens in Pakistan’s borderlands, the US-Pak relationship could be impaired, with serious consequences for Pakistan.
But Pakistan’s interests in Afghanistan, however badly defined or articulated, cannot be shrugged away at the altar of American interests. Forget about ‘strategic depth’ and that old nonsense. At the very least there is an unsettled border issue (Durand Line); and the volatile Pashtuns who straddle both Afghanistan and Pakistan are a majority “nationality” in the NWFP and a majority nationality in all of Afghanistan. Both facts raise the spectre of separatism in Islamabad. On top of it, Pakistan’s national security establishment has “invested” 25 years in trying to cobble an Afghan state sympathetic to, and dependent upon, Pakistan. How can Washington expect Islamabad to blithely support American short term ends in Afghanistan unless these are also in line with Pakistan’s longer term concerns if not interests?
The Americans, in effect, are trying to consolidate a factional state system in Kabul that Pakistan had also tried to foist and failed, albeit with different partners. A far better American approach would be to bring Pakistan into the loop as a strategic partner in the rebuilding of Afghanistan’s national state, thereby transforming a potential liability into a valuable asset. This can be done, for starters, by transforming the existing US-Afghanistan-Pakistan Tripartite Commission from a tactical to a strategic meeting point.