Coming too late

Afghan foreign minister Rangin Dadfar Spanta descended on Islamabad, met top political leadership, and his Pakistani counterpart Shah Mehmood Qureshi came out upbeat, saying he noted a radical change in Afghanistan’s approach and no more confrontation between the two countries. Maybe; but this change has come, if at all, too late when much water has flowed down the bridge in river Kabul.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai is at his term’s fag end and his reelection rug, going by western media, has slipped from under his feet as new dark horses are being saddled by the Americans for his job. And without a benevolent American hand, he cannot hope to reoccupy the presidency, a dependency for which he himself is squarely to blame. Had indeed he been his own man, Afghanistan would not have been what it is today, virtually America’s protectorate and at war with itself, and Kabul’s relations with Islamabad would have been not what they are actually, more adversarial and acrimonious and less harmonious and warm. But that he was not. He had had a chance that no other had to pacify his war-torn country and endear himself with his people.

The defeated predominantly-Pakhtun Taliban were demoralised and in disarray. And for being an ethnic Pakhtun with intimate knowledge of Pakhtun culture, traditions and norms, he had the credentials to isolate the extremists from the mainstream of his country’s majority community and woo it over to the government fold. He did not. Instead, he slavishly fell for toeing the American warlords’ line, letting them play a death dance on his community unquestioningly, even as he couldn’t be unaware of the Pakhtuns’ history of intolerance of foreign occupiers.

It is with tongue not gun that he could have won them over. The indiscriminate use of gun by the occupation armies has helped only the Taliban. They are resurgent lethally, getting more and more recruits as their fight has palpably spawned into traditional Pakhtun resistance to foreign occupation. In the process, Karzai’s own name has become just dust among his own community while he was not ever a man of the non-Pakhtuns. So his chances of reelection, for the present, look next to nothing. And even as he definitely knew that his country’s huge swathes, indeed most of its south and east, were under the Taliban’s sway right after their ouster from Kabul, where they were safely regrouping and had established launching pads for attacking the occupation armies, he kept braying that they had sanctuaries in Pakistan’s tribal region, inciting throughout the occupation armies to take out these alleged sanctuaries. And for the fatal American drone attacks on our tribal region, which more often than not kill and maim our innocent civilians, including children and women, he is viewed by our tribal Pakhtuns, too, as coconspirator of Pakhtuns’ massacre.

Worse, without bothering about Pakistan’s sensitivities and security concerns, he hobnobbed with the Indians and helped them establish a massive “non-transparent presence” in Afghanistan to sit on Pakistan’s neck on its western border as well. That saw the CIA and RAW conjoining up into an evil axis to infest our tribal region hugely with money, weapons and agents to terrorise and gore our innocent tribal compatriots blithely to destabilise it and wrench it away from Pakistan’s control. So if there is change in Kabul’s approach, it could only be tactical, not by conviction. Notably, the NATO community had long been disenchanted not just with Karzai but also with his regime for its corruption, ineptitude and incompetence. And towards their administration’s end, Bush’s neoconservatives, too, were giving vent to displeasure with him.

While on the stump, Obama and his aides were openly critical of Karzai and his government, which includes non-Pakhtun Northern Alliance that throughout sat high in Bush’s good graces for its services in toppling the Taliban and is the real power in the Kabul regime. Hence, the incumbent clutch of Northern Alliance in the Kabul ruling clan is feeling as uncertain and insecure as does Karzai about in the upcoming power dispensation. And it seems Spanta had descended here to strike some sort of a common position with Islamabad to cover up its flanks when Obama’s special envoy Richard Holbrooke for the two countries lands here next week to review the situation and report back to his boss. Islamabad needs to be very careful and not get swayed unnecessarily. It must be guided solely by our own national interests, which, of course, includes good relations with Afghanistan.