Afghanistan without illusions

Pakistan’s understanding of its northwestern neighbour is beset with hubris and delusion masquerading as familiarity. The increasingly bold and bloody attacks on our soldiers and Pakistan’s response indicate that it is time to set aside nostrums and ethnic proclivity. All attempts to make Afghanistan our backyard have failed. All attempts to appease Afghanistan have failed. It is a complex neighbour closer to being foe than friend. It is time to see Afghanistan without illusions.

This complex neighbour poses, after India, the most serious challenge for Pakistan’s security today. Terrorist incidents inside Pakistan began to rise in 2021, the year of the US withdrawal and assumption of power by the Afghan Taliban. In 2021, there were 294 terrorist incidents, a 56 per cent rise from 187 incidents in 2020. In 2022, the number of incidents rose to 380, and in 2023 nearly doubled to 645.

Pakistan’s security agencies estimate that almost all these incidents have their origin inside Afghanistan. Since the end of 2020, around 1907 Pakistanis have been martyred by terrorists. The worst recent attack killed at least 100 people, mostly policemen, when a suicide bomber blew himself up in a Peshawar mosque in January 2023. Compared with 2020, terrorist incidents in 2023 increased 244 per cent; and the number of Pakistanis killed rose by 267 per cent. Most of the Pakistanis martyred were in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) and Baluchistan, although Punjab also witnessed a rising number of terrorist incidents last year.

Pakistan is bleeding again. The simplest questions are the most relevant: who, why, how. We assume that the ‘who’ is the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) that Pakistan ostensibly eradicated in 2015-16 through operations Zarb-e-Azb and Rad-ul-Fasaad and some of its remnants fled to Afghanistan. After the Afghan Taliban took over, the government of Pakistan in 2021 – civilian as well as military – offered amnesty to TTP remnants and repatriated them. The severity of that strategic blunder cannot be overestimated. They are remnants no longer and once again are assaulting the constitutional state of Pakistan.

We avert our eyes to the ‘why’ question and have done so for too long. It was and is hidden under the rubric of religious extremism, terrorism, and regional deprivation. But the TTP is clear and has announced its political intentions repeatedly. Its principal demand is the reversal of the merger of former Fata with KP, with the eventual intention of separating Fata into an autonomous region ruled by TTP.

The ‘how' question raises the thorny question of the sanctity or utter lack thereof of the Pak-Afghan border. The previous PML-N government fenced thousands of kilometres of this border. But what could the fence do when Imran Khan deliberately brought the TTP Trojan horse across the fence and inside our borders in 2021? Establishing the sanctity of the border is the first task in rebuilding the future Pak-Afghan relations. The border is and has been a principal irritant between the two neighbours since Pakistan’s independence. The border was the reason Afghanistan was the sole country to vote against Pakistan's admission into the United Nations in September 1947, though it withdrew its negative vote shortly afterwards.

History cleaves the two neighbours and there has been too much of it. The two Afghan wars (1979-89 and 2001-21) are vast subjects that defy easy summarization. The second war that brought US occupation and presence in Afghanistan for twenty years – and Pakistan’s concomitant cooperation – ended in an ignominious US withdrawal in 2021.

What did Pakistan gain? Between 2007 and 2016 and again in 2021-to date, our nation was and is the principal victim of violent extremism in the world. Pakistan's economy collapsed under the colossal loss of $252 billion in the US-led war against terrorism, which is nearly eight times more than the financial assistance given by Washington to Islamabad.

Pakistan lost 67,000 citizens during 2001-22. Yet this unimaginable ocean of pain and Pakistani blood became dust in Western capitals. By allegedly providing safe haven to the Afghan Taliban and through deception, Pakistan is deemed to be the principal reason the US lost the war in Afghanistan. Pakistan was the easy scapegoat for the failures and defeats suffered by the Afghan Army and US forces at the hands of the Afghan Taliban.

Carter Malkasian differs in his magisterial work 'The American War in Afghanistan'. He documents how presidents Karzai and Ghani as well as successive heads of the Afghan National Army "claimed to be fighting a foreign Pakistani invasion and refused to characterise the [Afghan] Taliban as anything but a creature of Islamabad…Grievances, Pakistan and infighting could not explain every incident of [US] battlefield defeat".

The second task of rebuilding Pak-Afghan relations is reinforcing the sovereignty and thereby the responsibility of the two sides for their respective territories. This is the foundation for stopping cross-border terrorism, ending the harbouring of militants that attack the other state, and for returning Afghan refugees to their homeland. We should respect Afghanistan’s sovereignty in precisely the same magnitude and quality that Afghanistan respects Pakistan’s sovereignty. Quid pro quo.

The third task is to build cooperation on the common Pak-Afghan aim of defeating Islamic State Khorasan (ISIS-K), a group that according to a senior expert at USIP, “seeks to outperform rival jihadis by carrying out more audacious attacks to distinguish its jihadi brand and assert leadership of the global jihadi vanguard.” ISIS-K claimed responsibility for the attack on Moscow last week that killed at least 133 people, for attacking the Russian Embassy in Kabul, killed at least 84 people in Iran this January, and murdered 54 Pakistanis and injured over 130 in a suicide bombing in Bajaur last July. There is no time to waste in protecting the Pakistani people from this malignant extremism.

The fourth aim is ethnic neutrality in Pakistan’s Afghan policy. Pakistan needs to free itself from the impression that it supports Pashtuns at the cost of other ethnicities in Afghanistan. We need to see Afghans free from the Pashtun, non-Pashtun binary and see in our neighbours a nation like ours – yearning for peace and the ability to educate and feed their children. We also need to address the equally pernicious impression among Afghans that Pakistan has made money in their name, whether as refugees or through military aid from the US and allies.

Finally, it is time to unshackle ourselves from delusions of strategic depth and obsolete affiliations. It is time to focus single-mindedly on connectivity – trade, communications, financial systems, and energy – for shared prosperity. Pakistan has to redeem its destiny as the crossroads of South Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East, and China. 'Geography is destiny' and, whatever our current travails, Pakistan and Afghanistan are part of each other’s destiny.

The writer is a former member of the National Assembly. He tweets/posts @kdastgirkhan