Misunderstanding Afghanistan

Pakistanis, no matter what their political inclination may be, rarely consider Afghanistan a sovereign set of people. There are the right-wingers for whom Afghanistan is a country where we can fight our eternal battles against India. Not quite home but a place where he have home advantage – like Misbah’s team playing their cricket in the UAE. Others profess concern for Afghanistan but that usually ends up taking a paternalistic form, an ‘Oh, poor Afghanistan’ kind of pity which does not give the country and its rulers the agency to be responsible for charting their own course.

This infantalisation of Afghanistan is particularly severe when discussing the country’s ties with India. The billion dollars in aid that India has offered Afghan President Ashraf Ghani is seen, depending on where one falls on the hawk-dove spectrum, either as proof that the two countries are scheming against us or understood as a natural response to our constant meddling. Here’s a thought: maybe Afghanistan is doing what’s best for it and is accepting even more money from the country that is the fifth largest donor to the country. Any deal with India has to have a certain amount of anti-Pakistan rhetoric built into it but maybe, for once, everything isn’t about us.

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani is no ideologue. He is certainly an ambitious schemer but that is balanced out by his technocratic instincts. His predecessor Hamid Karzai was similar but had rougher edges, likely because he was at least in Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion and its aftermath. Ghani served Afghanistan in the vital battlefields of Columbia University, Berkeley, Johns Hopkins and the World Bank. This is a man with ice-cold pragmatism running through his veins.

After his election as president in 2014 – or rather his brokered agreement with Abdullah Abdullah in 2014 which elevated him to the presidency – Ghani was conciliatory towards Pakistan. Bilateral visits were filled with warm words. Analysts in Pakistan speculated that Ghani was pivoting away from India. He wasn’t. He wanted money and investment and we didn’t provide any of it. Once again we had made the mistake of looking at Afghanistan through our own India-centric prism rather than considering it a separate country with its own interests.

Our response to being left out of the Chahbahar port deal between India and Iran – which also includes Afghanistan, which will provide India road and rail access to Central Asia, bypassing Pakistan in the process – shows both how we view everything through India-tinted glasses while dismissing Afghanistan’s own importance. For us, the Chabahar deal is an outrage first because India got one over on us and second because now we won’t get to share in the spoils of Central Asia’s mineral and energy riches. Afghanistan is only a transit point to the countries we really want to do business with.

What we don’t realise in our inflated sense of self-importance is that Afghanistan is treating us the same way – as a flyover country. Its largest demand of Pakistan right now is that we allow Indian goods to cross the Wagah border on their way to Afghanistan. Afghanistan is not demanding this as a way of flouting its closeness to India in our faces. It just sees India as its most lucrative trading partner and wants to reduce the cost of transporting Indian goods. For Afghanistan, we are just a transit point to a more prosperous world beyond.

As much as economics matters, it’s impossible to discuss ties between the two countries without considering the Taliban-shaped elephant in the room. We have a long history of support for them.

Our story on the Taliban has more plot twists than the standard tear-jerking soap opera. Sometimes we are supporting the Taliban because they bring stability to the country. But then we aren’t actually supporting the Afghan Taliban; we just can’t take action against them because the TTP is the bigger problem right now. No wait, we are taking the fighting to them and have driven them out of the country thanks to Zarb-e-Azb. And if we get tired of juggling justifications, we just accuse them of doing the same thing and supporting the TTP.

The militancy problem also plays in to the perceptions both countries have of each other. Pakistan can be justified in pointing out that the world hardly seems concerned that Mullah Fazlullah and his merry band of marauding militants have been able to live peacefully in the Kunar province and other bordering provinces of Afghanistan for so long. We can also point out to Afghan intelligence being caught paying TTP militants. The problem, once again, is that we seem to have no empathy and lots of projection.

Conversely, Afghanistan does exactly the same thing with Pakistan. It accuses us of not properly manning the border – the not-too-veiled implication being that we want to facilitate the movement of Taliban fighters into Afghanistan – and then lashes out when we try to build a border gate at the Torkham crossing and demand identification from those entering Pakistan. This is also yet another case of the two countries petulantly trying to make life as difficult as possible for each other while maintaining plausible deniability.

Afghanistan can say it just doesn’t have the resources or ability to smoke out Fazlullah but we know they would rather he hang around and annoy Pakistan. Pakistan can claim it only wants to properly police the border but Afghanistan knows we want to squeeze them where it hurts by making it difficult for Afghans who work in Pakistan from crossing over and preventing refugees from meeting their families.

It is these refugees who have become pawns in Pakistan’s attitude towards Afghanistan. That we still call people who have, in some cases, been living in the country for decades, refugees rather than citizens should be scandalous enough. But our treatment of Afghans in Pakistan changes based on political calculation of ties with Afghanistan. When Ashraf blames Pakistan for militant attacks, spineless script-reading politicians suddenly sprout up to accuse refugees of bringing drugs, guns and violence to our previously pure shores. When we want some leverage with the international community over our hope to lead peace talks with the Afghan Taliban, we offer the refugees an extension of a few months before we will repatriate them. The refugees, most of whom are only refugees because we helped the US prove that Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires by trying to make the entire country one giant graveyard, are just props in our political problems of the day.

Our Afghan policy, if a hodgepodge of belligerent nationalism and paranoia can be called a policy, suffers the singular problem of our not caring about Afghanistan or its people. For all the shared heritage between its people, Pakistan has never tried to understand Afghanistan or its culture. We do not need to agree with Afghanistan on all, or even most issues. We just need to start treating it as a country, and not an extension of our political hang-ups.

The writer is a journalist based in Karachi.

Email: nadir.hassan@gmail.com