Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Pakistan's Policy Towards Afghanistan

This article will look at the factors due to which Pakistan switched from supporting Afghan leaders such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Sayyaf to supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan in the 1990s, and why Pakistan continued its support of the Taliban when the entire international community and the regional countries of Asia except the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia opposed the Taliban and Pakistan’s support for them.

Pakistan’s foreign policy towards Afghanistan has always been driven by its strategic interests. Pakistan and Afghanistan are neighboring states and Pakistan shares 2430 km 1 of its 6560 km long border 2 with Afghanistan along the controversial Durand Line.

Pakistan has, for a long time, harmonized its strategic interests with those of the United States of America. This started when Pakistan entered into the fold of CENTO and SEATO in the 1950s and this trend continued in the days of the Cold War. Pakistan did not acquire a lot from this policy except for the aids and grants that this policy gained Pakistan from the West (Grover, Pg 262). Some of Pakistan’s cardinal foreign policy decisions took place when Pakistan was under military rule. Generals of the third world countries have never been farsighted or great thinkers and so is the case in Pakistan. Popular governments are always the ones that have had to clear up the mess caused by such policies afterwards. From 1988 onwards, there had been several elected governments in Pakistan which were periodically ousted from power for attempting to follow a policy which was the opposite of the one which the military wanted to follow in Afghanistan. Because Pakistan had a different government almost after every couple of years in the 1990s, Pakistani military establishment continued its own policies in Afghanistan. A cruel political reality is that Pakistani military and its agencies are largely an autonomous body which is largely not answerable to the elected governments. The proof of this is the fact that although elected governments tried to eliminate Islamic militants from Pakistani territory, these militants still were there along the Pak-Afghan border where they were getting military training from the Pakistan army in the use of guerilla warfare and explosives (Grover, Pg 263). Therefore, a discussion of Pakistan’s strategic interests in Afghanistan should rather be seen through the perception of the Pakistani military and not merely through that of the elected government. We must first discuss Pakistan’s strategic interests over Afghanistan in the light of circumstances which prevailed after the departure of the Soviets from Afghanistan in the late 1980s.

The most important issue for Pakistan was the disputed border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. This border, also called the Durand Line was erected during the British Raj in India under a treaty with Afghanistan in 1893 after the Second Afghan war of 1878-80. The area between the Durand Line and British India was accepted as “free tribal territory” and its people retained their tribal autonomy despite being under Britain’s sovereignty. The covenant was renewed time and again between the British and Afghans by more agreements in 1905, 1929 and 1930. The Durand Line proved to be a bone of contention between Afghanistan and Pakistan after the Partition of India in 1947. The Afghans now refused to accept the border which divided Afghanistan from the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan. The NWFP is culturally, historically, linguistically and ethnically very close to Afghanistan and many people of the region have family members on both sides of the Pak-Afghan border. The Pakhtun tribes are all largely followers of Sunni Islam, Pashtu-speaking, but are politically divided into the settled areas of NWFP, tribal areas (FATA) and those in Afghanistan. The Afghans’ demanded that based on these factors, NWFP should be made a part of Afghanistan or else made into independent Pakhtunistan (Grover, Pg 264). The issue got further complex because of the inter-tribal wedlocks between Pakhtuns in Afghanistan and those in NWFP. The Durand Line was further made diluted by the influx of millions of Afghan refugees into Pakistani territory across the Pak-Afghan border after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. Pakistan converted a large part of the refugee population into being fighters against the Soviets (Mujahideen). This notion of Jihad brought Pakistan a large amount of financial help from the wealthy Muslim states. Pakistan also got a large amount of financial and military help from the West. Between 1979 and 1989, Pakistan reportedly got more than ten billion dollars of aid. Pakistan very selectively distributed part of this money amongst select groups of the Mujahideen and refugees to create a friendly group amongst the Afghans which would not be against Pakistan. Pakistan thought that this would cater to a number of its interests later on. Apart from settling the border dispute, it would give Pakistan the strategic depth to face India (Grover, Pg 265).

The Soviet retreat from Afghanistan led to the diminishing of foreign aid from the US to Pakistan. Pakistan now looked towards Gulbuddin Hekmatyar as a friendly successor in Afghanistan. Hekmatyar’s subsequent failure and negotiations with Rabbani’s government may be some factors which led to formation of the Taliban later on. Afghanistan did not have any charismatic person who could command the loyalties of the Afghan population. Pakistan tried to invent such a leader in Gulbuddin Hekmatyar but he was not accepted by all factions of the Mujahideen population. Subsequently, Pakistan lost its credibility in the eyes of the Afghans as a sympathetic mediator in solving the Afghan’s problems.

There were several other developments at about this time in the international world. Iran’s success in its Islamic Revolution in the 1980s gave it a sort of leadership position in the Islamic world. The Saudis felt this menace from Iran and were in favor of having a strong government in Kabul soon which could counter the growing influence of Tehran in the region.

Another development was the discovery of mineral and fuel resources in the newly independent Central Asian Republics which came into being with the breakup of the Soviet Union after the Cold War. These natural resources drew the attention of USA into the region. A US company called UNOCAL Corporation and a Saudi company called Delta Oil Company, two major oil and gas companies of the world joined hands together to make use of these resources for the markets in Pakistan and Eastern Asia. Two major pipelines were proposed over a distance of 1000 miles, costing a total of 4.7 billion dollars, in order to carry the minerals from Turkmenistan to Pakistan through Afghanistan. This was termed as the UNOCAL/Delta Oil’s Corridor to Commerce (Grover, Pg 266). It was stated in the details of the project that “one of the major obstacles to project implementation is the political instability in Afghanistan. It is fundamentally important that a single body representing the whole of Afghanistan is formed.” (Grover, Pg 267)

Under these circumstances, Pakistan was willing to assist UNOCAL/Delta Oil Company as it very well suited Pakistan’s strategic and economic goals and UNOCAL/Delta also knew of Pakistan’s role in Afghanistan during the Cold War. Pakistan tried to bring into play its past tactics in Afghanistan. It knew that a full-scale war in Afghanistan could not be victorious for it, seeing what had recently happened with the former Soviet Union which had been a superpower in its time. It therefore used religion as a basis to bring unity amongst the ethnically divided Afghans. Pakistan had previously used this tactic of using religion with some amount of success in Kashmir and Indian Punjab. It now used this strategy of exploiting religion to create the Taliban, as a substitute for the Rabbani regime in Kabul to help it in realizing its economic and strategic interests. The Taliban, like Hekmatyar, were not accepted by all the Afghans because they represent only a part of the ethnically divided population of Afghanistan. An understanding developed between General Dostum and Ahmed Shah Masood of Afghanistan and they successfully managed to evade Taliban’s assaults on Panjshir Valley. Pakistan failed for another major reason. To begin with, Pakistan is not strong enough to do such a mammoth task and it also did not realize that USA would lose its interest in this part of the world once the Soviet troops returned to Russia (Grover, Pg 267).

Ahmed Rashid wrote an article in Herald in which he quoted Diego Cordovez and Selig Harrison, stating that Pakistan’s Afghanistan policy was not right since the very start as it favored only those Afghan leaders which were its favorites, such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar against others such as Masood during the Soviet invasion. According to Rashid, Pakistan would have been far better off had it let a legitimate and credible leadership to evolve in Afghanistan which had the support of the Afghan masses. Pakistan is also accused of directing the CIA arms equipment towards its favorites and supporting Pakhtuns in order to preserve Pakhtun command in Afghanistan. Pakistan maintained this attitude when Soviet invasion ended in Afghanistan, hardly thinking that it was annoying the neighbors of Afghanistan, namely Iran and the Central Asian Republics, many of whom vehemently joined Teheran in opposing Islamabad’s actions in Kabul. It can be rightly said however that Pakistan, like other nations of the world, had never expected the Soviet Union to break apart in 1991, and Pakistan indeed attempted to tend to wounds it had caused to Iran in 1995 and 1996 when many visits took place of Pakistan high officials to Iran, including the Prime Minister’s visit to Teheran in November 1995 to eliminate Iran’s fears about the Taliban. Pakistan was in a frenzy to gain recognition of Iran and other countries for the Taliban as the Taliban moved towards the capture of Kabul (Grover, Pg 268).

Pakistan’s policy over the Taliban led it to be quite regionally isolated by the end of 1996. Iran, the Central Asian Republics and Russia were opposing it on one side and Pakistan’s Gulf friends were not giving it the financial support in the quantities that it required. Nasim Zehra’s article “Hot War over Afghanistan” in the Nation stated: “Teheran’s current policy towards Afghanistan does not alienate it regionally but Pakistan is viewed suspiciously by Russia, Kazakhstan, China and Tajikistan. Teheran-Delhi growing trade ties have now been supplemented by deeper diplomatic and political understanding between the two on Afghanistan, while Islamabad’s Washington supporters are weary of openly supporting Islamabad’s policy of backing the Taliban. Compared to Islamabad, the going is better for Teheran.” (Grover, Pg 269).

To conclude, we can see that Pakistan supported the Taliban in the face of growing international opposition for strategic and economics interests. Pakistan had initially supported Afghan leaders like Hekmatyar because it seemed that their interests would be similar to those of Pakistan if they came to power. At their failure, Pakistan began supporting Taliban because they were the ones who had managed to control most of Afghanistan and hence seemed to bring about some level of stability in the country. Many of the war-torn country’s inhabitants welcomed the Taliban as their saviors, even though many of them resented them on ethnic basis. They seemed to be a good alternative for Pakistan instead of people like Hekmatyar because they were basically Pakhtuns, and Pakistan has a large Pakhtun population in its North West Frontier Province. Therefore, Pakistan felt that a Pakhtun authority in Kabul would be suitable for promoting its interests as it would sympathize with Pakistan. It would also help in solving Pakistan’s border dispute along the Durand Line and the Pakhtunistan issue sentiments which, however lessened, still existed with Afghanistan. Pakistan already had a hostile neighbor in India and could not afford to have an unfriendly Afghanistan. For the sake of preserving its sovereignty, it needed to have clearly defined and respected borders. The Taliban were strongest in the areas surrounding the Pak-Afghan border and Pakistan felt that supporting them would prove to lead to friendly relations with Afghanistan in the years to come. Thus, it always wanted to have a friendly Afghanistan, which seemed possible to it at the time if Afghanistan came under Taliban rule. Stability of Afghanistan was also important for Pakistan due to economic reasons. The wealth of natural resources in the Central Asian Republics could be tapped by Pakistan only through Afghanistan. There was the issue of the pipelines through Afghanistan from Central Asia which could be important for enhancing Pakistan’s economy. There was possible influence from USA which never wanted Pakistan to have a gas pipeline with Iran and instead much favored gas from Central Asia. Pakistan was also becoming concerned that Turkey and Iran could deprive it of trade with the landlocked Central Asian States via Karachi and Gwadar by developing trade links through Port Bandar Abbas in Iran and through the Mediterranean via Turkey. In October 1994, Pakistan’s interior minister Naseerullah Babar undertook a highly publicized journey across Afghanistan through Kandahar and Herat and then dispatched a trade convoy along the same path in order to display the potential of Pakistan as a trade outlet to the sea for Central Asia. It was the Taliban who had protected this very trade convoy (Marsden, 132). The Taliban were in control of this trade route so Pakistan felt that helping them could be beneficial for Pakistan. The Taliban had an appeal to the young madrassah students and had no difficulty in recruitment therefore. Thus, Pakistan felt that the Taliban had an excellent chance of controlling the Pakhtun belt and could also take over the whole of Afghanistan if they were supported, just as Abdur Rahman had done with British help in the 1800s. The political stability that would come as a result would therefore give Pakistan not only trade opportunities with Central Asian Republics, but also strategic depth against its rival India (Peter Marsden, 143). Taliban were also accepted by Saudi Arabia and UAE which were friends of Pakistan and Pakistan expected that after some time other countries would also recognize the Taliban regime. It was due to these factors that Pakistan continued to support the Taliban in the 1990s in the face of increasing opposition from the international community.



Bibliography

1. "Afghanistan Border." World Map, Map of the World. N.p., n.d. Web. 01 June 2009. .

2. "The Geography of border landscapes -." Google Book Search. N.p., n.d. Web. 01 June 2009. .

3. Grover, Verinder. Afghanistan. Minneapolis: Deep & Deep Publications,India, 2000. Print.

4. Marsden, Peter. Taliban war, religion and the new order in Afghanistan. Karachi: Oxford UP, Zed Books Ltd., 1998. Print.

(This article was written by me for my Pakistan's Foreign Relations class taught by Ambassador Shaharyar Khan during my Sophomore year at LUMS.)