This is what Pakistan is getting wrong about Afghanistan
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Historically, Pakistan’s relations with Afghanistan have never been steadily friendly or consistently hostile, but always overlayed by rancor, incompatibility and aggressiveness in attitudes, often hidden by diplomatic etiquette. These conflictive orientations cannot be attributed to any specific era or regime, except that in the pre-communist era and Soviet intervention, we see some extended years of cordiality and nuanced understanding of each other.
My argument is that it is geopolitics going back more than a century that has held the two Muslim non-boring states prisoners of their ambitions, which neither of the two, no matter what the character of the regime on either side of the border, has been willing to get free of. Afghanistan with the high voltage crosscurrent of nationalism, driven by Pashtun essentialism, finds at loss to see roughly two-thirds of the co-ethnics on the Pakistani side, as a consequence of the British colonial rule. The Durand Line drawn in 1993 by an agreement between one of the most powerful kings and the builder of the modern Afghan state, Amir Abdul Rehman Khan (1880-190), and British India has left a deep sense of anguish, frustration as a historical wrong for the Afghans.
Facing a much more powerful state, Pakistan, and eventually, integration of the Pashtuns in the economic, political and state structure of Pakistan, the Kabul rulers have seen Pashtun nationalism withering away, a sentiment they had used to confront Islamabad. Pakistan’s support of the Mujahideen resistance against the Soviet Union and its aligning with Jihadism in the region further dissolved ethnic nationalism. There was optimism in Pakistan that hosting millions of Afghan refugees, assisting Mujahideen to their victory, and standing with the Afghan nation when they were occupied by the Soviet Union earned it the right to interfere and have a friendly government in Kabul.
What Pakistan has failed to understand is that the Afghans of all shades and opinions, supported by it or on the other side of any divide, have never felt comfortable with Pakistan telling them what is good for them or what type of relations they should have with certain countries.
Rasul Bakhsh Rais
Actually, the story is more complicated than such a simplistic notion of the Afghan psyche, history, and complex political landscape. There were other Afghans fighting against the Mujahideen and terming Pakistan’s counter-intervention as aggression against their state. Many of the Afghans hold Pakistan responsible for the destruction of their state and society for pursuing what has become a common but equally controversial notion of ‘strategic depth’, meaning deep influence over Afghanistan's influence on how it conducts relations with powers seen as hostile to Pakistan.
What Pakistan has failed to understand is that the Afghans of all shades and opinions, supported by it or on the other side of any divide, have never felt comfortable with Pakistan telling them what is good for them or what type of relations they should have with certain countries. They are fiercely independent people, willing to confront any power, big or small, to maintain their relative independence. More so, it is in the political culture of Afghanistan, which has strong roots in resistance to foreign powers, that being seen as a puppet is losing honor, face, and even power. Divisions within Afghanistan, ethnic and owing to power politics have added much greater complexity to relations with Pakistan. When their infightings, for the last half century, required some groups to seek Pakistan’s support (interference), others opposed and sought similar patronage from rival regional powers. What is equally important to note is that instability in Afghanistan makes relations unstable with Pakistan and other countries primarily because of the unsettled issue of legitimate political power.
Pakistan should have learned a lesson and rethought its Afghan policy when the Mujahideen it had cultivated and fielded in the Afghan war (1980-92), were not willing to even abide by the power-sharing agreements or listen to any voice of reason from any country in their internecine powerful struggle. It was apparent to all that the quest for power necessitated them to seek foreign support but when it came to their power interest or what they thought of the national interest, they took no dictation. That factor has continuously added temporariness and opposite trajectories to the Afghans’ orientation toward the external world.
Sadly, Pakistan has overtime exploited such vulnerabilities of Afghanistan during the two great power interventions—the Soviet Union and the United States—eventually ending up on one side of the political and diplomatic divide. The post-9/11 American-led war had provided an opportunity both for Afghanistan as well as Pakistan to reset the historical pattern but the same factor as alluded to above cut deeply into any such effort.
By supporting the Taliban movement against the international coalition forces, Pakistan burnt many bridges, hoping the second Taliban regime would be helpful in the pursuit of ‘strategic depth’. Once again, Pakistan has got it wrong, the Taliban are Afghans with similar cultural and geo-strategic orientations as any regime in the past. The border, trade routes and terrorism constitute structural faultiness mending of which has remained an elusive dream.
- Rasul Bakhsh Rais is Professor of Political Science in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, LUMS, Lahore. His latest book is “Islam, Ethnicity and Power Politics: Constructing Pakistan’s National Identity” (Oxford University Press, 2017).
