The End of the Affair
The sharp downturn in the AfPak relationship is a wonder of modern times. It is hard to remember when a friendship imploded as quickly and completely as the lovefest between Pakistan and the Afghan Taliban. The nearest one can think of is the Ribbentrop Molotov Pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. And yet, in hindsight, there appears an inevitability about the whole affair.
When America abandoned Afghanistan in 2021 Pakistan celebrated the Afghan victory as much as did the Taliban. Historically though, the friendship was an anomaly. More natural is a state of conflict between the territories that are now Pakistan, and Afghanistan. A shared religion encouraged for some time the notion of ‘strategic depth’ for Pakistan. The same religious reason is partly responsible for the collapse of the relationship.
As far as one can make out, Tehrik e Taliban Pakistan (TTP) insists that the Shariah be promulgated in all of Pakistan. But also looming over the relationship is the old conflict over Afghan territories incorporated into British India through the Durand Line of 1893 which Afghanistan was forced to accept in the colonial era.
The dispute is older than the Durand Line, however. It begins when the Sikhs under Ranjit Singh crossed the Indus to take Afghan territories ruled by the Barakzai Sardars, relatives of the Barakzais of Kabul. When the British in turn defeated the Sikhs they inherited these territories, including those parts extending up to and beyond the Khyber pass, held by the Sikhs.
Afghan national feeling newly formed under the Father of the Afghans, Ahmad Shah Durrani did not for a moment accept this loss of Pathan homelands. Raids into what was now British territory continued through the second half of the nineteenth century. A strong irredentist sentiment continues to smoulder in Pakhtun political life.
In the 19th century Russia and Britain caught up in the ‘great game’ vied for influence in Afghanistan. The Russians were the more proactive lot seeking access to warm waters while the British feared loss of their empire in India. Both sides secretly manoeuvred for influence in Central Asia and even battled each other, as in Crimea in 1853. Eventually, at the turn of the century, with a European war looming the triple alliance between Britain, France and Russia ended the great game.
Meanwhile Afghanistan became a buffer state between Russia and British India. Afghan tribesmen however continued to raid British territory even after the Durand line was forced upon the Amir Abdul Rahman by Mortimer Durand the Foreign Secretary of the Government of India.
Emir Amanullah of Afghanistan recognized the Line in the Anglo Afghan agreement after the 3rd Anglo Afghan war in 1919, but it did not end the raids. Afghanistan was the only country to oppose the admission of Pakistan to the United Nations when it was created in 1947 because it included territory claimed by Afghanistan.
King Zaheer Shah continued to be cool towards Pakistan during his term. In the mid seventies after Zaheer Shah’s nephew Daoud Khan had deposed him it seemed that an agreement between the two countries might be possible under which Afghanistan would recognize the Durand Line. But Bhutto was deposed by Zia ul Haq in 1978 and Daoud himself soon thereafter.
The Taliban whom Pakistan helped create and subsequently nourish, through thick and thin, have never accepted the Durand Line. This is where matters are today. What is new is the fundamentalist strain of religious thought now dominating both sides of the Durand Line. This strain seems to have originated from Pakistan, primarily from the Deobandi Darul Uloom Haqqania.
Pakistan’s religious troubles with Afghanistan are self-created. It helped create the Taliban, encouraged them to take over Afghanistan, and sustained them through years of adversity. In fact during the early years of the Taliban takeover of Pakistan in the 1990s the US ambassador to India (if memory serves, it was Richard Celeste) welcomed the takeover of government by the Taliban. In those days the US company Unocal was trying to get a gas pipeline built from Turkmenistan to India and Pakistan, which the Taliban were willing to allow.
In those days the Taliban were useful to Pakistan, even perhaps its tool. This became evident during the Kandahar hijacking incident of the Indian Airlines flight from Kathmandu. Pakistani Punjabis fought as part of the Taliban against Ahmad Shah Masood’s Northern Alliance just before the nine eleven episode that led to the American invasion. Masood Azhar, Omar Sheikh and Mushtaq Ahmad Zargar turned up in Pakistan after being released to the Taliban. Pakistan managed to evacuate a large contingent of Taliban fighters including Punjabis and Afghans from Kunduz when the Americans took over in December 2021.
2021 brought Taliban redux. Lt. General Faiz Hameed’s smiling group photo taking tea in Kabul with Taliban leaders portended continued close cooperation between the two countries. Why that did not happen must await the more informed researches of a future historian. It was an astute bit of manoeuvring, whatsoever the means employed, or motivations.
When the East India Company and the Russian Tsar began jousting in Central Asia cash payments lubricated deals between the them and rival Afghan Sardar seeking allies against each other the Russian and British encroachments upon Afghan sovereignty also helped consolidate Afghan nationalism.
What Pakistan faces today on its Western frontier is a consolidated Afghan national feeling. Unfortunately for that country, the pan Islamic sentiment that it hoped would favour its strategic interests in the East has reversed direction, for the present at least. Pakistan encouraged and strengthened the Islamic fundamentalist strain among Afghans to counter the liberalizing tendencies under King Zaheer Shah. In an awkward turnaround religious zealotry has hoisted Pakistan with its own petard as the country is now charged by the TTP with being insufficiently Islamic.
In the early 2000s Nek Mohammad, one of the founders of the TTP offered to fight with Pakistan against India over Kashmir. It was the kind of talk Pakistan liked to hear. It would not be for the first time that frontier tribesmen were invoked in the sacred cause. In a strange mutation of sentiment since then the same Pakistani Taliban now prioritize fighting Pakistan over fighting India. General Musharraf himself escaped two assassination attempts, in at least one of which one Ilyas Kashmiri, born out of the Kashmir theatre of conflict, was said to be involved.
In 1990, after a Pakistani army exercise called Operation Zarb e Momin, the Army Chief General Aslam Beg proclaimed he had now found strategic depth against India. That depth, whatever it may have meant, is now not just lost, strategic space with Pakistan is greatly reduced. Unless it tones down the martial bravado it may get itself into a real jam East and West.
India in turn would be ill advised to take the current state of mild friendship with the Taliban regime as the harbinger of a long-term close relationship. The Afghan people may seem fond of India (a 2022 survey found that 69% of Afghans consider India their best friend) but that is not how Afghans felt about India in 1980 when it refused to condemn the USSR invasion of Afghanistan.
From India’s point of view Pakistan is a useful buffer against Afghanistan. While it serves India’s purpose to have Pakistan busy on its Western frontier there is little to be gained by having an Afghan presence West of the Indus. There is no doubt that Pakistan is strong enough to not only retain its own territory but to decisively punish Afghan incursions into Pakistan.
Pakistan’s internal situation is, however, fraught, and politically fragile. A political collapse in Rawalpindi will reinstantiate the army (which, in some sense, has already happened). But the army is not a popular institution nowadays. The Taliban is also known to have made claims to territories occupied by Hindko speaking Pathans on the borders of the erstwhile J&K State (Ayub Khan and actor Dilip Kumar were Hindko speakers).
The Afghan Taliban are said to be reluctant to help suppress the TTP because they could switch allegiance to ISIS Khorasan. In that case Afghanistan itself might become a conflicted country again. The Taliban are fundamentalist Muslims of course, but they are nationalists who follow the Hanafi school, subject to the tribal code of Pakhtunwali. ISIS (K) reject all traditional schools of Islamic law and all national feeling, insisting on a Salafist interpretation of the faith under a Caliphate.
One presumes that Pakistan, with its nationalist outlook and adherence predominantly to the Hanafi school will not want to encourage the ISIS (K) as a counter to the Taliban. History tells us, however, that there are no limits to the Pakistani Army’s obtuseness. In trying to get out of one hole it could easily dig a deeper one for itself.
B R Singh is a retired IAS officer who served in the J&K cadre.
