Seen in the backdrop of the July 7 bombing of Indian Embassy in Kabul, for which Afghanistan, India and the United States have all squarely accused Pakistani spy agency Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) of being involved, the new tranche of $450 million was Delhi's way of saying it will not be cowed down by acts of terror against its personnel, property and interests. The attack on embassy killed nearly 60 people, including two Indian diplomats. 'It was an attack on the friendship of India and Afghanistan,' said Singh in the presence of the visiting Afghan President Hamid Karzai on August 4 in New Delhi. 'We have agreed that we will not allow terrorism to stand in our way, and we will fight it unitedly and with full determination,' he said.
India's growing influence in Afghanistan is a cause of worry for Pakistan. India is involved in a substantial way in Afghan reconstruction work. Apart from training Afghan police and diplomats, it is building roads, hospitals, dams and schools and erecting transmission lines that will bring much-needed electricity from Central Asia to Kabul. Over the last five years Delhi has also awarded 1,000 scholarships to Afghan students every year.
While India's effort in helping rebuild a shattered economy is in sync with the U.S. and Nato's peacekeeping operations in Afghanistan, it is a cause of concern for Pakistan. Every now and then Indian efforts are hampered by acts of violence against its personnel. A number of Indian officials and road workers have been killed over the last few years. Afghan intelligence agency accuses Pakistani agents of training militants to attack Indian road workers in Afghanistan. Islamabad also does not allow Indian goods and humanitarian aid to be routed through its territory. Delhi has to direct the goods to Afghanistan mainly through the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas.
Pakistan too has provided financial aid to Kabul though in a much smaller measure as compared to India. But, more importantly, Pakistan has been playing host to millions of Afghan refugees, at a considerable cost, who had spilled over its territory after the Soviet occupation – and over two million of these displaced people continue to live in Pakistan.
Voicing Islamabad's misgivings over India's growing profile in Afghanistan, Pakistan's newspaper The Nation wrote early August: 'New Delhi has been extending its influence inside Afghanistan, especially after the Taliban regime had been toppled, and the common factor of hard feelings towards Pakistan has helped them (India and Afghanistan) in this context…India has also established consulates outside Kabul, which are, as pointed out by Pakistan several times, operating against its interests.'
Late 2002, a year after Taliban were ousted from power in Kabul, India reopened four of its consulates – in Jalalabad, Kandahar, Herat and Mazar-e-Sharif. By most accounts the Indian consular staff in these towns has little on their hands except to issue a visa or two daily to Afghan nationals or assist local applicants seeking scholarships to Indian universities. But Islamabad accuses Indian intelligence agents, particularly in bordering Jalalabad and Kandahar, of fanning secessionist fires among ethnic Pashtuns in Pakistan and financing secessionist insurgency in its Balochistan province. Delhi denies the accusations.
Pakistan has all along looked at Afghanistan as its backyard and any Indian presence there is an anathema for Islamabad. Karzai and his ministers have often sought to allay Islamabad's fears by assuring that their country will 'never use its friendship with India to harm Pakistan's interests.' But Islamabad remains unconvinced.
Pakistan's anxiety, real or imaginary, translates into trouble for Afghanistan too. ISI's most potent weapon to offset India's reconstruction efforts or to destabilise the Delhi-friendly government of Hamid Karzai remains Taliban. A creation of Pakistan and nurtured by the U.S. and Saudi Arabia to begin with, Taliban militia is also the most viable force that can once again restore Pakistan's lost influence in Afghanistan. Pakistani intelligence knows that some day in future the U.S. and Nato forces will grow weary of a thankless war on terror and leave the country. That day, together with Taliban, ISI hopes to bring back the lost glory of 1996-2001 when the Islamic militia ruled most of the country and when Islamabad's influence was at its peak. That's the reason why Taliban does not feel the need to control territory or to outfight American and Nato forces at this point in time – but simply to stage an insurgency that hurts, sometimes real bad, and to last out till such time that western forces vacate the country.
Pakistan's desire to have a decisive say in Afghan affairs is as old as Pakistan itself and is influenced by the 'Great Game' of the 19th century played out between the British and Russian empires. Though neither of these expansionist powers was able to occupy Afghanistan permanently, the British did manage a decisive say in its foreign affairs by a generous help of arms and funds up until the third and last Anglo-Afghan War of 1919 that established full Afghan independence.
Prior to that British India's frontier with Afghanistan was drawn by an English civil servant, Sir Mortimer Durand, in 1893 and agreed upon by the two governments. This border, the Durand Line, purposely segregated the 'lawless and fiercely independent' Pashtun tribes of the region into Afghan Pashtuns and British India Pashtun so that they would not pose a collective threat to British rule in India. Thus the Pashtun tribes in Afghanistan were separated from Pashtuns of North-West Frontier Provinces (NWFP) and Balochistan, as were the Pashtuns of British India into two different provinces. This was resented by the Pashtuns because – though they are all Muslims – for them ethnic identity has held more importance than religious identity.
When independence dawned on modern-day Pakistan in 1947, its rulers assumed they had inherited the British leverage and would henceforth guide the Afghan policy to their advantage, as indeed the British had done earlier. But they were in for a surprise. Afghanistan was in no mood to play the second fiddle to Pakistan and instead was found disputing Durand Line as border between the two countries and also demanding the creation of a Pashtun state that would join the tribes in Afghanistan to those in NWFP and Balochistan. This was, of course, unacceptable to Pakistan as it would take away a large chunk of its territory.
Writing in Far Eastern Economic Review in 2005, Husain Haqqani, the present ambassador of Pakistan to the U.S., noted: 'Although India publicly did not support the Afghan claim, Pakistan's early leaders could not separate the Afghan questioning of Pakistani borders from their perception of an Indian grand design against Pakistan. They wanted to limit Indian influence in Afghanistan to prevent Pakistan from being crushed by a sort of pincer movement involving Afghanistan stirring the ethnic cauldron in Pakistan and India stepping in to undo the partition of the subcontinent. Pakistan's response was a forward policy of encouraging Afghan Islamists that would subordinate ethnic nationalism to Islamic religious sentiment…Pakistan's complicated role in Afghanistan beginning well before the Soviet invasion of 1979 and through the rise and fall of the Taliban can best be understood in light of this desire.'
The 'strategic depth' into Afghanistan that Pakistani generals have all along sought vis-à-vis the huge Indian landmass and military was best achieved during Taliban's rule of Afghanistan but the advantage evaporated post 9/11 when U.S. and Nato forces bombed Taliban out of Kabul into the Tora Bora mountains (along with Al Qaeda and other militants) and onward into the tribal areas of Pakistan where the remnants now find refuge.
After 9/11 Pakistan had to make a U-turn in its Afghan policy and even provided vital support to U.S. in bringing down the Taliban regime. But Islamabad has clearly not given up its long-term goal of having a subservient outfit ruling Kabul and carrying out its regional agenda. Hamid Karzai and other Afghan nationalists seek to pursue an independent foreign policy and are not the ones to accept a subordinate role for their country. Hence ISI continues to support Taliban who make regular inroads into Afghanistan from Pakistan's tribal areas to carry out terror attacks against U.S., Nato and Afghan forces.
The dual role of Pakistan – in containing Taliban under U.S. pressure and supporting the Islamist militia for long-term gains – continues up until today. To quote Husain Haqqani, 'Pakistan will crack down on the Taliban…only when it finds the cost of positioning itself as a major regional power unbearable.'
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