Editorial»
The flash point where Afghanistan meets Pakistan
JAN 13 - Over lunch at the loya jirga in
Kabul - the recent meeting that produced Afghanistan’s draft constitution - I asked a delegate from Kandahar Province, a supporter of President Hamid Karzai, whether the Taliban’s resurgence there was due mainly to support from Pakistan or conditions in Afghanistan. “Without the support of Pakistan,” he answered, fixing me with his gray-green eyes, “the Taliban cannot do anything.” Pakistan, he said, “never wants a strong government in Afghanistan, because if we have a strong government we will reclaim our land, all the way to Gwadar” - a Pakistani Indian Ocean port.
This is one view, unsurprising in a delegate from a Pashtun area. The Pashtun ethnic group, predominant in Kandahar, not only is the largest in Afghanistan, but populates territory nearby in Pakistan, and many Afghan Pashtuns feel a unity with those lands. An opposition leader I spoke with at the loya jirga saw things differently, urging that Afghanistan’s constitution “recognize the borders of the country” as they are now. As he saw it, the refusal to recognize Pashtun tribal territories as part of Pakistan had destabilized Afghanistan’s South and East for decades. In principle, Karzai agreed. He knows peace and prosperity require full cooperation and recognized but open borders between Afghanistan and Pakistan. And there is hope this problem might finally be resolved as part of a regional settlement in South Asia.
Over breakfast on the second day of the loya jirga, Karzai argued that Afghanistan needed partners in Pakistan for a dialogue. Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani journalist, added that the status of the tribal areas had become a huge question mark for Pakistan. After Sept. 11, 2001, the Pakistani Army entered the tribal areas for the first time, yet the government still assumed no responsibility for governing them. Pakistan’s northwest frontier with Afghanistan, like its northeast frontier with India, where armies face each other in Kashmir, is contested and unrecognized. And these two border areas have long been dysfunctionally linked. In 1947 the nascent Pakistani Army recruited Pashtuns from both sides of the frontier to fight in Kashmir. During the 1980’s the Pakistani military used the weapons and training aid intended for the Afghan mujahedeen to train a new generation of guerrillas for Kashmir. And Pakistan allowed Al Qaeda to establish itself in Afghanistan partly in return for Qaeda help in training Kashmir fighters.
Madrasas in the tribal areas trained a generation of militants from among the impoverished youth of the tribal areas, both Pakistanis and Afghan refugees. They marched off to fight in Afghanistan, Kashmir or both, and now such militants have twice nearly assassinated Pakistan’s president, Pervez Musharraf. Now forces are coming together that could finally bring about some progress on the border issues. The loya jirga consolidated the strength and legitimacy of Karzai, and it showed that Pashtuns could assert influence while accommodating other groups.
In Pakistan, Musharraf, after his close calls with assassination, has once again sent the Pakistani Army to battle extremists in the tribal territories and seems finally to have agreed to cease using extremists in Kashmir. This may be the time to push him to rein in cross-border activities by the Taliban. Posted on: 2004-01-13 02:23
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