South Asia has become a theatre of intense diplomatic activity since Ashraf Ghani took office as Afghan president in September. The region’s rival powers and the global forces invested there have quietly built a one-point consensus: the future must be determined by states, working in concert to create a security environment that would be manageable.
The prospective longevity of the budding partnership is apparently based on the premise of non-nuclear mutually assured destruction. That would be the likely outcome if Afghanistan is allowed to return to the Syria-like civil war that prevailed after the 1989 Soviet exit.
There is a relevant precedent for a partnership on Afghanistan. In 2002, after US forces invaded it and routed the Taliban, an eclectic mix of nations managed to thrash out a consensus on the installation of a new government led by president Hamid Karzai.
Obviously, the greatest challenge to such marriages of convenience is mutual distrust, so a great deal of credit is due to president Ghani for reaching out to Pakistan, with which his predecessor, Mr Karzai, had a very antagonistic relationship.
To establish a credible diplomatic platform, Mr Ghani involved as guarantors Saudi Arabia and China, the regional powers that matter most to Pakistan. By December, a small Afghan Taliban delegation was in Beijing for talks about talks with Kabul, while US drones and Afghan forces were hunting Pakistani Taliban insurgents in eastern Afghanistan.
Concurrently, the US and China have been working to ease tensions between India and Pakistan, which have been manifest in months of border skirmishes. The fighting was sparked by the resumption in 2013 of crossings by Pakistani militants into India-administered Kashmir. It intensified last year as a result of the punitive military posture adopted by the newly elected administration of prime minister Narendra Modi.
He and Pakistan’s Nawaz Sharif weren’t even on speaking terms for several months, so it fell to the Americans and the Chinese to fix the situation. US president Barack Obama phoned the Pakistani prime minister before and after visiting India in January and China surprisingly agreed to back an Indian-sponsored antiterrorism resolution in the UN that seemed to target Pakistan. Meanwhile, Mr Ghani said he would not allow his soil to be used by either country. This calmed Pakistan’s anger at alleged covert Indian support for the Baloch insurgency from its consulates in Afghanistan.
Subsequently, Mr Modi called his Pakistani counterpart to wish Pakistan’s team luck in the cricket world cup. Last week, India’s top diplomat flew into Islamabad to restart regular bilateral consultations. This was apparently based on the understanding that Pakistan would close down its militant proxies, in return for India returning to a peacetime military posture on the border.
Again, this isn’t the first time this has happened. In 2002, an attack on India’s parliament almost triggered a war. But it was avoided when the US, working with China, pressured Pakistan into disbanding a council of anti-India jihadists, leading to a ceasefire and open-minded talks. The lesson therein is one of pragmatism, and it applies equally to the various types of militants active throughout South Asia.
The man at the top of that pyramid is Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar. For several years, he has broadcast political signals to the international community and received a response. Thus the Doha initiative and the new one in Beijing.
His ambitions have been scaled down to ruling Afghanistan’s Pashtun-majority province. This reflects a clear desire to be recognised as a legitimate state actor. His quarrel with America will end the day all its forces leave Afghan soil and he has no ambitions to wage global jihad. And he apparently has a healthy respect for China.
In return, the US has called off the manhunt for him and the Afghan Taliban is classified as an armed insurgent group, not as a terrorist organisation.
To this day, however, Mullah Omar hosts and commands the loyalty of Osama bin Laden’s deputy Ayman Al Zawahri, and this remains a major sticking point. By last year, most Al Qaeda Arabs had relocated from Afghanistan and Pakistan’s tribal areas to the Middle East, while Al Zawahri has fallen off the radar.
A similar environment prevails among Pakistani militants. The Pakistan Taliban chief, Mullah Fazlullah, is a refugee, and has had to join forces with hated rivals, including defectors to ISIL, to survive. The Americans have assured Pakistan he will soon die, probably by a drone strike, like the three previous Pakistani Taliban chiefs.
As is the case with Al Zawahri, Fazlullah’s colleagues would not mourn his passing. But would the demise of the Pakistani Taliban lead to the rise of ISIL’s South Asian “governorate”? ISIL is said to be working towards this by staying out of the way of the Pakistani military offensive in the tribal areas and focusing on building a network in Baluchistan and Karachi. Of course, that’s precisely the kind of scenario all the countries in the region – and invested in it – want to avoid.
Tom Hussain is an independent journalist and political analyst based in Islamabad
On Twitter: @tomthehack