pakistan
Within days of each other, two Pakistani generals have expressed their views on Afghanistan and Pakistan’s policy on it. Lt Gen Asad Durrani is a former head of the Inter-Services Intelligence agency. Gen Pervez Musharraf is a former army chief and president.
Gen Musharraf called for Pakistan to end the backing of militant “proxies” in Afghanistan.
The essence of Gen Durrani’s message was that statecraft is not linear and it must adjust to changing situations.
In any alliance, as long as countries have common interests, they coordinate their work. But when interests diverge, nations can no longer use their instruments of power in support of each other, but have to serve their own national interests.
Sometimes, a country might choose to inform its ally that the alliance stands (perhaps briefly) dissolved. But, since this might only be very briefly, it may not always happen. Conscious that the interests of allies might not always continue to converge, all nations hedge their bets.
One person who seems to appreciate this reality is M K Bhadrakumar, a former Indian diplomat. He minces no words in praise of Pakistan in his article Two Pak generals, one Afghan endgame.
However, I disagree with Gen Durrani and Mr Bhadrakumar in their unconditional praise. It was my opinion, which I made known to Gen Musharaf in early 2000, that Pakistan’s policy in supporting Afghan Taliban needed to be dispensed with, much before 9/11.
My rationale, then and now is that Pakistan’s Afghan policy must not run contrary to the wishes of the Afghan peoples. Pakistan decided to support the Taliban in late 1994 because Afghans had pinned their hopes on the group. But by 2000, the Taliban had become an oppressive and regressive force and it had, most importantly, lost the support of the Afghan people.
That was Pakistan’s major policy error on Afghanistan. There were other, earlier errors too.
However, what irked some Afghans the most was the arrogance of Pakistan’s policy on Afghanistan. It began with the very flawed concept of strategic depth. When Pakistan continued to support the Taliban after it had alienated the Afghan people, it seemed that Islamabad sought strategic depth without caring about Afghan wishes.
The fact that former Afghan president Hamid Karzai disliked Pakistan created a vicious circle of distrust. It took Ashraf Ghani’s election as president to bring about better relations.
Despite its flaws, after the American invasion Pakistan’s Afghan policy was at least consistent. It prioritised its national interests and hedged its bets with all players to ensure there was enough flexibility for statecraft that would continually readjust to the dynamics on the ground.
Someone once said that the word hypocrite must never be applied to nations. I am a pragmatic moralist, which may sound like an odd term but here is what it means: my morals cry out against hypocrisy; my pragmatism accepts it as a national compulsion.
In many ways, this term applies to countries as well. The Americans, for example, constantly preach morality and consistently practise hypocrisy.
Perhaps it may have been better to have been up front with Washington all along and stated unequivocally that Pakistan would serve US interests only when they converged with Pakistan’s. But it is difficult to be too critical of Pakistani policymakers because there were very sound reasons for the double game.
Perhaps US arrogance deterred Gen Musharaf and his successor as army chief, Gen Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. Perhaps there was some apprehension about the likely consequences. Perhaps it was a combination of the two, but whatever the reasons, Pakistan and US policies diverged when their interests diverged.
After the Afghan elections last year, once again, the interests of all three countries – the US, Pakistan, and Afghanistan – have converged on a basic point: peace in the region.
Pakistan and the US refrained from attempting to influence the Afghan presidential elections, which threw up the more pragmatic Mr Ghani. Consequently, there seems to be considerable harmony among the three countries on the methodology to achieve that end.
The current army chief Gen Raheel Sharif’s decision to lay things out clearly on the table, for representatives of all three countries, has also helped create greater mutual trust.
One can only hope it lasts.
Brig Shaukat Qadir is a retired Pakistani infantry officer
