The Longest August (56 page)

With seven-eighths of the UN-sponsored Loya Jirga delegates voting for Karzai in June 2002, he had his interim presidency confirmed. The Indians were joyous to see an Indophile like Karzai confirmed as president. He envisaged India, a stable, comparatively well-developed democracy, as an ideal partner for his underdeveloped, struggling country. His twenty-nine-strong cabinet maintained the status quo, with General Muhammad Qasim Fahim, a Tajik, as defense minister and other Tajiks retaining among others foreign, interior, and intelligence ministries. The job of the National Directorate of Security (NDS) chief went to Muhammad Arif Serwari, the NA's erstwhile chief intelligence official.

As in the past, he maintained a suspicious eye on Pakistan and its intelligence network in Afghanistan. He looked benignly on India, allowing it to set up its own intelligence network. RAW agents cooperated actively with NSD operators to monitor pro-Pakistan and pro-Taliban elements.

The Kicking Conjoined Twins

The Taliban announced its rebirth dramatically a week before the first anniversary of 9/11—a bomb explosion in Kabul, which caused fifteen fatalities, and an assassination attempt on Karzai during his visit to Kandahar.
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While the Pentagon trumpeted its swift victory in Iraq during March and April 2003, the Taliban staged guerrilla assaults in the southern provinces of Helmand and Zabul adjoining Pakistan—the Taliban's prime source of volunteers, cash, and arms, and the site of several training camps.

During his visit to America in the last week of June 2003, Musharraf was received by Bush at Camp David, indicating that he was being treated as “a close friend” of the US president. When questioned by reporters about cross-border attacks on Afghanistan from Pakistan, he replied that the writ of Karzai did not run beyond the edges of Kabul. This remark angered Karzai. On July 7 he accused Musharraf of interference in Afghanistan's domestic affairs.

At the same time reports circulated in Kabul that Pakistani forces had intruded sixteen miles into Nangarhar province along their common border. This led to protests in Kabul outside the Pakistani embassy the
next day. A well-organized mob, armed with sticks, stones, and sledge hammers vandalized the mission while the staff locked themselves in the basement. Pakistan closed its embassy in Kabul as well as its consulate in Jalalabad.
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Zalmay Khalilzad, an Afghan-American serving as the special US presidential envoy for Afghanistan, intervened to cool passions. Karzai apologized for the damage done to the Pakistani mission and agreed to compensation. The representatives of the United States, Afghanistan, and Pakistan together decided to send a joint team to investigate reports of border clashes between Pakistani and Afghan forces. Pakistan reopened the embassy on July 23. On the source of the extremists' cross-border attacks on Afghanistan, however, Khalilzad was unequivocal: “We know the Taliban are planning [attacks] in Quetta.”
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During the diplomatic spat, Karzai stressed the vital importance of Pakistan to his country. “We are like conjoined twins, and like such twins sometimes we cannot stop kicking each other,” he said in his interview with Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani journalist and author. Regretfully, Karzai realized that the “brotherly feeling” between him and Musharraf was evaporating. “We have one page where there is a tremendous desire for friendship and the need for each other. But there is the other page of the consequences if intervention continues. . . . Afghans will have no choice but to stand up and stop it.”
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In a move designed to put both Karzai and India, governed by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, on the defensive, on July 27 Islamabad expressed its “deep concerns” about Delhi's activities along the Pakistan-Afghan border. It alleged that the Indian consulates had “less to do with humanitarian aid and more to do with India's top-secret intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing.” A hand-grenade assault on India's Jalalabad consulate on September 1 drew the attention of the international media. In a subsequent report for the Boston-based
Christian Science Monitor
, filed from Jalalabad, Scott Baldauf summarized Pakistan's claims. It held the Indian consulates responsible for printing fake Pakistani currency and orchestrating acts of sabotage and terrorism on Pakistani territory. It accused Delhi of establishing networks of “terrorist training camps” inside Afghanistan—at the military base of Qushila Jadid, north of Kabul; near Gereshk in Helmand province; in the Panjshir Valley northeast of the capital; and at Kahak and Hassan Killies in the Nimruz province. During his visit to Jalalabad, however, Baldauf found the consulate “swamped with delegations of Indian diplomats and businessmen
who were snapping up many of the lucrative projects to rebuild the roads and infrastructure of Afghanistan.”
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Having maintained for a long time that the Baluchistan Liberation Army was a fiction, Chief Minister Jam Muhammad Yousaf announced in mid-August 2004 that India's RAW was running forty terrorist camps in the province.
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As the Baluch insurgency, led by Sardar Akbar Bugti, intensified, it became routine for the Pakistani media to refer to the involvement of the Indian consulates in Afghanistan and claim that evidence had been found. But it was never made public. The insurgency reached a peak in the summer of 2006.

Karzai's First Term as President

In the October 2004 election held under the new constitution, Karzai was elected president by 55 percent of the ballots on a voter turnout of an impressive 73 percent. His vice presidents were Fahim, a Tajik, and Karim Khalili, a Shia Hazara.

During the two-day visit to Kabul in August 2005, Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh led a foundation-stone-laying ceremony for the Afghan parliament complex, which was to be financed by Delhi. It was to be built opposite the ruinously damaged Dar ul Aman royal palace on the outskirts of the capital. Singh hoped the seed of democracy in Afghanistan would grow into a robust tree. As a result of the inordinate delays in starting the construction, the original cost of Rs 3 billion ($60 million) would balloon to Rs 7.1 billion ($140 million) in eight years.

Such a gesture—graphically highlighting India's generosity toward Afghanistan while underscoring its commitment to democracy—caused heartburn among Pakistani policy makers, then facing rising insurgency in Baluchistan as well as FATA. In March 2006, when Pakistan's troops encountered considerable resistance to their offensive against militants in North and South Waziristan Agencies, an unnamed official in Islamabad claimed that Pakistan had collected “all required information about the involvement of India in fomenting unrest in North and South Waziristan.” He alleged that “the Indian consulates in Southern Afghanistan have been supplying money as well as arms and ammunition to the militants that has added to the trouble and violence in the tribal belt.”
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In his interview with Delhi-based
Outlook
magazine in April 2006, Mushahid Hussain Sayed (aka, Mushahid Hussain), chair of the Pakistan
Senate's foreign relations committee, claimed that RAW had established training camps in Afghanistan in collaboration with the NA's remnants. “Approximately 600 Baluch tribal dissidents are getting specialized training to handle explosives, engineer bomb blasts, and use sophisticated weapons in these camps.” He added that “the Indian consulates in Kandahar and Jalalabad and their embassy in Kabul are used for clandestine activities inside Pakistan in general and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and Baluchistan in particular.” According to Sayed, “Indian diplomatic and RAW officials have significant ingress in the Afghan ministry of tribal affairs, and they are exploiting it to conduct covert activities. Indian agents are instrumental in arranging meetings of tribal elders and Afghans with dual nationalities with Indian consulate officials in Jalalabad, and assisting them in spotting and recruiting suitable tribal elders from Jalalabad and Pakistan's North and South Waziristan Agencies for covert activities.” He added that “meetings of tribal elders are arranged by the Afghan intelligence agency [Riyast-i-Amniyat-i-Milli] at the behest of those RAW officials who serve in different diplomatic offices of India in Afghanistan. Indian agents are carrying out clandestine activities in the border areas of Khost and in Pakistan's tribal areas of Miranshah with the active support of Afghan Border Security Force officials.”
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Years later a former Indian consul general in Kandahar “privately” admitted to a Delhi-based interviewer that “he had met with Baluchi leaders at his consulate there” while claiming that his ambassador gave him “strict instructions not to aid them in any way against Pakistan.” He “hinted” that “RAW personnel were present among the staff at the Kandahar and Jalalabad consulates.”
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The truth was hard to determine. What really mattered was the extent and intensity of the insurgent operations sponsored by India. These could be rationalized as Delhi's quid pro quo to Islamabad's involvement in stoking the separatist movement in Indian Kashmir, even though RAW's activities never rivaled those of the ISI in India-held Kashmir. On the other hand, just as Pakistan condemned India periodically for its egregious human rights violations in Kashmir, Delhi expressed concern at the fighting in Baluchistan and recommended dialogue. Overall, it is fair to say that even without the subversive activities of RAW, Islamabad would have encountered security problems in its tribal belt and Baluchistan, both of which had a long history.

By attributing the violent anti-Pakistan activities in FATA to India working in cahoots with Afghanistan, Islamabad motivated its forces
during its later offensives against the militant jihadists in FATA. They were made to believe that in the final analysis their campaign in FATA was against their number one enemy, India, which has been the unchanging doctrine of the Pakistani military.

As the Afghan Taliban regrouped, and insurgency gathered momentum especially in southern Afghanistan in early 2006, relations between Karzai and Musharraf turned testy. To defuse the situation the Afghan president met his Pakistani counterpart in Islamabad in mid-February. Among other things he handed his interlocutor a list of Afghan Taliban militants allegedly living in Pakistan, including their leader, Mullah Omar. When no action followed, Kabul leaked the list to the media. Musharraf would later claim that “much of the information was old and useless.”

On his part, Musharraf complained of an anti-Pakistan conspiracy hatched by the defense and intelligence agencies of Afghanistan run by ethnic Tajiks—Fahim and Serwari respectively—one-time stalwarts of the pro-Delhi NA. “[Karzai] better set that right,” he said.
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His hectoring angered Karzai, who regarded it as open interference in Afghanistan's internal affairs.

During Bush's brief visits to Kabul, Delhi, and Islamabad in early March, the strained Afghan-Pakistan relations were discussed. An unnamed senior Pakistani official close to Musharraf told Agence France-Presse: “We have provided sufficient evidence to President Bush what certain Afghan officials are doing to fund and supply arms to militants in Pakistan. . . . One Afghan commander in Jalalabad is sending arms into Pakistani areas, for example. As a result our soldiers are dying and their soldiers are dying too.”
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Jalalabad figured as prominently in Pakistan's accusations against the Karzai regime as it did in the case of the Singh government in Delhi.

Meanwhile, resurgence of the Taliban led to intense fighting in the southern Afghan provinces of Kandahar and Helmand. Suicide bombings exacted heavy losses among British and Canadian forces operating under the aegis of the US-led NATO. By the summer of 2006, NATO intelligence had obtained irrefutable evidence of the ISI's alliance with the Afghan insurgents, covering recruitment, training, and arming and dispatching of partisans as well as overseeing their leadership.

By contrast, in his interview with Fareed Zakaria, editor of
Newsweek International
, on September 19, Musharraf claimed that Mullah Omar was in Kandahar and therefore “the center of gravity of this [Taliban] movement is in Afghanistan.” Two days later, in his interview with
Zakaria, Karzai retorted: “Mullah Omar is for sure in Quetta in Pakistan. . . . We have even given him [Musharraf] the GPS numbers of his house—of Mullah Omar's house, and the telephone numbers . . . when we had a nasty meeting that day [in February] and subsequent to that as well.”
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Bush invited Karzai and Musharraf to a working dinner at the White House on September 27, 2006, at which he hoped to help the feuding duo turn the page. When Karzai complained bitterly about Pakistan's policy of harboring the Afghan Taliban, Musharraf accused him of basing his allegations on “outdated” intelligence and kowtowing to India. Despite the many billions the US treasury had poured into Afghanistan since 2002, and the $5.5 billion given to the Pakistani army to assist the Pentagon's operations in Afghanistan, the American president failed abysmally to reconcile his quarrelling chief guests.

Durand Line Dispute—Continued

The ill-defined Afghan–Pakistan border continued to be a running source of tension and periodic skirmishes. For instance, during an armed confrontation in September 2005 precipitated by the posting of a Pakistan flag inside Afghanistan, 120 Afghan soldiers gathered on the border in Khost province. They threatened to attack Pakistani soldiers if the latter did not abandon a disputed checkpoint. It required intervention by an American officer to calm the disputants.
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In May 2007 Afghan troops assaulted Pakistan's military outposts, which they claimed were illegally built on their soil, and killed eight Pakistani soldiers. In response Pakistan's artillery fire on targets in Afghanistan led to seven deaths among the Afghan forces.