Afghanistan (16 page)

CHAPTER THREE

“
The most dangerous geography on earth.”

—Ambassador Richard Burt, 28 February 2008

I
t is questionable whether there can be any lasting improvement in the security of Afghanistan, and with it the lives of Afghans, without addressing the conditions and policies in Pakistan that turned the Frontier into the Vortex. Many countries, organizations, and individuals created the Vortex. But the government of Pakistan, through overt action and enabling or not countering the actions of others, began the creation on its own territory, with the intention of affecting Afghanistan. But, from the start, Pakistan has been reaping the unintended consequences of these actions.

“Pakistan does not want to own Afghanistan, just run it, like the [pre-1919] Brits” is the view of one veteran journalist. In 2008–10, for Pakistan’s military and elites, the goal of their Afghanistan policy is the creation of what eluded them in the past: a Pakistan-friendly, Pushtun-dominated (often styled “moderate Taliban”) government in Kabul. They believe that the US and the coalition are preventing the achievement of this goal, even though it is also in their interest. By 2008–10, the US had become wildly unpopular in Pakistan, both among elites and in mass sentiment. The US
is seen as waging a war on Islam both in Afghanistan and through their links with India and Israel. US policies are seen as being aimed at destabilizing or dismembering Pakistan to weaken or eliminate a nuclear-armed Muslim state.

Many Pakistanis see US policies since 2001 as having led to the emergence of the radicalized Taliban movements that by 2008–10 threatened both Afghanistan and Pakistan. They still believe that, in the end, the US and the coalition forces will disengage from Afghanistan and that their Afghan allies and the current Kabul government will flee into exile at that point. The non-Pushtun Afghans—perceived as a minority—will deal with Pakistan’s enemies and rivals—India, Iran, and Russia among them—to try and hang on to power, setting the stage for a potential resumption of the Afghan civil war that the US could have avoided by supporting Pakistan’s goals.

The continued cross-border nature of the terrorism, insurgency, and narcotics traffic make Pakistani policy decisions vital to the future of Afghanistan. The future of Afghanistan is more dependent on what happens in Pakistan than any other country (including the US and its coalition partners). It is questionable whether there can be any lasting victory over terrorism, insurgency, and narcotics in Afghanistan and with it improvement in the lives of Afghans without solving the long-running crisis of governance problems in Pakistan.

There remain significant differences between the conflict in Pakistan and the one in Afghanistan. No one wants to secede from Afghanistan, while the greatest threat to Pakistan is that their insurgency may cause the country to come apart at its ethnolinguistic seams. The insurgency in Pakistan—emerging from the Vortex but not limited to it—was widely recognized by 2008–10 to have become a threat to its future.

Creating the Vortex: The Roots of Pakistani Policy in Afghanistan

Pakistan’s involvement in Afghanistan has been more extensive than any other regional power and has played a direct role in events back to the 1970s. Pakistan’s involvement in Afghanistan is inherent in the contradictions of Pakistan’s political and cultural identity; it is not just the conflation of issues and actors. It dates back to when Pakistan recruited
Pushtun tribal lashkars (armies) from both Pakistan and Afghanistan to fight the Indians in Kashmir in 1948. Pakistan later withdrew the regular military from its garrisons in the FATA; it would embrace the Pushtuns and their ethos—while denying them the vote and access to Pakistani justice, and underdeveloping their heartland in the FATA—and not be an occupying power like the British.

Pakistan’s long-standing perceptions of national security have led to a necessity to shape the political situation in Afghanistan. This has led to participation as a frontline state in the conflicts in Afghanistan. Pakistani strategy in Afghanistan reflects what can be seen as a succession of two geostrategic thrusts.
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The first (from the 1950s until 1989) was southward by the Soviets. The Soviets threatened Pakistan through their actions in Afghanistan: first, widespread aid, trade, and internal penetration; and, in 1979–89, through invasion and a major military commitment. The Soviet relationship with India in these years further increased Pakistan’s fears that the Soviet goal was to surround and destroy Pakistan and achieve access to the “warm waters” of the Indian Ocean. This provoked a Pakistani northward thrust. Pakistan saw Soviet and Indian support for this Afghan policy as being much more important than the minimal amount of cross-border violence that resulted from Kabul’s Pushtunistan claims. Indian influence in Kabul encouraged Afghanistan to create and use the Pushtunistan issue as a lever to dismember Pakistan. Even though Afghanistan did not militarily cooperate with India in any of its conflicts with Pakistan, the Pushtunistan issue contributed to the lasting concern Pakistan has about threats that may emerge from Afghanistan.

Pakistan’s northward thrust became a political and military search for the elusive “strategic depth,” otherwise denied it by geography, that put most of Pakistan within easy striking range of India. This strategy was always viewed through the prism of its security competition with then-Soviet ally India on one hand and domestic (especially dealing with military and ethnic Pushtun access to power) politics on the other.

The northward thrust was viewed as a counter to the two threats that Pakistan’s military thought could destroy the country. These were outside attack by India (aided by the Soviet Union), or outside-aided internal
strife that would pull Pakistan apart. Because of India’s links with both the government in Kabul and Pakistan’s own Pushtun population—both dating to before partition in 1947—the strategy had both an internal and external dimension.

The northward thrust began in the 1970s, after Pakistan’s defeat by India in the 1971 war and the secession of East Pakistan to become the independent state of Bangladesh. In 1971, the Pakistani military perception was that their outside supporters—the US, China, and Saudi Arabia—could not prevent India pulling off a piece of Pakistan or aiding movements aiming to secede from Pakistan. In their mind, at the end of the day, Pakistan could not count on outsiders. Therefore, Pakistan needed to build a strategy on national and especially religious bonds that would prove solid under pressure.

To counter previous decades of Soviet and Indian involvement in Afghanistan, Pakistan’s involvement also started with internal penetration. Pakistan armed and trained anti-Kabul Afghan Islamist insurgents (including both Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Ahmad Shah Massoud). These were launched in an abortive uprising against the Afghan government, the 1975 Panjshir revolt. Pakistan policy evolved to providing support for the Afghan war of national liberation after the 1978 Communist putsch seized power in Kabul.

Pakistan’s military and especially the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate has remained the main internal generator and implementer of Pakistan’s Afghanistan policies. The ISI is both a military intelligence agency and the military’s “directed telescope” inside Pakistan. This military control of Afghanistan policy generation was not total and complete but was often to the exclusion of the Pakistani foreign ministry and other civilian governmental organizations (including, for example, the political agents in the FATA). While different Pakistani governments—military and civilian—have tried to involve other organizations, the military has remained the prime determinants of Pakistan’s Afghanistan policies.

Since the Panjshir revolt, the Pakistani military’s main agents of change in Afghanistan have been Afghan guerrillas, who are motivated by Pushtun ethnicity and Islamist or fundamentalist ideology. Pakistan has enabled—either by direct support or an indirect hands-off
approach—these guerrillas to fight against other Afghans and their foreign supporters (the Soviets in 1979–89, the US and ISAF more recently) opposing Pakistan’s policies.

The 1979–89 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan transformed Pakistan’s northward thrust into part of overall Cold War strategy. In those years, Pakistan was a frontline state and its actions received support from the US, China, Saudi Arabia, and others. The Pakistan-based Afghan resistance received extensive aid from the US, China, Saudi Arabia, the UK, France, and many other donors. Pakistan insisted on retaining control of both their own strategic vision and their relations with the Afghans waging the war and sheltering in their territory.

The Afghan guerrillas of 1979–92 had the benefit of a seemingly open sanctuary in Pakistan that was, in the end, always denied by the government in Islamabad and a massive aid flow. The Afghan resistance managed to prevent Soviet political consolidation in Afghanistan until Moscow’s war effort was swept away by the final unsolvable crisis within the Soviet state. While Pakistan, unlike the Soviets, put much smaller numbers of military men—hundreds rather than some 150,000—into Afghanistan in 1979–89, their presence was much better thought out, their actions shrewder, and their impact more long-lasting.

By 1987–89, the Soviet Union was coming to an end and their southward push was failing. Instead of aiming to counter the southward thrust, Pakistan now believed that its strategic interests required that state power in post-Soviet Afghanistan be held by Pushtuns, that a government in Kabul be “friendly” to Pakistan and Islamic in character, and that Indian involvement in Afghanistan be marginalized. Pakistan added to the strategic requirements motivating the northward thrust, re-opening central Asia after over a century under Russian rule. To the other strategic requirements were added that Pakistan now must have unfettered access to central Asia for trade and energy pipelines, with Karachi as the main port on the Indian Ocean for the landlocked nations that were formed from former Soviet territory in central Asia.

The Soviet defeat in Afghanistan reopened the Kashmir issue, as India’s superpower ally was now in retreat. The ISI planned to achieve victory in Kashmir much as they had perceived that it was already being
achieved in Afghanistan, through the use of Pakistan-hosted guerilla groups in a cross-border insurgency. The revival of conflict in Kashmir and the tensions with India that resulted lasted through the Kargil conflict of 1999 and beyond. A cross-border insurgency directed at India would require strategic depth, a source of manpower, and a deniable support infrastructure. Pakistan looked to post-Soviet Afghanistan to provide all three.

In 1992, as the Soviet-installed government in Kabul collapsed, Pakistan backed a force led by HiH, supported by a strong force of foreign volunteers from the Islamic world, the “Afghan Arabs,” to seize Kabul and establish a government that would meet Pakistan’s strategic requirements: pro-Pakistan, anti-India, ethnically Pushtun and Islamic in nature. However, HiH was preempted by the Northern Alliance Forces, led by Ahmad Shah Massoud that, in a bloody battle, held Kabul and made possible the creation of the Islamic State of Afghanistan (ISA), drawn from the Pakistan-based anti-Soviet resistance leadership, in Kabul. To Pakistan, the power of the Northern Alliance—led by Massoud and made up of guerillas from Tadji, Uzbek, and Hazara coalitions—made the ISA government unacceptable. They therefore decided to back HiH in proxy war against the ISA in Afghanistan. This started with rocket attacks on Kabul in August 1992.

Pakistan backed HiH through much of Afghanistan’s civil war, transferring its support to the Taliban starting in 1994 and culminating just before the Taliban took Kabul from the ISA in 1996. But, following this success, Pakistan saw its influence with its Afghan Taliban clients challenged by the arrival of Osama bin Laden in 1996 and the rise of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan; by the late 1990s, Pakistan was interested in creating a “moderate Taliban” leadership to replace what they saw as increasingly non-responsive Taliban regime (president Karzai’s father was murdered, presumably by Al Qaeda or the Taliban, following an approach for participation in this stillborn group).

With its political control eroded, Pakistan increased its commitment to the proxy war being waged against the predominantly non-Pushtun Northern Alliance forces, whose (limited) support from India, Iran, and Russia Pakistan perceived as a challenge to its national strategy. Pakistan
and Al Qaeda alike backed the Afghan Taliban for what they hoped would be the final military defeat of the Northern Alliance. In 2001, the 9/11 Al Qaeda terrorist attacks brought about US and coalition intervention. The military situation changed rapidly. The Taliban collapsed. Al Qaeda fled. The end of the Pakistan military commitment in Afghanistan came when Pakistan had to ask US permission to airlift trapped ISI officers from northern Afghanistan, alongside the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
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Post-2001: The Vortex and Pakistani Policy

In 2001, Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf’s military government had supported and enabled the US-led coalition in their 2001 intervention in Afghanistan. To Musharraf, this US intervention was seen as inevitable after the 9/11 attacks and he hoped that Pakistan’s support for the US would lead to more security aid for Pakistan in the short term and a renewed relationship with the US—previously soured by Pakistan’s acquisition of nuclear weapons—in the longer term. To many in Pakistan—including much of the military and civilian nationalist elites—this spelled disaster. With the arrival of the Al Qaeda (and its foreign allies) and Taliban in the FATA, NWFP, and Baluchistan after their retreat from Afghanistan in 2001–02, the war literally came home to Pakistan.

A similar “blowback” also happened following the Musharraf government’s ending of Pakistan’s transborder guerrilla operations in Kashmir in 2003–04. The infrastructure, systems, and networks created to support these two failed proxy wars stayed and grew even stronger.