Indian Defence Review

By nailing Pakistan for engineering the recent terrorist attack on Kabul airport, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani has signaled that the much touted Afghanistan-Pakistan honeymoon that never was, is practically over. A day earlier, media headlines had reported that multiple terrorist strikes in  Kabul had caused a bloodbath killing 51, and that year 2014 was among the deadliest in Afghanistan’s history wherein 10,000 civilians alone had died on account of terrorist violence.

An editorial in Pakistan’s Express Tribune on 4th April 2012 had read, “Just as the Soviet Union was defeated by a combination of Afghan Mujahedeen and Pakistani warriors, this time too Pakistan could infiltrate its non-state actors to achieve the ‘strategic depth’ it requires to feel safe about its northwestern neighbor. What is scarier for the world is the perception that Pakistan doesn’t control its non-state actors hundred per cent, as demonstrated by the Punjabi Taliban fighting the Pakistan Army in parts of FATA.” Well that infiltration was facilitated by Ashraf Ghani throwing his lot with Pakistan, egged on by the US that Pakistan could persuade the Taliban to join the Afghan government.

John F Kennedy had once said, “No matter how big the lie; repeat it often enough and the masses will regard it as truth.” But over the years such tactics have been refined further. The more effective modus operandi being used is to flood scores of versions of the same event to confuse the recipients before applying the repeat lie. This is generally found to psyche the masses more easily. That it is being applied regularly in modern day conflict situations especially in respect terrorist organizations and proxy forces requires little emphasis. So, we had Osama-bin-Laden ensconced comfortably in Abbotabad as guest of the Pakistani military, given up to the US at an opportune time feigning surprise. After all the strategic payoffs were all that mattered – continued military and financial support and most importantly Afghanistan subcontracted to Pakistan and her proxies, much to the chagrin of India. And, all this despite the fact most of the 5000 odd US-NATO killed in Afghanistan were by Pakistani proxies; Taliban, Al Qaeda, Haqqanis, you name it.

For years, Pakistan sold to the world that the TTP and Afghan Taliban were daggers drawn and fighting with each other. The fact was that they were practically hand in glove, helping each other money, arms, cadres and even provision of safe havens whenever pressure mounted on either. Daniel S Markey, Senior Fellow for India, Pakistan & South Asia, Council on Foreign Relations wrote last year, “If we say that the Pakistani government supports Taliban, and we say Pakistani government is target of Taliban, we are telling the truth in both instances….. you could even say that Afghan Taliban is playing a double game on the Pakistani state…. they more or less get safe haven inside the tribal areas along the Afghan border …… on the other hand, Afghan Taliban help Pakistani Taliban; provide inspiration, provide training, access to financing, and sometimes even fighters.”

Then take the case of Haqqanis. Yes, an odd Haqqani cadre or even leader got killed but Haqqanis were in the ISI league of terror, sheltered within Pakistan and used for strikes in Afghanistan, including targeting India assets in that country. Quoting Afghan intelligence sources, Michael Hughes had written in 2010, “If Pakistan truly wanted to capture the Haqqani Network they would be able to drag them out of their caves by their beards within a few days…..In a movement that should have floored US policymakers, Kayani was brazen enough to try and inveigle Afghanistan to strike a power-sharing arrangement with the Haqqanis. And Kayani, apparently the spokesperson for the Haqqani group, said they’d be willing to split from and denounce Al Qaeda, which is President Obama’s primary rationale for the war”.

One year later in 2011, Pir Zubair Shah and Carlotta Gall wrote in New York Times, “The Haqqani family, which runs the network like a mafia, maintains several town houses, including in Islamabad and elsewhere, and they have been known to visit military facilities in Rawalpindi, attend tribal gatherings and even travel abroad on pilgrimages. Experts say leaders of the Haqqani network may be hiding in plain sight in cities rather than in remote tribal areas.”

Now take this business of Pakistan persuading the Taliban to talk and join the Afghan government. To start with the Americans tried there level best, even by deliberately leaking out the Afghan Peace Process Roadmap to 2015 drafted by the US in conjunction the Afghan High Peace Council (AHPC) in November 2012 that besides other things promised the Taliban non-elected positions at various levels in government which virtually gives the Taliban complete control of Pashtun dominated areas along Afghanistan-Pakistan border after 2014 elections. This appeared to back a two-state solution (Robert Blackwell’s proposal of defacto division of Afghanistan) or a variant of it splitting the country into two blocs, a non-Pashtun north and west and the Pashtun south and east, under a weak central government in Kabul, leaving Pakistan with an extended FATA. But this had not worked to persuade the Taliban with their stated position they would not talk to Karzai government, sought changes to Afghan Constitution and insisted withdrawal of all foreign troops from Afghanistan. The conditions of throwing all foreign troops out, rule by Sharia and not laying down arms continue as Taliban demands to-date.

The best part is that US scholars admit they don’t expect Pakistan to bring Taliban to join the Afghan government. No doubt one round of talks between the Afghan Government and Taliban, brokered by Pakistan took place in July at Muree, with the Taliban delegation led by by Mullah Abbas Akhund, erstwhile  Taliban Health Minister and interior affairs committee chief, Mullah Jalil. But it is not difficult to decipher that Pakistan engineered this round of talks to establish a semblance of credibility with Ashraf Ghani. That this may have even involved payments to the Taliban and with knowledge of the CIA is well on the cards.

Taliban may have acquiesced to the arrangement because it was to be dumped immediately thereafter by announcing the death of Mullah Omar, together with perception management that this has caused deep fissures among the Taliban. Successor to Mullah Omar, Mullah Akhtar Mansoor (though not chosen with overall consensus) released a audio message “We will continue our jihad until the creation of an Islamic system. The enemy with their talk of peace is trying by this propaganda to weaken the jihad” on the Taliban website. So now you cannot blame Pakistan for further talks going kaput, can you? Significantly, the ascendency of Mullah Mansoor has been backed by Jalaluddin Haqqani who is an ISI protégé.

With the intelligence network within Taliban, would the death of Mullah Omar have remained unknown even as Omar would have been enjoying the hospitality of the ISI similar to Osama-bin-Laden? That Pakistani military did not know when Mullah Omar died can hardly be believed with reports of him having breathed his last in a hospital in Karachi. It is also relevant that as per American officials Mullah Omar was more of a spiritual commander with little to no operational control over the Taliban for past few years. So is actually there much commotion over his death or is this what the public is supposed to believe?

The Afghan government also now has to contend with the ISIS that is embedding slowly but definitively in the Af-Pak region. The recent announcement by the IMU that they are now “part of ISIS” has complicated the situation further with increased IMU attacks in Afghanistan.  This is even more significant with recent admission by Michael Flynn, former head of US Defense Intelligence Agency that rise of ISIS was a “Willful Decision” of the US. So what are the implications of the ISIS for Central Asia and South Asia?

The TTP had earlier declared their allegiance to the ISIS but factions of Afghan Taliban too are reaching out to the ISIS now. Interestingly, an ISIS delegation visited Baluchistan last September, meeting up with Jundullah who have been executing cross-border raids into Iran. Earlier this year a high level meeting was held in Saudi Arabia of senior level ISIS officials with ISIS heads of Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan. So, take a look at the radical scene in Af-Pak. Chinese were training the Taliban on Chinese soil even before the US invasion of Afghanistan. If China has been nurturing the Taliban to safeguard her economic and geostrategic interests in Af-Pak, Pakistan’s TTP has been helping the West by assisting Al Nusra to dislodge Syrian President Basar-al-Assad, while Iran has been training Taliban to help Assad remain in place. As mentioned earlier, there are strong links between both the Taliban.

When Obama declared the US-NATO drawdown from Afghanistan in 2009, the Afghanis were protesting that the US is subcontracting Afghanistan to Pakistan. This perhaps left Ashraf Ghani no choice but to throw his lot with Pakistan. Even if Ghani had not taken this course, Pakistan had already launched the Zarb-e-Azb with the main aim of pushing the TTP and part of the 20 Mujahid battalions trained during 2013-2014 to operate in guise of Taliban into Afghanistan. Little wonder that the Afghan Ministry of Defence says that of every 10 terrorists fighting in Afghanistan four are foreigners from Pakistan, China, Central Asia, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Middle East.  But the fact remains that by November 2014, Pakistan had already pushed some 2,50,000 ‘refugees’ into Afghanistan ostensibly mixed with task forces to attain her strategic depth. Ayman-al-Zawahiri had declared his support to Afghan Taliban last year

No one knew Pakistan and ISI’s terror nexus better than former Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Karzai had lived in Pakistan as Afghan refugee in early 1980’s and operated with anti-Soviet Mujahedeen. In his 13 year’s Presidency, Hamid Karzai made 20 trips to Pakistan hoping to find a solution. As President, he even once said that if US attacked Pakistan, Afghanistan will side with Pakistan. Yet, it was Pakistan that sabotaged any possibility of talks between the Karzai government and Taliban by imprisoning Mullah Ghani Beradar, former deputy of Mullah Omar and shooting and critically injuring Taliban Finance Minister Mullah Mutasim Agha Jan in an assassination attempt. Karzai’s final words were “No peace will arrive unless the US or Pakistan want it.”

Unfortunately, the US has looked the other way because it has made use of ISI sponsored proxies. The bottom-line is that the Pakistani military is confident it will always retain the strategic potential to assist the West in containment or shall we say restraining of Russia and China through her proxies, in tandem with her global terrorist links including the ISIS which is a CIA generated proxy. Both Pakistan and the West know it and West  will always forgive Pakistan all her trespasses as they did in the case of Osama bin Laden. That is why you find rapid radical realignments in the Af-Pak region and even Central Asian Republics where the declaration of the IMU that it now is part of the ISIS has signaled the entry of the latter into Central Asia.

Robert H Kaplan in his book ‘The Revenge of Geography’ wrote, “An Afghanistan that falls to Taliban sway threatens to create a succession of radicalized Islamic societies from the Indian-Pakistani border to Central Asia. This would, in effect, a greater Pakistan, giving Pakistan’s ISI the ability to create a clandestine empire composed of the likes of Jallaluddin Haqqani, Gulbuddin Hekmetyar, and the Lashkar-e-Taiba : able to confront India in the manner that Hezbollah and Hamas confront Israel”.

The value of Pakistan to Afghanistan in terms of peace already stands negated with significant increase in terror attacks and mounting evidence that Pakistan has no intention of giving up pursuit of violence.  That Pakistan is in the process of achieving this strategic depth is becoming a reality. At the same time she has to walk the razor’s edge between the US and China. Pakistani military thinks it has derived strategic value by making her proxies available to both US and China notwithstanding the fact that the institutionalized radicalization is taking the country down the vortex of terror. The prospects of Afghanistan-Pakistan and India-Pakistan peace were never more remote. Two question however remains – what about the future of Pakistan?