Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Afghanistan and the Regional Geopolitics

A win-win game or zero-sum affair?
STATE CRAFT BY HAPPYMON JACOB

THE TALIBAN were born in Pakistani refugee camps, educated in Pakistani madrasas and learnt their fighting skills from Mujaheddin Pushtuns based in Pakistan. Their families carried Pakistani identity cards”, wrote one of the leading experts on the Taliban and Afghanistan, Ahmed Rashid, in his celebrated book Taliban: The story of Afghan warlords. When the Frankenstein - the Taliban – came back to haunt the Pakistani state – its originator - in the recent past, Pakistan watchers began to believe that the Pakistani state will go all out against the remnant Taliban elements in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Pakistani state did so, but in parts and half-heartedly, which has gone on to further embolden the Taliban elements in the region.
It is now widely perceived that while most of those who run the political establishment in Pakistan want to see that the ongoing talibanisation process does not take further roots in the state and society of Pakistan, many disgruntled elements in the Pakistani armed forces and the all-powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), apart from the Islamic radical parties in Pakistan, continue to support the Taliban so that they can exert complete control on Kabul and bring about a ‘true Islamic’ state in Pakistan.
The new regional geo-politics in Afghanistan has been played out by a number of global and regional parties – the United States, NATO, Iran, Pakistan and India. While the United States and the NATO seem to be increasingly disinterested in continuing their engagement with Afghanistan, India and Pakistan seem to be clearly furthering their strategic interests in the war-torn nation.
Pakistan’s strategic interests in Afghanistan and its aggressive policies there, which date back to the 1970s, stem from both strategic necessity and geo-political greed. One of the primary reasons for its pro-active and aggressive Afghan policies is the successive Afghan governments’ firm refusal to accept the Durand Line which currently separates the two countries as a settled issue. Afghan Prime Minister, Mohammad Harkim Khan, declared as early as in 1947: “If an independent Pushtunistan cannot be set up, the frontier province should join Afghanistan. Our neighbour (Pakistan) will realise that our country with its population and trade, needs (an opening) to the sea”. Since then the Afghan irredentist tendency has only grown in intensity: various Afghan leaders such as President Nur Muhammad Taraki, Prime Minister Daud Khan, the Taliban leadership and now Hamid Karzai have all refused to accept the Durand Line as a settled issue.
Second is the issue of an independent Pushtunistan which many Afghan political leaders have fanned to the disquiet of the Pakistani leadership. When put together, Pushtun nationalism and Afghan irredentist tendencies have enough in them to give sleepless nights to Pakistan. Thirdly, many Pakistani strategic thinkers such as Pakistani General Aslam Beg have emphasized the need for Pakistan to have a strategic depth in Afghanistan. The question of strategic depth needs to be seen in the context of Pakistan’s access to energy-rich Central Asia.
Yet another Pakistani concern regarding Afghanistan is the latter’s traditionally close friendship with the former’s arch rival – India. The Indo-Afghan friendship had almost always flourished but for a brief interregnum during the Mujahideen war and the Taliban rule. The present Afghan leadership under Hamid Karzai has been proactively trying to enhance Afghan engagement with India which India is only glad to extend. India sees very tangible strategic results from a close relationship with Kabul: India is building parts of a highway from Chabahar (in Iran) through Afghanistan to Tajikistan (Chabahar-kabul-Kunduz-Badakhshan) which will enable India to have a transport corridor to the otherwise inaccessible Central Asian region. India’s goodwill in Kabul is a result of a variety of Indian initiatives: its liberal development aid to Kabul (as the fifth largest donor, it has already pledged more than $750 million to build roads, train teachers and bureaucrats, and putting in place the necessary infrastructure for the country), the large number of Indians (around 4,000) working in various developmental projects in Afghanistan, immediate steps towards reconstruction after the ouster of the Taliban in 2001 (helped reopen the Indira Gandhi Children’s Hospital in Kabul, sent medical missions to assist in humanitarian work, donated Airbuses to enable Ariana airlines to resume operations and started plying hundreds of city buses in Afghan cities for public transit facilities), and the traditional ties it has had with the war-torn state.
Hamid KArzai has visited India six times ever since 2001 and the recent visit of Afghan Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak to visit the headquarters of the army’s 15th corps in Srinagar J&K to see counter-insurgency operations raised quite a few eyebrows in Islamabad. More importantly, Pakistan thinks India fans insurgencies within Pakistan from its bases in Afghanistan.
While both Pakistan’s and India’s engagement in Afghanistan is to gain the much-needed diplomatic and strategic leverage in that strategically important location, Pakistan, unlike India, has been trying to influence the developments by sheer muscle power rather than soft power and deft diplomatic skills which the Afghans have come to strongly resent. While this has brought New Delhi and Kabul closer, this has not been to the liking of Islamabad which is now trying its best to spoil that.
Last week’s attack on the Indian Mission in Kabul was not the first of its kind – allegedly sponsored by ISI – against Indian engagement in Afghanistan. In 2007, the Indian Border Roads Organization reportedly came under 30 rocket attacks while it was constructing the 124-mile stretch of road across Nimroz Province.
Pakistan’s concerns, strategically speaking, are understandable: It does not afford to have enemies on both sides and be sandwiched between them. It has to preempt any such moves by India and Afghanistan. However, the Pakistani strategy in preempting that is only making its own position in Kabul more and more vulnerable. Pakistan needs to rethink its strategy in Afghanistan, and India and Afghanistan together could persuade Pakistan to get together for a tri-lateral regional initiative at countering extremism in the region and rebuilding Afghanistan making the geo-strategic game in Afghanistan a win-win one rather than a zero-sum one.

Sunday, July 13, 2008

Political chaos in J&K

Political chaos in J&K
By HAPPYMON JACOB
During the course of the last three weeks, many significant developments have taken place in Jammu and Kashmir and many of these will have long-lasting implications for the ongoing peace efforts in and on Kashmir. The Congress government in the state has resigned leading to the possibility of President’s rule in the state for the fourth time in the state’s history, seven people have so far died in the protests that rocked the valley in the past few weeks, the ruling coalition in the state - Congress and the People’s Democratic Party - has parted ways and the state continues to be in turmoil.

However, the most unwelcome result of all the political developments in the state is indeed the unprecedented communal polarisation that the state is witnessing today: there are threats of an economic blockade of Kashmir by some Hindu fundamentalist parties in Jammu and this has prompted many Kashmiris to ask Pakistan for help with essential commodities. There are also reports of communal clashes from many parts of the state.

It all started when the state government decided to allot 200 Kanals of forest land to Shri Amarnath Shrine Board (SASB), which led to the 10-day agitation in the Kashmir Valley spearheaded by the secessionist leaders such as Syed Ali Shah Geelani, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq and Yaseen Malik. Under pressure from widespread protests, the state government revoked the land grant order, which gave rise to protests in Jammu.

Kashmir, by all accounts, was limping back to normalcy in the last couple of years. Why then has this otherwise relatively minor act of land transfer and the controversy surrounding it, which, of course, could have been pre-empted by some deft handling by the government, taken the state by storm? What explains this sudden change of public mood on the streets of Srinagar? Why is peace in Kashmir so fragile?

A post-facto analysis of the situation in Kashmir proves one thing beyond any doubts: peace in Kashmir is too fragile to be taken for granted. Normalcy in Kashmir, to a great extent, did manage to veil the discontent, uneasiness and disapproval of the people at a lot of things that were happening in and on Kashmir. It is this pent-up anger and uneasiness that was vented out on the streets of Srinagar during the past few weeks.

T here are a number of underlying causes behind what is happening now and they call for some serious introspection on the part of the state and central governments.

Many analysts around the country tend to believe that the anger on the streets of Kashmir is essentially communal in nature and the Kashmiri dissidents who led these protests and a large number of common Kashmiris who participated in them are indulging in anti-Hindu politics.

The truth is far from that. While the immediate cause of these protests may be linked to the land transfer itself, there are other not-so-apparent and more substantive causes behind this. The recent spell of protests is the result of a series of fundamentally flawed policies in and on Jammu and Kashmir by the governments in Srinagar and New Delhi.

First of all, despite all their promises to the state of Jammu and Kashmir, what have the governments in Srinagar and New Delhi done to resolve the Kashmir issue to the satisfaction of the people of the state? Almost nothing. The Prime Minister’s round table conferences and the reports that were produced subsequently by various working groups have been neatly archived and forgotten about, as usual. The reports and the contents were indeed very encouraging and one had hoped that the governments would act on them helping, thereby, improve the situation in the state.

The change of guard in Srinagar in November 2005, when the People’s Democratic Party’s (PDP) Mufti Mohammad Sayyed was replaced by Congress party’s Ghulam Nabi Azad as the state’s Chief Minister, in retrospect, was a serious mistake committed by the Congress party: it suddenly brought to a grinding halt all the good work that the Mufti government was doing in the state even to the extent of being accused of as pro-militants by some. More importantly, the incoming political leadership lacked the political will and vision to implement the suggestions from the various working group reports. Even as PDP’s ‘healing touch’ was dismissed as mere rhetoric, it did have a great deal of symbolic effect. Therefore, one might say that the Mufti government would have organised the round tables better and diligently worked towards implementing the suggestions from the working groups.

Secondly, it is now apparent that the government was sleeping through the various phases of peace in Kashmir ignoring the daily demands and pleas from dissidents, activists, mainstream politicians and analysts to engage the state and the problems therein more proactively.

Not only that there was unprecedented willingness from the part of the dissidents and various sections of Kashmiris in looking for a solution to the state’s problems but more importantly many of these suggestions to conflict resolution were concrete and should have been taken into serious consideration. The governments’ dismissive attitude towards such gestures and proposals has brought about the prevailing situation of political disconnect between the people and the state in Jammu and Kashmir.

Giving the current spate of protests in Kashmir a religious colour is being simplistic and counter-productive. It is time we learnt to read the signs of political frustration of the people and act on them before it is too late. That said, it is necessary also to point out that the argument that the transfer of land to SASB is part of a well-thought out Indian conspiracy to settle non-local Hindus in the valley in order to turn Muslims to a minority in the state is far from the reality. It is also interesting to note the Pakistani reaction to the political developments in Kashmir.

Despite repeated pleas from the Kashmiri separatist leadership to get involved in the ongoing political turmoil in the state, Pakistani government is maintaining a studied silence on the issue and is seemingly unwilling to make loud statements about it.
Source: Sakaal Times, July 10, 2008.