by Manoj Kumar Mishra 13 November 2021
Pakistan’s proclivity towards meddling in the internal affairs of another neighboring sovereign country – Afghanistan with an inevitable desire to shape political dynamics there questions its dedication towards helping build Afghanistan for Afghans. While peace and stability in Afghanistan is contingent on its evolution as a country with full independence and neutrality, Pakistan’s objectives in the war-ravaged country historically have been to use it to further its own economic, political and ideological interests. For instance, former Pakistan senator Afrasiab Khattak with his superior knowledge about the country’s deep state and its nexus with militant groups, referred to Pakistan’s strategy of using the Taliban as a “tool” for its dominance under the guise of strategic depth.
Independent and Neutral Afghanistan – A Misnomer
An independent and neutral Afghanistan would be in the interests of the South Asian as well as Central Asian region as it would not only enhance historical and cultural contacts between the two regions but both regions would also benefit from interregional trade and investment with Afghanistan acting as a bridge. However, Pakistan’s efforts at driving a wedge between the regions by blocking transportation of goods from Afghanistan and Central Asia towards India and vice versa as well as its earlier reluctance to see Afghanistan as a member of South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation (SAARC) indicated that any kind of integration drive that seeks to interweave South Asia with Central Asian geopolitics and geo-economics would be resisted by the country. More recently, Pakistan was witnessed being reluctant to respond to India’s plans to provide wheat and other assistance to Afghanistan, which were discussed on the side-lines of the Moscow format conference in October, 2021. Former Afghan President Ashraf Ghani was quoted saying that Kabul will restrict Pakistan’s access to central Asia if it is not given access to India through the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) project and he threatened to keep Afghanistan out of the project unless Pakistan changed its obstructionist behaviour. To keep Afghanistan under its influence, Pakistan continued to interfere in the Afghan peace process. It is worth mentioning that Kabul very often blamed Islamabad on the charges of sabotaging Afghan peace process and accused it of interfering in Afghanistan’s internal affairs although Pakistan kept on rebuffing the charges.
For instance, the former minister of interior Mohammad Omar Daudzai, as well as a member of The Council For The Protection and Stability of Afghanistan (council made of former Afghan Jihadi figures), accused Pakistan of meddling in the internal affairs of Afghanistan and exploiting the peace process in a bid to pursue its own objectives. Not much time before, following Kabul ambulance bombing, the head of Afghanistan’s intelligence service, National Directorate of Security (NDS) Masoom Stanekzai stated that these actions were deadly attempts by the Pakistani backers of the insurgency to show that they could not be sidelined. Pakistan’s Foreign Office spokesman Mohammad Faisal’s curt response to a question whether India has a role in the conflict-ridden South Asian country that “India has no role in Afghanistan” in the beginning of 2019 clearly pointed to Pakistan’s proclivity to weigh its strategic, economic and political gains in Afghanistan in zero-sum terms against India’s similar loss in Afghanistan and Central Asia.
Historically, Pakistan looked for strategies that could link it with Central Asia through communication networks. For instance, under the government of Benazir Bhutto, its Interior Minister General Naseerullah Babur initiated steps at utilizing the Taliban in an effort to bring stability to southern and eastern Afghanistan and open routes and trade links to different resource rich Central Asian states. He foresaw greater alignment between the American and Pakistani geopolitical interests in Afghanistan in terms of opening of trade routes and forging links with different resource-rich Central Asian states. The fact that the Taliban consisted of many members drawn from the Central Asian states rather than representing exclusively the Pashtun Afghans pointed to its fabricated structure to cater to Pakistan’s geopolitical interests.
Peace and stability in Afghanistan seems secondary to Pakistan’s strive for a propped regime in Kabul which would not only allow and assist it in extending its sway into the Central Asian region for economic, cultural and diplomatic gains but would deny a similar space to India at the same time. Pakistan’s continued objection to India’s non-military and developmental role in Afghanistan under the pretext that it is New Delhi’s encirclement strategy also indicates its resistance to greater economic integration between New Delhi and Kabul. Pakistan’s military and the intelligence wing (deep state) believed radical religious groups could be an asset in addressing its security dilemma posed by India – a much bigger power in terms of size, population and conventional army by making Pakistan more relevant to the American objectives, first, by pushing the Soviets out of Afghanistan and subsequently by bringing closer alignment between its interests and those of Americans in Central Asia [1]. With the evolving circumstances, Pakistan looks poised to influence the Taliban in a bid to keep Afghanistan within its economic, ideological and political sphere of influence.
Economic, Ideological and Political/Diplomatic Influence
The conventional idea about the concept of strategic depth and Pakistan’s desire to cultivate it against India has been substantiated by the argument that military planners in Pakistan had struggled over the years to overcome the deficiencies of Pakistan’s geographic narrowness and the presence of important cities such as Lahore and Karachi and communication networks within short striking distance of India. The concept is thus understood as Pakistan’s desire for cultivating more territorial space to launch counter-offensive from Afghan territory.[2] However, the concept defined exclusively in military and strategic terms which projects Pakistan’s strive for gaining territorial space in case of war with India does not conform to the operational policy of Pakistan. Pakistan has so far responded to India’s superiority in conventional military capabilities by raising proxy wars and building capacity as well as resorting to threat of deploying tactical nuclear weapons.
Pakistan’s Afghan strategy has been geared towards incorporating Afghanistan as well as the Central Asian region within its economic, ideological and diplomatic sphere of influence. For instance, Pakistan took concerted efforts at making Afghanistan overly dependent on it for market so that its economic influence in the country did not get diluted. To realize this objective, Islamabad aimed at creating an overarching Islamic identity in order to displace the Pashtun ethnic nationalism because the demand for Pashtunistan, if conceded, would have granted Afghanistan the most desired route to the Indian Ocean [3]. Afghanistan was in the lookout for alternative routes for long that would have lessened its dependence on Pakistan. However, Islamabad took concerted efforts at creating such an Islamic identity by raising jihad against Soviet Union following its intervention in 1979 and later by propping up the Taliban during the civil war period in Afghanistan. Pakistani governments tried to undercut Pashtun nationalism even before the jihad in the 1980s. For example, it was in 1973 that the then Pakistani Prime Minister Zulifikar Ali Bhutto provided sanctuary to Islamist leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar with a view to undermining the established government in Kabul.[4]
Pakistan’s desire in keeping Afghanistan and Central Asia away from Indian sphere of influence is evident from its resorting to the Afghan Trade and Transit Agreement of 1965 in order to deny overland route to India and ensure that Afghanistan remains overly dependent on it for trade. Since 2015, Afghan President Ghani continued to warn that his government would close Pakistan’s transit route to Central Asia if Afghanistan’s entrepreneurs were not allowed to trade with India through the Wagah border crossing. On the other side, India without a direct land access to Afghanistan being denied by Pakistan looked for alternative ways (through Iran) to reach out to Central Asia. Its continued trade, cultural and energy ties with the region made it a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) along with Pakistan. However, Pakistan continued to direct its policies to ensure Afghanistan’s dependence on a single entry point into the world through the port of Karachi. Maniappan Kutty, a driver working with the Border Roads Organisation (BRO) project of building the Zaranj-Delaram highway was abducted and subsequently killed in 2005 and Kasula Suryanarayana, an Indian telecommunications engineer in the Zabul Province was killed in April 2006 by the Taliban are some of the examples of Pakistan’s covert designs in nullifying India’s objective of making Afghanistan a land bridge connecting South Asia with Central Asia [5].
Pakistan being located at the crossroads between Central and South Asia seems inclined to see the Gwadar port and other interlinking projects under China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), serve the purpose of establishing strong ties with the landlocked energy-rich Central Asian states. Pakistan would like to see the revival of the Silk Route but without India being a part of it. The Silk route in the past allowed enormous economic activities between the Central and South Asian regions and the merchants from South Asia were not only actively engaged in trade with the Central Asian region using Afghanistan as a bridge, they established their outposts and stations in various parts of Central Asia. Against this backdrop, the Pakistani city of Peshawar emerged as the main trading centre and the Hindko language of Peshawar served as the common language to facilitate trade dealings between the two regions whereas trade flourished through the Samarkand-Multan to Lahore route.
Pakistan’s desire for overriding ideological and cultural influence in Afghanistan as well as Central Asia encompasses the country’s attempts at invoking the commonalities of Islamic region and tradition with a view to deepening its ideological space. For instance, instead of adopting peaceful Sufi tradition, Pakistan not only promoted radical teachings in madrasas in the Saudi Arabic deobandi tradition, many radical religious groups were trained in Afghanistan and Pakistan as well to destabilize Central Asian States and strengthen the opposition groups soon after they emerged as independent republics. Its foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi during his visit to Bishkek in May 2019, stressed on the commonalities of culture, religion and traditions that could bring Pakistan closer to Central Asia. Pakistan keeps overemphasizing its cultural links with the Central Asian region in its bid to reach out to the region while overlooking the South Asian continental ethos.
Desire for Political and diplomatic sphere of influence includes Pakistani efforts at strengthening its diplomatic position by mustering overriding support from the Islamic countries. Working in this direction, for instance, Pakistan not only mooted the idea of ‘proportional representation’ of Muslim countries in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) within the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), it also sought support from the member-states on the Kashmir issue. Pakistan’s desire for political/diplomatic influence in Afghanistan includes all the strategies that Islamabad adopts to shape political developments and peace process in Kabul with the objective of keeping the war-torn country within the parameters of its political and diplomatic influence.
It can be argued that peace and stability in Afghanistan are contingent on how Pakistan perceives its broader economic, ideological and political interests in Afghanistan are protected by the Afghan Taliban. While Pakistan’s leverage over the Taliban may not be as overwhelming as to compel it accept something against their willingness but many experts believe that Pakistan would retain leverage over the Afghan Taliban. Pakistan lost no time in demonstrating its enthusiasm to reset the fraying relations with Afghanistan soon after the Ghani regime collapsed and the Taliban took over. Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi during his visit to Kabul in October invited the interim foreign minister of the Taliban government Amir Khan Muttaqi to make his first visit to Pakistan. Pakistan’s objectives are clear, first to maintain its control over the ruling regime which is not a monolithic group. While Pakistan has its prop – the Haqqani network within the regime to foster its anti-Indian objectives, it has to keep its sway over other shades of the Taliban by playing a balancing act. Second, Pakistan wants the Durand line being recognised as the international border between it and Afghanistan which has been resisted by all ruling regimes of Kabul including the Taliban. Third, the country by maintaining its influence over the disparate groups within the Taliban is interested to ensure that non-state actors such as the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) do not use Afghan soil to launch attacks against it. Even while Pakistan continues with its attempts to fulfill its larger objectives in Afghanistan and it is geographically better placed than India to enhance trade, cultural and energy links with Central Asia, it needs to be underlined that an unstable Afghanistan with its problems of Islamic fundamentalism and drug-trafficking have historically prevented the Central Asian leaderships from allowing an enhanced role for Islamabad.
[1]A. Rasanayagam, Afghanistan: A Modern History, 2009, I. B. Tauris, London. pp.100-200.
[2] A. Jalal, The State of Martial Rule: The Origins of Pakistan’s Political Economy of Defence, 1990, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, p. 50.
[3] J. Shah, Indo-Afghan Relations 1947-67, 1976, New Delhi, Sterling Publication, p. 69.
[4] It was said in the speech delivered by M. K. Bhadrakumar at the international conference, “The Age of Obama: From the Mediterranean to the Greater Middle East” organised by the Foundation for European Progressive Studies and Fondazione Italianieuropei, Rome, November 30, 2009.
[5]S. D’souza, “India’s aid to Afghanistan: Challenges and Prospects”, Strategic Analysis, Vol. 31, No. 5, 2007, p. 840.