JEDDAH, 8 November 2004 — When Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf visited Kabul earlier this week, no one pronounced the “T” word which had bedeviled relations between the two neighbors since the overthrow of the Taleban in 2002.
Most Afghans believe that the Taleban was a phenomenon concocted by the Pakistani military intelligence against indigenous Afghan Mujahedeen who had managed to force the Soviet Army out and to capture Kabul in 1992. So, when the Taleban regime collapsed, Pakistan was left without any influence in Afghanistan, a country it regards as its hinterland in its decades-long conflict with India. By promoting the Taleban, if not actually inventing them, Pakistan played the Pushtun card in Afghanistan, and lost.
This week’s visit, however, was a major comeback and a diplomatic coup for Musharraf. He became the first foreign leader to visit Kabul after Karzai was sworn in as the new Afghan president.
The symbolism of the visit could not be lost on anyone. Karzai’s victory means that the Pushtuns are, once again, at the center of Afghan politics and that Pakistan is prepared to back them as it had done with the Taleban.
For his part, Karzai needs Pakistan if only to modify his image as Washington’s man.
AS for the United States, it needs Pakistan and Afghanistan to come closer together for three reasons.
The first is that without their sincere cooperation the war being fought against terrorists, possibly including Osama Bin Laden and his gang, in the wild uplands that form part of their frontier, would have little chance of ending in victory. Terrorists have used bad relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan to their own advantage, at times by playing one side against the other.
The decision announced during Musharraf’s visit to set up a joint Afghan-Pakistani committee to supervise the anti-terrorist war on the border is a major step forward.
The second reason why the US wants Kabul and Islamabad to draw closer to one another is Washington’s desire to find a counter to Iran’s growing influence in parts of Afghanistan.
Finally, Washington hopes to help India and Pakistan come to a deal on Kashmir, ending one of the oldest conflicts in the modern world. The prospect of India getting access to Central Asia through Pakistan and Afghanistan may well provide the extra inducement needed to speed up things on Kashmir. By reviving the special relations forged between the Taleban and Islamabad, Karzai also paves the way for relaunching an ambitious plan to build oil and gas pipelines to link the energy-rich lands of Central Asia, the Caspian basin and Kazakhstan to the outside world via Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Before the fall of the Taleban, Karzai worked as a consultant for the American oil company Amoco that was involved in the initial pipelines deal. Another key figure involved in the negotiations at the time was Zalmay Khalilzad, an ethnic Pushtun and a naturalized American who now serves as US ambassador to Kabul. A third member of the Amoco consultancy group, Ashraf Ghani, is finance minister of Afghanistan.
“The project worked out between the Taleban and Amoco is being revived without the Taleban,” says Farhad Kuhi, a London-based oil analyst. “Had the Taleban agreed to hand over Bin Laden to the Americans they would still be in power and the pipelines would be built by Amoco with Karzai and Khalilzad as consultants.
The pieplines project has received a major boost, and a sense of urgency, as a result of skyrocketing crude oil prices in recent months. In its new, expanded version the project also envisages a branch to India that is emerging as the world’s fastest growing oil market after China.
Some of the projects that were once aimed at linking Afghanistan closer to Iran have now been diverted to Pakistan. These include a railway line between Kabul and Karachi, providing landlocked Afghanistan with access to the sea. At a later stage, the line could be extended to link up with the trans-Siberian in Central Asia and thence to Russia and Europe.
“This whole area is likely to see a railway building boom in the next two to three decades,” says Jean-Claude Barrat, a French specialist in transport. “Central Asia, despite its name, has been a backwater. The Americans now want to open it to the outside world.
The most natural way of doing this would have been through Iran. But with Iran under the mullas, Pakistan and Afghanistan are regarded as good enough.”
One area in which Musharraf appears to have had no success is related to Afghanistan’s renascent army. The Pakistani president had hoped to secure a role in training the new Afghan Army and security forces. Afghan public opinion is still too angry against Pakistan for its support of the Taleban to allow for a direct Pakistani presence in military fields. But this may well be temporary. As allies of the US, Kabul and Islamabad are bound to move still closer in the years to come.
