Pakistan's tough Kabul assignment

The future of Afghanistan is being decided and Pakistan is one of the principals involved in shaping it. For Islamabad this amounts to a delicate balancing act that achieves the goal of a peaceful Afghanistan but also simultaneously protects Islamabad’s geo-strategic interests. This is easier said than done!

Over the next few weeks there are hard decisions to be made by Kabul, Washington and Islamabad that need to be endorsed by many other international players, including Beijing, Moscow, Tehran, Riyadh and New Delhi. Over the next few weeks huddles at the levels of heads of government or foreign ministers are planned in Moscow, Ankara and Doha.

A key sticking point needing resolution is the extent of the role the Taliban will have in the immediate future of Afghanistan, including the nature of its power-sharing under a peace deal.

The Taliban, a former direct adversary of the US and still fierce opponent of the legitimately elected Afghan government of President Ashraf Ghani, are impatient to return to power but this time with their legitimacy endorsed by the international community. They prefer an interim government with the principal role in a political settlement. They also want the US to stick to President Trump's pledge to withdraw the remaining 2,500 of its once 100,000 troops by May 1.

President Biden is not averse to the Taliban being directly handed a share of power but is iffy on the withdrawal of troops by the deadline. Ghani is not too twitchy about the troops but balks at the prospect of sharing power with a bitter adversary. Instead, he proposes a new national election and wants the Taliban to earn a transparently legal mandate from the people. The Taliban reject this.

This is where Pakistan comes in. While the US has been in recent years openly acknowledging Pakistan’s centrality in the final decisions related to Kabul, the Ghani administration has also significantly mended Kabul’s traditionally testy relations with Islamabad. This is because of the generally excellent relations that the Pakistani establishment has had with the Taliban.

Islamabad and Riyadh were the only two world capitals that had diplomatic relations with the Taliban regime in the 1990s when the militant group was an international pariah. Taliban’s return to international acceptance with the start of the Doha process in 2013 was in large part with Islamabad’s assistance with Washington and Kabul’s assent.

Pakistan now finds itself facing competing demands from the Biden and Ghani administrations. Both want Islamabad to convince Taliban to their respective positions on the proposed peace deal. The US wants a quick fix that allows it to exit Kabul on its own terms and Islamabad as an enabler of its interests.

This is not easy for Islamabad because while it wants the Taliban to be guaranteed a stake in power sharing quickly, it knows that without at least a partial endorsement of the Afghan electorate for this peace deal and significantly satisfying the Ghani government, things can get bad quickly.

This can potentially leave Pakistan as the biggest casualty along with Afghanistan in case the peace deal fails and the Taliban lose patience with the political process. Pakistan no longer supports any violence by the Taliban or any other actors as a substitute for politics having battled for decades the violent fallout of the Afghan instability that cost the lives of 40,000 Pakistanis, including 5,000 soldiers.

Pakistan has spent the last four years building a 1,500 km fence on its long border with Afghanistan as a hedge against spillover of violence from across. While this has helped Pakistan stay safer, Afghanistan has also benefited by successfully targeting militants that previously escaped to Pakistani borderlands for refuge.

Pakistan will have to do a tightrope walk by facilitating events in Afghanistan without dictating them and facilitate a win-win for all sides. It will have to leverage its influence with Taliban to convince them to be more flexible than they have been despite the US backing their stake to political power in a country aghast at prospects of seeing them in power again.

Islamabad can offer better bilateral trade and socio-economic ties with any future Kabul power-sharing administration supported by Afghan citizens in exchange for Taliban’s flexibility and even a possible direct land trade route between Afghanistan and India through its territory in return for the Ghani administration’s compromise on its hard stance — all in aid of for a smooth political transition much deserved by the people of Afghanistan.

– Adnan Rehmat is a Pakistan-based journalist, researcher and analyst with interests in politics, media, development and science.

Twitter: @adnanrehmat1