Afghanistan (45 page)

Aid has allowed Iran to entrench its influence in Afghanistan with
both the Karzai government and officials and grassroots Afghans alike in western Afghanistan, which remains economically dependent on Iran.
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The most significant program is a railroad that will link Herat to Iran’s national rail system. During the 2008 energy and food shortages, Iran offered to supply Afghanistan with 100 MW of power a day over transmission lines plus food aid. Iran serves as a source of jobs for Afghan expatriate workers. In 2008, in the words of COL McNiece, “Iran is the second biggest investor in Afghanistan behind the US and has good political influence.”
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Despite US hostility toward Iran, the Karzai government has a public policy of maintaining good relations.

Iran has a long-standing commitment to stemming the narcotics trade, especially that concentrated in the area of the Afghanistan-Iran-Pakistan border tri-junction.
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Dating back to the 1980s, Iranian paramilitary counter-narcotics operations have led to pitched battles with well-armed traffickers. However, there have also recently been unconfirmed signs of cooperation with select Afghan narcotics traffickers, with some Iranians, possibly including the IRGC, letting them transit Iranian territory for a share of the proceeds.
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Iran’s counter-narcotics forces are reportedly suffering from increasing levels of corruption and cooperate with traffickers.
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The rectitude of Iran’s drug interdiction operation may also have been a casualty of war.

Pakistan resents any and all Iranian involvement in Afghanistan, which Pakistan believes should be in their sphere of influence. Pakistan continues to see Afghan Persian-speakers as a natural fifth column for Iran and any non-Pushtun government in Kabul as a potential Iranian puppet. Pakistan has thus been suspicious of Iran’s energy-based dealings in the region and has blocked Iran’s ambitions for energy pipelines running to India. By 2008, Iran was concerned about the anti-Shia objectives of the insurgency in Pakistan as well as the TTP’s links to Iran’s rivals in Saudi Arabia and throughout the Gulf. Iran feels loyalty toward Pakistan’s Shias that go back to the 1980s, including Shia Pushtun tribes such as the Touray, which have faced violence from both Pakistani religious groups and Afghan Islamists such as HiH that had strong relations with the Pakistani security services. This has been reflected in providing access to funding that was used to acquire, in the case of Shia Pushtuns, weapons for self-defense.

For Pakistan, the conflict in Afghanistan has traditionally been viewed through two prisms: domestic as involving Pushtuns and religion; and international, first opposing the Soviet Union and then India. The Pakistani military and many elites believe that India is trying to use Pakistan’s disparate groups and weak civil society to destroy the entire country and annex its territory or, at best, reduce it to a compliant client state. The actions of the US and its coalition partners are perceived in Pakistan to weaken their influence in Afghanistan, making it less of a barrier against Indian encirclement. The US is seen as having become increasingly pro-India since the 1990s or worse, according to some Pakistanis, as part of an alliance with Israel and India to destroy or subjugate Islam.

Indo-Pakistani tensions have been playing out in Afghanistan since 1947 when New Delhi took over the British policy of supporting King Zahir’s government in Kabul, albeit at a greatly reduced level of resources. Afghanistan voted against Pakistan’s admission to the UN over its opposition to the Durand Line as the international border. India encouraged Afghanistan to raise its territorial claims to Pakistan up to the Indus as Pushtunistan, following King Zahir’s calling a Loya Jirga in 1949 that repudiated the Durand Line, insisting it was not what Pakistan and the world community saw it as, the international border. During Afghanistan’s Golden Age, Pakistan saw Soviet and Indian support for this Afghan border policy as being much more important than the minimal amount of cross-border violence that resulted from Kabul’s Pushtunistan claims. Indian influence in Kabul encouraged Afghanistan to create and use the Pushtunistan issue as a lever to dismember Pakistan; and Pakistan, in return, became committed to excluding Indian influence from Afghanistan. But Afghanistan never took advantage of Pakistan’s conflicts with India to take action; there has never been a “stab in the back.”

Before 1978, India maintained a significant presence in Afghanistan, keeping consulates and listening posts at Kandahar and Jalalabad, in addition to its large embassy in Kabul. These outposts provided New Delhi with the means to assist the then-thriving local Hindu and Sikh communities, which today have been reduced to a few hundred. The Indians kept contact with the Pushtunistan Movement in Afghanistan and Pakistan, some of whose Pushtun leaders, including Khan Abdul
Ghaffar Khan, the “Frontier Gandhi,” had been close to Jawaharlal Nehru and the Indian National Congress pre-partition.
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This contributed to the Pakistani military’s suspicion of secular Pushtun nationalists as potential secessionists.

Improved relations between India and the Soviet Union in the 1970s increased Pakistan’s fears of encirclement. India had refused to vote in the UN to condemn the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and maintained a small military assistance mission in Kabul during the period of the Soviet occupation. With the end of the Soviet Union over a decade later, increased Indian involvement in Afghanistan reflected concern over Islamism and its potential impact on Indian Muslims as well as Pakistan’s attempts to use Afghanistan-trained guerrillas and insurgent networks in Kashmir, fueling a cross-border insurgency there starting in the late 1980s. After 1992, India developed contacts with Ahmad Shah Massoud and the other leaders of the Northern Alliance in an effort to oppose Pakistan’s proxy war in Afghanistan through HiH and the Taliban and counter militant Islam.

Since the collapse of the Taliban in 2001, Indian diplomatic and economic involvement in Afghanistan has increased. From Kabul’s perspective, Indian involvement in Afghanistan appears benign—four consulates (the same number as Pakistan); 750 million dollars in Indian aid in 2001–09 and a further 1.6 billion dollars pledged—making it Afghanistan’s sixth largest bilateral aid donor.
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But when the Indian consulates that had operated until 1989 re-opened in Jalalabad and Kandahar in 2003, it was seen as an act of offensive political warfare by Pakistani officials. Pakistan has repeatedly claimed that these consulates have been used to support the secular nationalist insurgency in Baluchistan and to collect intelligence against Pakistan. By mid-2008 there were an estimated 4,000 Indian civilian and security personnel working in Afghanistan, which further raised Pakistani fears. Pakistan also perceives India’s involvement in reconstruction programs as a threat, especially the program of road building, some carried out by India’s Border Roads Organization (especially the Zanaj-Dilarm highway), believing it is a cover for establishing an Indian military and intelligence presence in Afghanistan. The BRO’s paramilitary nature and roots in India’s long-standing internal counter-insurgency campaigns are
widely perceived in Pakistan as a harbinger of greater Indian military involvement. The Indian government’s access to the Farkhor airbase in Tajikistan, granted by that government with Moscow’s apparent approval, fed Pakistani perceptions of a threatening encirclement.

Musharraf’s back-channel diplomacy on Kashmir that led to the end of cross-border support for the insurgency in Kashmir in 2003–04 was matched by India’s unwillingness to make meaningful concessions to improve relations with Pakistan or soften its control of Kashmir, widely resented by Pakistanis across the political spectrum. India has offered Pakistan little reconciliation and no concessions for its ending the cross-border insurgency in Kashmir and threatened military retaliation for attacks by terrorist groups tolerated by the Pakistani security services. Insurgents in Pakistan desperately needed to prevent any India-Pakistan rapprochement in order to sustain the momentum of their conflict. The 2002 attack on the Indian parliament and the 2008 Mumbai attack are examples of the terrorist need to preserve India-Pakistan hostility. India, like Israel and the US, is seen in Pakistan as providing terrorists more fodder for recruits and attacks by appearing to be waging a global war against Islam. That the Mumbai attack also targeted a Jewish community center shows that solidarity with Islamic violence worldwide has an important motivational factor.
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No More Frontiers

Radical religious groups are no longer a fringe threat on the outskirts of Pakistan’s society or the margins of its national territory. Years of low electoral turnout for religious parties—usually less than ten percent—does not accurately reflect their influence on Pakistan’s society and politics. Mainstream politicians now make major policy decisions to gain their support, such as Nawaz Sharif’s unimplemented plans, announced in 1999, to introduce Sharia law nationwide. In addition to support for the religious parties by many of Pakistan’s political leadership, religious radicalization has been fed by the economic downturn that reversed much of Pakistan’s growth experienced in the decade prior to 2008, increased urbanization, the impact of terrorism, and the insurgencies and the propaganda. While some 87 percent of Pakistanis polled in 2009
described themselves as religious, 83 percent believed Sharia permitted girls’ education and 75 percent believed it permitted women working; the radicalization has more turned opinion against the US than in favor of fundamentalism or insurgency.
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The polarization of Pakistani popular opinion against the US and what has been portrayed as its “Global War on Islam” greatly increased in the last two years of the Musharraf government, and this has not decreased.
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Yet the unpopularity of the US does not mean that the Pakistani insurgents are necessarily popular. The Pakistani insurgents have demonstrated little interest in taking part in democratic politics. In 2009, polling suggests than only about 10 percent of Pakistanis actually support the insurgents or radical ideology.
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Yet this is a vocal and politically mobilized 10 percent, and their links with the religious parties mean that even the military, which sees itself as the guardians of Pakistan’s future, must treat them with caution even as they oppose their attempts to gain greater political and societal power.

The 2008 elections, which were apparently less corrupt that those in 2002, created a democratic opening in Pakistan; but if this is allowed to erode away in the coming years, as have other such openings in past decades, it may concede the rest of Pakistan’s future to democracy’s enemies and beyond the point of no return. The economic downturn of 2008, unresolved structural problems, the ongoing ethnic and regional divisions, the absence of any likelihood of internally directed reform, the low quality of political leadership, and the continued focus on opposing India are all contributing to trends that have undercut the civilian government and reversed any real headway to create a functional civil society. After the optimism that greeted Zardari’s election in 2008, within a year deep despair and cynicism over the failures of civilian politicians have led many Pakistanis to look at rule by the military as a preferable to the current politics. But the military rule option may well not yield another Musharraf-like government, acceptable to Pakistani elites and foreign supporters. Rather, it may be a “colonel’s coup” of radicalized anti-Western officers as a violent reaction against a dysfunctional political system. A less explosive alternative was seen in the military’s pressure against Zadiri, seen as too pro-US and soft on opposing India and supporting the Afghan insurgents, in late 2009.
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“The economy is trashed
and law and order is approaching a crisis, but the military is reluctant to come back into power as it knows the public is fed up with them,” in the words of a veteran journalist.

The first years under Pakistan’s post-2008 new democracy did not augur well for success. National-level politics remained deadlocked between the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) and the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), with the pro-Musharraf Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid-e-Azam (PML-Q) watching from the sidelines. The highly personalized competition between their leaders and their families for national leadership and the personal and economic benefits power brings with it has limited opportunities for effective political cooperation. Even without the effect of the military, it is the vocal religious parties, the entrenched power sources of large landowners or other elite family organizations, and powerful retired military officers and government officials that have actually limited democracy in Pakistan, coupled with the fact that the political parties themselves have not yet made the internal transition from personal patronage networks to modern political institutions and are thus stuck in the highly personal “feudal” ways. The parties, like society, are still fixed on traditional lines, making the move into a modern democracy all the more difficult. The insurgency and the economic crisis have made it more difficult for Pakistan’s leaders—both elected officials and unelected elites—to put aside their essentially feudal battles. Expecting the civilian government to alter the military control of national security policy, including Afghanistan, is not reasonable in the short term in light of these continued disputes. In the longer term, the transition to a democratic Pakistan will require outside aid—financial and providing expertise—and assistance in strengthening the institutions of governance. This is required for the first steps toward a Pakistan where state schools teach, income taxes are collected, and politics is a matrix for reconciling differences, not maximizing the wealth and power of those in office.

No elected government in Pakistan has ever served out its full term. Pakistan’s civilian political leaders have had limited influence on any Afghanistan-related policy since the 1970s. Until that fact changes, there is unlikely to be a break in the tightening cycles of policy failures, with the military fearing Indian encirclement through Afghanistan. The only
way the Pakistan military has been able to feel secure from this threat has been to continue their decades-old policies of using Afghan proxies to put a government in Kabul that will exclude India and further Pakistan’s security interests.