OpinionsPakistan’s karma coming back to haunt it

Pakistan’s karma coming back to haunt it

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Pakistan's karma coming back to haunt it

Sushant Sareen

The recent wave of terror attacks, which the Pakistanis claim have been planned by terrorists based in remote, lawless and ungoverned areas of eastern Afghanistan, is a classic case of what goes around comes around. For over four decades now, Pakistan has used and continues to use its Pashtun tribal belt which borders Afghanistan as a base camp for all sorts of despicable jihadists to carry out their operations in Afghanistan. Now, it appears, Pakistani jihadists have set up bases in those very parts of Afghanistan which ironically enough were destabilised by the Pakistanis through these very same jihadists. Like they say, Karma is a bitch and the Pakistanis are learning this the hard way. Perhaps, if the Pakistanis learned the right lesson – there are consequences, many of them unintended, of inimical actions against others – things could start to improve. The problem, however, is that the Pakistanis generally end up learning the wrong lesson and do stuff which will only make things worse for them.

 

After the latest upsurge in terror attacks, the Pakistanis turned their ire on the hapless Afghans who are themselves struggling against the Islamist terrorists, many of whom continue to function as ‘strategic assets' of Pakistan. Immediately after the attack in Lahore, the Pakistanis closed their border with Afghanistan and stopped all movement of goods and people. A couple of days later, following the attack on the Sufi Shrine in Sehwan, Sindh, Afghan diplomats were summoned by the Pakistan Army and handed a list of 76 terrorists who are supposed to be operating from inside Afghanistan. For their part, the Afghans pushed back and handed their list of 85 terrorists who have received sanctuary in Pakistan (including the who's who of the Taliban and Haqqani Network) and asked Pakistan to move against 32 terrorist camps in Pakistani territory.

 

Summoning of the Afghan diplomats to the GHQ was clearly a violation of all diplomatic protocol. But this is hardly surprising considering the Pakistanis treat Afghanistan as a vassal state or as a conquered fifth province of Pakistan. No wonder then that the Pakistanis seem to have extended the infamous colonial era black law called Frontier Crimes Regulations (FCR) to browbeat and even bludgeon the Afghans into submission. The FCR, which remains in force in the Tribal Areas of Pakistan allows Pakistani authorities to administer collective punishment on entire populations and forcibly displace people, destroy their homes and hearths, and detain people indefinitely without any due process. Something similar is being done with the Afghans.

For over two weeks now, a virtual blockade has been imposed on Afghanistan. All border crossings which are used by the Afghans for their transit and trade purposes through Pakistan have been shut. Thousands of people have been stranded and thousands of trucks, many of them carrying perishable goods, are stuck. This is the Pakistani version of collective punishment being meted out to the Afghans. Although the Afghans have been diversifying their trade and transit by using the Iranian route – Iran has displaced Pakistan as Afghanistan's largest trade partner – there are many Afghans who still use the Pakistani routes for a variety of reasons. law disallows Pakistan from closing these routes but clearly Pakistanis feel they can blithely dispense with niceties of international law. While the Pakistanis claim that the border has been closed for security reasons, this step doesn't make any sense in light of the fact that over the last few months they have introduced strict regulations to control movement of goods and people along the Afpak border.

Apart from the blockade, the Pakistanis are also believed to have carried out military operations against alleged terror bases inside Afghanistan. Although the Pakistanis have used the expression ‘along the Afghan border', there are hints that they actually carried out Special Forces operations inside Afghan territory. The Pakistanis have also admitted to have used long-range artillery to shell some of the alleged terror bases inside Afghanistan and there are suggestions that aerial bombardment was also carried out across the Durand line. All these attacks are a clear violation of Afghan sovereignty and quite rightly the Afghans have termed these attacks ‘aggression' and have promised to respond. Of course, given their limitations, there isn't very much that Afghan forces can do to pay back the Pakistanis in the same coin. This is precisely the sort of hostile action from Pakistan that was feared by the former Afghan president Hamid Karzai when he insisted on security guarantees from the US in the Bilateral Security Agreement between the two countries. The Americans however only committed that they ‘shall regard with grave concern any external aggression or threat of external aggression' and agreed to work together with the Afghans to develop ‘an appropriate response' in the event of external aggression. Clearly, the recent actions of the Pakistanis can be used by the Afghans to invoke these watered down commitments given by the US, and test the Americans' resolve in defending Afghanistan.

The Americans and its allies must do everything possible to protect Afghanistan from unilateral action by Pakistan, which is not only foisting an undeclared war on the Afghan state through its proxies, but has also now started to send in regular troops into Afghan territory under the utterly false and self-serving pretext that the Pakistani jihadists are operating from Afghanistan with the assistance of the Afghan state. The fact of the matter is that the areas where Pakistani jihadists have set up base are hardly under the control of the Afghan state – the Pakistanis themselves have done everything possible to undermine the Afghan state in these areas over the last decade and a half, and even longer. For Pakistan to now demand action from the Afghans is rather rich. Interestingly, more than the writ of the Afghan state, it is the writ of Pakistan's strategic allies – Afghan Taliban and Haqqani Network (HN) – that runs over most of these areas. But instead of pressuring them, the Pakistanis are blaming the Afghan government. This is in large part to deflect blame from the deep state in Pakistan which continues to support and provide sustenance to these ‘strategic assets'. But it is also being done because blaming the Afghan intelligence agency NDS and 's R&AW is helpful in winning public support within Pakistan as well as prevent any major public outcry demanding action against the Taliban and HN.

But all the stuff that Pakistan blames the Afghans for can very easily be defended by the Afghans by throwing back in Pakistan's face arguments that the Pakistanis have made to deny their complicity or justify their inaction against terrorists operating against India and Afghanistan from Pakistan- controlled territory. For instance, the Pakistanis have often told India that people who infiltrate the LoC travel scores of miles of Indian territory and so should be apprehended by Indian forces. The same can now be said for the terrorists who cross the Durand line to strike in Lahore or Sehwan or Peshawar. Similarly, if the Pakistanis feel that Afghan inability to act against Pakistani jihadists justifies cross-border operations by Pakistani forces, the same logic can be used by India in PoK, and by the US and Afghan forces in Pakistani territory where despite evidence of training camps no action is taken by the Pakistani forces. Again, just as the Pakistanis refuse to act against Taliban bases in their territory because of strategic reasons, the same argument can be thrown in their face by the Afghans. One could go on and on to give examples of how every specious logic and every false argument that the Pakistanis made in the past to India and Afghanistan, can today be flung at them.

If the menace of terrorism has to be defeated, then it is imperative that countries like Pakistan which have spawned this beast, make a clean break with it. Mere point-scoring or indulging in blame-games isn't going to help very much. Continuation of pernicious policies that have made the ground fertile for terrorists is only going to make things worse. Clearly, Pakistan's karma is coming back to haunt it. Without a complete overhaul of Pakistan's strategic policy paradigm, what Pakistan sends around, will continue to come around to cause grievous harm to Pakistan itself.

The author is Senior Fellow, Vivekananda International Foundation. Views expressed are personal

Northlines
Northlines
The Northlines is an independent source on the Web for news, facts and figures relating to Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh and its neighbourhood.

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