When Karzai comes to Delhi

South Asian News Agency (SANA)


The Afghan government has accused Pakistan of being involved in the killing of its former president and peace envoy Burhanuddin Rabbani, saying the killer was a Pakistani citizen and that the killing was “plotted” in Quetta.
Now Afghan president Hamid Karzai is coming to Delhi tomorrow, but that is not the point of this column. Sunday’s indictment by the Afghans is a grim reminder of the November 2008 Mumbai attacks, which were also carried out by Pakistani citizens.

Perhaps the time has come for the elected Pakistani government as well as the Pakistani intelligentsia to look inward and ask itself : Why are ordinary Pakistani citizens so angry with two of their three immediate neighbours that they embark on murder missions to kill innocent people in those countries?

After all, what harm did the people of Mumbai or Kabul — specifically, the victims of the Mumbai attacks and Rabbani and his family — do to Pakistan and Pakistanis, that their lives were so brutally cut short?

Is it because India refuses to talk straight about Kashmir to Pakistan, that innocent Pakistanis are being used pawns in some grand, strategic war to bleed India with a thousand direct and indirect cuts? Is it because the Pakistani intelligentsia has clearly stated that with the withdrawal of the Americans from Afghanistan, Pakistan as its closest neighbour, must have a direct stake in the endgame?

But how does killing Rabbani or innocent people in Mumbai help achieve those desired outcomes?

The Haqqani attack on the US embassy in Kabul some days ago, which has precipitated such American anger against Pakistan, is an irrevocable turning point in US-Pakistan-Afghan relations. Remember that the Haqqani group — at least in New Delhi’s and Kabul’s eyes —is responsible for attacking not only the Indian embassy in 2009, but also last year was accused of killing several Indian medical doctors and those in the army’s education corps who had been stationed in Kabul to help teach Afghan soldiers English.

Everything Hillary Clinton and Mike Mullen and several other wise Americans are telling the Pakistanis these past few days, the Indians have already said for several years : Which is, that you can’t make a distinction between “good” terrorists and “bad” ones, because sooner than later the good ones will also turn within, and upon you.
The people of Pakistan can certainly not be held responsible for the policies of its government and the military or the ISI. Certainly, too, there was a great deal of anger and commiseration by ordinary Pakistanis when the Mumbai attacks took place, as well as several shows of solidarity.

When Karzai comes to Delhi this week, it is believed that India and Afghanistan will sign a strategic partnership agreement. What a far cry from those early years when Karzai first visited Delhi after the September 2001 attacks and hesitated to forge strategic ties because he said he never wanted to forget the generosity of the Pakistan people when they hosted several million Afghans in the time of the Russians, the ensuing civil war as well as during the Taliban years.
Still, the truth of why nation-states keep “good” terrorists on a leash was brought home to me by Bangladesh home minister Shahara Khatun in Dhaka early last month when I asked her why her government had decided to hand over Indian insurgents based in Bangladesh, back to India.

“Why should we keep them here? They only instigate criminal elements and create more problems,” Khatun said.
Maybe Pakistan should listen to her more closely.

The writer is a New Delhi-based journalist who has worked as senior editor at The Indian Express from 1997-2004 and since then has been writing for Khaleej Times, Business Standard and Wall Street Journal 


jyoti.malhotra@tribune.com.pk
Courtesy The Express Tribune,

Afghan president travels to India amid regional tension

Afghan President Hamid Karzai began a two-day visit to India on Tuesday that could boost the two countries' economic ties and lead to an agreement for India to train police, in a trip likely to irk Pakistan as tension grows in the region.

India is one of Afghanistan's biggest bilateral donors, having pledged about $2 billion (1.3 billion pounds) since the 2001 U.S. led-invasion, for projects from the construction of highways to the building of the Afghan parliament.

India wants to ensure that a withdrawal of U.S. troops by 2014 does not lead to a civil war that spreads Islamic militancy across borders. At the same time, it knows its traditional foe Pakistan has far greater influence in Afghanistan.

Karzai's visit, during which he is meeting Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as well as Foreign Minister Krishna, has been planned for months, but it comes as Afghanistan appears increasingly frustrated with Pakistan.

"At this juncture, the visit will cause great heartburn in Islamabad," said Saeed Naqvi, a fellow at the Observer Research Foundation think-tank in New Delhi.

"That is unfortunate from the Indian perspective because anything achieved in the visit will be seen by Pakistan as an insult."

Wary of Pakistan, Indian officials have always said they want to focus on what they like to call "soft power" -- economic aid and trade. But India could offer more security training to Afghanistan, something almost certain to annoy Pakistan.

India has already trained a small number of officers from the Afghan National Army.

ECONOMIC FOCUS

Still, India treads carefully. It suspects Pakistan of involvement in several major attacks, including two bombings of its embassy in Kabul in 2008 and 2009, seen as warnings from Islamabad to stay away from its traditional "backyard."

Without a land border with Afghanistan and dependent on Pakistan for any overland trade, India knows it influence is limited.

"India will want to play its part in keeping Afghanistan stable, but it is focussing mainly on economic ties," said C. Raja Mohan, senior fellow at New Delhi's Centre for Policy Research. "It does not does not see itself as a counterbalance to Pakistan. It knows that Pakistan is setting the terms there."

Karzai may also be wary of upsetting Pakistan, a country crucial for forging any peace deal with the Taliban.

"Karzai wants to sign a strategic deal with India during his trip but it may hurt his recent call on peace talks with Pakistan," said Ahmad Saidi, a Kabul-based political analyst. "If Afghanistan want to move forward with a peace process, it should attract Pakistan's attention."

India does have historical ties to former Northern Alliance leaders who battled the Pakistan-backed Taliban in the 1990s. Some believe that India could increase its influence with these leaders if Afghanistan moves back towards civil war.

Afghanistan says Rabbani's killer was Pakistani

 Afghanistan said on Sunday that the suicide bomber who posed as a Taliban envoy to assassinate Afghan peace negotiator Burhanuddin Rabbani was a Pakistani national.

Tensions between the neighbours have been rising amid allegations from Afghan officials that Pakistan and its powerful ISI intelligence agency masterminded the former president's September 20 killing and are seeking to destabilise Afghanistan.

Hundreds of Afghans took to the streets of Kabul on Sunday to condemn recent shelling of border towns by Pakistan's army and the killing of Rabbani, accusing Pakistan of trying to sabotage his attempts to end the 10-year war.

An investigative delegation established by President Hamid Karzai said evidence and a confession provided by a man involved in Rabbani's killing had revealed that the bomber was from Chaman and the assassination had been plotted in Quetta -- both on the Pakistani side of the border.

Many Afghans have long accused Pakistan and the ISI of backing insurgent groups to further their own interests, something Pakistan denies.

Angry Pakistan rejects Afghan charges on Rabbani

 Pakistan has angrily rejected allegations from Afghan officials that its intelligence agency masterminded the assassination of Kabul's chief peace negotiator with the Taliban.

An investigative delegation established by President Hamid Karzai said evidence and a confession provided by a man involved in Burhanuddin Rabbani's killing on September 20 had revealed that the bomber was Pakistani and the assassination had been plotted in Pakistan.

"Instead of making such irresponsible statements, those in positions of authority in Kabul should seriously deliberate as to why all those Afghans who are favourably disposed towards peace and towards Pakistan are systematically being removed from the scene and killed," Pakistan's foreign ministry said in a statement.

Analysis: Pakistan's double-game: treachery or strategy?

Washington has just about had it with Pakistan.

"Turns out they are disloyal, deceptive and a danger to the United States," fumed Republican Representative Ted Poe last week. "We pay them to hate us. Now we pay them to bomb us. Let's not pay them at all."

For many in America, Islamabad has been nothing short of perfidious since joining a strategic alliance with Washington 10 years ago: selectively cooperating in the war on extremist violence and taking billions of dollars in aid to do the job, while all the time sheltering and supporting Islamist militant groups that fight NATO troops in Afghanistan.

Pakistan has angrily denied the charges, but if its critics are right, what could the explanation be for such duplicity? What strategic agendas might be hidden behind this puzzling statecraft?

The answer is that Pakistan wants to guarantee for itself a stake in Afghanistan's political future.

It knows that, as U.S. forces gradually withdraw from Afghanistan, ethnic groups will be competing for ascendancy there and other regional powers - from India to China and Iran - will be jostling for a foot in the door.

Islamabad's support for the Taliban movement in the 1990s gives it an outsized influence among Afghanistan's Pashtuns, who make up about 42 percent of the total population and who maintain close ties with their Pakistani fellow tribesmen.

In particular, Pakistan's powerful military is determined there should be no vacuum in Afghanistan that could be filled by its arch-foe, India.

INDIA FOCUS

Pakistan has fought three wars with its neighbor since the bloody partition of the subcontinent that led to the creation of the country in 1947, and mutual suspicion still hobbles relations between the two nuclear-armed powers today.

"They still think India is their primary policy," said Talat Masood, a retired Pakistani general and prominent political analyst. "India is always in the back of their minds."

In an interview with Reuters on Tuesday, Pakistani Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani - unprompted - complained that Washington's failure to deal even-handedly with New Delhi and Islamabad was a source of regional instability.

Aqil Shah, a South Asia security expert at the Harvard Society of Fellows, said Islamabad's worst-case scenario would be an Afghanistan controlled or dominated by groups with ties to India, such as the Tajik-dominated Northern Alliance, which it fears would pursue activities hostile to Pakistan.

"Ideally, the military would like Afghanistan to become a relatively stable satellite dominated by Islamist Pashtuns," Shah wrote in a Foreign Affairs article this week.

Although Pakistan, an Islamic state, officially abandoned support for the predominantly Pashtun Taliban after the 9/11 attacks on the United States in 2001, elements of the military never made the doctrinal shift.

Few doubt that the shadowy intelligence directorate, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), has maintained links to the Taliban that emerged from its support for the Afghan mujahideen during the 1979-1989 Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

Until recently, there appeared to be a grudging acceptance from Washington that this was the inevitable status quo.

That was until it emerged in May that al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden - who was killed in a U.S. Navy SEALs raid - had been hiding out in a Pakistani garrison town just two hours up the road from Islamabad, by some accounts for up to five years.

Relations between Pakistan and the United States have been stormy ever since, culminating in a tirade by the outgoing U.S. joint chiefs of staff, Mike Mullen, last week.

Mullen described the Haqqani network, the most feared faction among Taliban militants in Afghanistan, as a "veritable arm" of the ISI and accused Islamabad of providing support for the group's September 13 attack on the U.S. embassy in Kabul.

The reaction in Islamabad has been one of stunned outrage.

Washington has not gone public with evidence to back its accusation, and Pakistani officials say that contacts with the Haqqani group do not amount to actual support.

However, Imran Khan, a Pakistani cricketer-turned-populist-politician, said this week that it was too much to expect that old friends could have become enemies overnight.

He told Reuters that, instead of demanding that Pakistan attack the Haqqanis in the mountainous border region of North Waziristan, the United States should use Islamabad's leverage with the group to bring the Afghan Taliban into negotiations.

"Haqqani could be your ticket to getting them on the negotiating table, which at the moment they are refusing," Khan said. "So I think that is a much saner policy than to ask Pakistan to try to take them on."

REGIONAL GAME

The big risk for the United States in berating Islamabad is that it will exacerbate anti-American sentiment, which already runs deep in Pakistan, and perhaps embolden it further.

C. Raja Mohan, senior fellow at New Delhi's Center for Policy Research, said Pakistan was probably gambling that the United States' economic crisis and upcoming presidential elections would distract Washington.

"The real game is unfolding on the ground with the Americans. The Pakistan army is betting that the United States does not have too many choices and more broadly that the U.S. is on the decline, he said.

It is also becoming clear that as Pakistan's relations with Washington deteriorate, it can fall back into the arms of its "all-weather friend," China, the energy-hungry giant that is the biggest investor in Afghanistan's nascent resources sector.

Pakistani officials heaped praise on Beijing this week as a Chinese minister visited Islamabad. Among them was army chief General Ashfaq Kayani, arguably the country's most powerful man, who spoke of China's "unwavering support."

In addition, Pakistan has extended a cordial hand to Iran, which also shares a border with Afghanistan.

Teheran has been mostly opposed to the Taliban, which is dominated by Sunni Muslims while Iran is predominantly Shi'ite. But Iran's anti-Americanism is more deep-seated.

"My reading is the Iranians want to see the Americans go," said Raja Mohan, the Indian analyst. "They have a problem with the Taliban, but any American retreat will suit them. Iran in the short term is looking at the Americans being humiliated."

ARMY CALLS THE SHOTS

The supremacy of the military in Pakistan means that Washington has little to gain little from wagging its finger about ties with the Taliban at the civilian government, which is regularly lashed for its incompetence and corruption.

"The state has become so soft and powerless it can't make any difference," said Masood, the Pakistani retired general. "Any change will have to come from the military."

Daniel Markey, a senior fellow for South Asia at the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations, said the problem lies with a security establishment that continues to believe that arming and working - actively and passively - with militant groups serves its purposes.

"Until ... soul-searching takes place within the Pakistani military and the ISI, you're not likely to see an end to these U.S. demands, and a real shift in terms of the relationship," Markey said in an online discussion this week. "This is the most significant shift that has to take place."

(Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)