Over the past several days, Kabul city experienced one of the worst waves of terrorist attacks during the present Afghan conflict. It started with a massive truck bombing in the small hours of Friday morning in the Shah Shaheed district. The apparent target was an Afghan intelligence complex but 15 civilians perished and dozens — mostly women and children — were injured in the attack, which reportedly destroyed almost a full city block. Later during the day a suicide bomber killed 29 cadets right outside the police academy when he blew himself up. The third attack of the day targeted the US special forces headquarters killing one US personnel and eight Afghans. And then at noon, on Monday, another suicide car bomber struck outside the Hamid Karzai International Airport, killing five people and injuring over a dozen. The string of attacks had the Haqqani terrorist network written virtually all over it.
With the Afghan Taliban just having chosen their new emir (head), Mullah Mohammed Akhtar Mansoor, and deputy emir, Sirajuddin Haqqani, on Pakistani soil by most accounts, it was inevitable that Afghan President Dr Ashraf Ghani would lambast Pakistan for failing to put a leash on assorted Taliban groups. Within hours of the airport attack Dr Ashraf Ghani held a press conference laying the blame squarely on Pakistan’s doorsteps. Dr Ghani, who is recuperating from foot surgery, spoke while sitting down with his war cabinet lined up behind him. He spoke in both the Afghan national languages — Dari Persian and Pashto — and minced no words about whom and from where death is raining on the Afghans. Dr Ghani’s scathing critique of Pakistan’s policy vis-à-vis the Taliban was a clear departure from his 10-month-long diplomatic overtures to Pakistan’s civil and military leadership. He spoke resolutely but came across as someone feeling betrayed and profoundly incensed. The Afghan president said: “Pakistan still remains a venue and ground for gatherings from which mercenaries send us messages of war. The incidents of the past two months in general and the recent days in particular show that suicide training camps and bomb making facilities used to target and murder our innocent people still operate, as in the past, in Pakistan.”
Dr Ashraf Ghani’s speech and press conference indicate that after fighting the war against the ghost of Mullah Omar he is not willing to accept the ghost peace presented to him a la the Murree talks. No doubt, in diplomacy one holds one’s cards close to their chest till an opportune moment but outright deceit like conducting war and peace in the name of a dead man was simply not going to fly. Following that treachery with a barrage of attacks inside the Afghan capital seems to have just compounded Kabul’s deep mistrust of both Pakistan’s motives and its ability to deliver on the pledges it has made. The Pakistani leadership’s mantra that it is desirous of an “Afghan-led and Afghan-owned peace process” comes across as an abject farce when Taliban leaders live and die — both politically and physically — on its soil. Some Pakistani analysts and newspaper editorials seem to make light of Dr Ashraf Ghani’s blistering remarks and have dismissed them as something he had to do for domestic consumption. These pundits, unfortunately, underestimate the Afghan anger at the murder and mayhem unleashed on them and Dr Ghani’s anger at being double-crossed. Unless there is an immediate and verifiable change in Pakistan’s policy of allowing sanctuary to the Afghan Taliban any change in Dr Ghani’s new geopolitical posture is extremely unlikely.
The Afghan people, parliament and intelligentsia have thrown their full weight behind Dr Ashraf Ghani while that country’s chief executive, Dr Abdullah Abdullah, has reiterated his president’s sentiments in a separate interview saying that he has seen no evidence of Pakistan changing its tack. The problem is that the one-trick jihadist pony that Pakistan backs is simply not capable of changing into a political outfit, which could compete even in a primordial, collective decision-making process like a tribal jirga let alone in an electoral democracy. The Kabul bombings indicate that the new Taliban leadership is trying to remain relevant and assert itself against its jihadist rivals as well as the Afghan people and the government through the only means they know: violent terrorism. Both the Taliban and their patrons seem oblivious of the diminishing political returns from these gruesome assaults. The Afghan people are getting angrier rather than feeling terrorised. Influential voices within Afghanistan are calling for their government to take the issue of Taliban sanctuaries east of the Durand Line to the United Nations. And such robust international diplomacy is what it may eventually boil down to.
Afghanistan does not have a military option and using any tit-for-tat proxies is a patently bad idea that would gain little but cause loss of the moral high ground. Dr Ashraf Ghani built a case for peace through what he described the concentric circles engaging regional and then international powers. He may just have to use the same template to internationalise the Taliban sanctuaries’ issue. China, India, Iran, Russia and the Central Asian countries have no desire whatsoever for the Taliban or any other jihadist outfit upending the democratic order in Kabul. Pakistan’s diplomatic position is likely to become untenable even with China if the former cannot or does not restrain the Taliban. The US’s functionaries, especially its Department of State, cannot play dumb endlessly. The State Department’s spokesperson’s remarks, in the wake of the Kabul attacks on how it “is in the urgent interest of both countries to eliminate safe havens and to reduce the operational capacity of the Taliban on both sides of the border” are patently disingenuous and create a false equivalence.
Major questions have arisen about the US knowing about but playing down Mullah Omar’s presence and then death in Pakistan. The US letting a terrorist outfit keep the appearance of a unified force under a figurehead, who was suspected dead, was truly a weird way of prosecuting the war against the Taliban while the latter attacked and killed US troops. The State Department can choose to eat out of the palm of Pakistan’s hand but it certainly cannot tell Afghans to do that. The Murree peace process that the US diplomats sat through was a dud; the ghost of Mullah Omar could make war but certainly cannot make peace. To stop the cycle of ghost war and ghost peace imposed upon Afghanistan the international community, including the US, will have to hold Pakistan’s feet to the diplomatic fire. Dr Ashraf Ghani has an uphill task ahead but his straight talk indicates he is not only gearing up for it but that speech may also be his roadmap.
The writer can be reached at [email protected] and he tweets @mazdaki