Introduction: Why are people in Afghanistan so bitter about the Pakistani regime?
The mujahid had just returned from 10 gruelling days in the icy mountains. His sunken cheeks and tired eyes showed he was hungry as hell and was dying to hit the bed. But no, he says, he is willing to fight again with Pakistan.
“So when is India going to attack Pakistan,” he asks. He will be there on Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan, ready to launch an attack from this side.
Fellow fighters lounging around at Tora Bora agree. They quickly exchange a few words in Dari, the local tongue. The translator turns to me and says, “Every one of us is ready to fight Pakistan. And now.” They want to punish Pakistan for what they think it did to their country, using the Taliban. “Some day soon, Inshallah,” says Badam, the mujahid.
For most Afghans, the Taliban were just a bunch of village idiots forced upon their country by Pakistan. And it was actually Pakistan — and not Osama bin Laden or his Al-Qaeda network — that wrecked their country in the name of the Taliban. In fact, new evidence does seem to bear out what was earlier taken as just idle street-talk. The government has found evidence of Pakistani nationals holding senior positions, including in the cabinet, in the Taliban regime.
Mullah Razaq, the Taliban interior minister — equivalent of the home minister in India — was actually a Pakistani and so was the governor of a critical province. The investigation isn’t over yet and the government expects to uncover more Pakistanis posing as Afghans.
The Taliban were the creation of Pakistan. And it did all it could to keep them going, with men and ammo. No wonder, the regime collapsed so soon as Pakistan pulled the plug. And the famed, ferocious Taliban fighters jumped into their Datsuns and made off in whichever direction they could, leaving the Al-Qaeda fighters to continue the battle. Most of them are suspected to be hiding in Pakistan now.
As a result, Afghanistan has become the last place for a Pakistani to be in now; India is safer. In fact, when the Pakistani Foreign Minister Abdul Sattar worked the back-channels to get himself accepted for the inauguration of the Interim Council, the Afghan officials who wanted him out argued that his safety cannot be guaranteed. After the inauguration, he hurriedly got into a waiting car with his wife, and was gone before you could say, “Hey, that was Sattar.” He wasn’t going to take chances, and his unwilling hosts had probably told him to do a Houdini immediately after the ceremony.
Pakistan hasn’t been allowed to reopen its embassy in Kabul, while it was possibly the only one functioning for the last five years, during the Taliban rule. While every country was out of Kabul, Pakistan was right in and now, when others are returning to Kabul, it has to wait out.
It’s difficult to fathom from a distance the depth of the outrage that every Afghan feels over Pakistan’s role in propping up the Taliban and holding it up there. “They ruined our country,” says Naqeeb Atalullah, a hotel manager. In Afghanistan, everything that the rest of the world blames the Taliban for is attributed to Pakistan. The banning of girls from schools and colleges, for instance, is said to have been Pakistan’s intention of keeping Afghanistan illiterate. In fact, all the retrograde edicts of the Taliban regime are blamed on Pakistan, which, it is said, wanted to keep this country backward and dependent as a colony.
It nearly became one. Among other things, the rates for calling Pakistan from Afghanistan were the same as for local calls, there was not even STD, leave alone ISD facilities. Everyday, commodities such as butter and bottled water arrive — even now — from Pakistan. Kaldars, the local name for Pakistani currency, is widely accepted all over Afghanistan.
In Jalalabad, the city adjoining Pakistan, Kaldars are preferred to the country’s own currency, Afs (short for Afghanis). Payment in Afs is discouraged there, by Afghans.
And then there were the Pakistanis — scores of them — fighting the Taliban’s war. A lot of them died too, fighting someone else’s war on someone else’s soil. But they are not heroes here. They remain the hated jehadis who should never have crossed the border.
The hatred runs so wide and is so intense that it has become a strange kind of uniting factor for the deeply divided Afghans. This is how the Pashtuns, the Tajiks, the Uzbeks and the Hazaras have found themselves a common enemy. And not unlike scholars and experts, people here understand exactly why
Pakistan cannot keep its hands off Afghanistan. It has to do with a boundary sketched in 1893 by Sir Mortimer Durand, foreign secretary for the British Empire in India. It’s now called the Durand Line and runs right through areas inhabited by Pashtuns, splitting them in half.
The Afghanistan government doesn’t recognise the line and at the time of Partition of India, it had demanded the redrawing of the line — the Indus river was its suggestion for the new border. It’s plea was ignored.
Since then the border dispute has been a constant source of bitterness between Pakistan and Afghanistan. There has been two major flare-ups between the two countries over this dispute.
In September 1960, Afghanistan’s push for an independent Pakhtunistan led it to bribe the ruler of one of the small states within Pakistan to attack one of his feudatories. In May 1961, after Pakistan had accused Afghanistan of fomenting trouble between the two rulers, fighting broke out between the two states. They broke diplomatic relations in July, re-establishing relations only after mediation by the Shah of Iran in May 1963. Peter Tomsen, former American special envoy to the Afghan resistance, according to a report, believes that Pakistan’s support for the Taliban regime has “in part been based on keeping the Pakhtunistan issue suppressed”. Kabul basically argues that the line divides Pashtun-dominated areas and that they together belong to Afghanistan and that Pakistan is not able to administer them anyway. Besides, the treaty that made the Durand Line the border between the two countries lapsed in 1993 after 100 years. There has been a longstanding demand in Afghanistan for the creation of an independent state of Pakhtunistan, unifying the divided Pashtun-dominated areas.
At the time of the inauguration of the interim government, most Afghans were expecting an announcement demanding the redrawing of the international boundary with Pakistan. That didn’t happen, and no one was realistically expecting it. When asked about it later, Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah said, “It’s not going to be an issue for us now; we will leave it for the permanent government (that takes over after a Loya Jirga in the next six months).”
The interim administration clearly doesn’t want problems now with neighbours. Its first priority is to last out the tenure, get some work done — reconstruction — and, most crucially, bring peace and stability to this war-ravaged country. The loathing for Pakistan easily gives way to fears here that it may wreck the chance, now that this country has a chance to reinvent itself.
While Burhanuddin Rabbani and his successor Hamid Karzai have repeatedly said that ties with Pakistan will be normal, the government wants an assurance from the neighbour that it will not interfere in its internal affair again.
It seems that ties can never become normal between the two countries, not with all the bitterness this side of the border; but they can make a fresh start, and hope for the best.
The ball is in Pakistan’s court.
Afghanistan will wait and watch.