Events in Afghanistan and Pakistan continue to resonate in the world at large, and certainly in United States diplomacy. They continue to demonstrate how hard it is to arrange any reasonable stabilization of the area. In the pre-Cold War period the United States held Pakistan close to its chest, concerned as it was with the refusal of independent India to take sides in that contest. For though Pandit Nehru’s India was established and maintained itself as a parliamentary democracy, the Americans were displeased with his designation of himself and the Congress Party as socialist but democratic in outlook. American concern about India’s political orientation was reinforced by that country’s early commitment to a stance of non-alignment in the Cold War, a stance to which Eisenhower’s Secretary of State John Foster Dulles took strenuous objection with his statement that “neutralism is immoral.”
In that period, while the United States had committed itself to preservation of the ‘Free World,’ the geopolitics of the Middle East-South Asian region drew it into the support of regimes of any kind, including the frequently military ones of Pakistan, commencing with that of General Ayub Khan. Free in the American lexicon referred not to the nature of domestic regimes, except insofar as they were communist, but to the alignment of newly independent countries with the non-socialist bloc. And it is in that context too, that the United States turned a blind eye to the development by Pakistan of nuclear weapons, against the tenets of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
The withdrawal by the Soviet Union of its troops from Afghanistan in 1989, after nine years of trying to sustain a regime that had declared itself committed to a form of Soviet socialism, gave the Americans hope that in the ‘struggle for freedom’ they had gone one notch ahead of the Soviets in what both considered a major strategic region in the world. Indeed the US actively supported the mujahedin forces against the Soviet presence, irrespective of the fact that most of them were known to be committed to backward and restrictive forms of Islamism. Geopolitics took precedence over democracy.
After the Soviet withdrawal the mujahedin fought among themselves, and the Taliban emerged as the dominant force. As is now well known, however, the orientation of the Taliban rulers quickly became intolerable to the United States. The 9/11 events, widely attributed by the Americans to persons and groupings affiliated to the Taliban philosophy, in the form of al Qaeda, gave the United States under President George W Bush the opportunity to move quickly against the Taliban and restore a regime under current President Karzai deemed to be committed to the establishment of some form of democracy in Afghanistan. Since then, the United States and other NATO countries have been ensconced in the country, with both military and technical and economic aid battalions, seeking to completely remove the remnants of the Taliban and al Qaeda forces alleged to have taken refuge there. Now in a sense, the Americans and NATO have sometimes begun to feel as embattled as the Soviets were in the 1980s.
In search of company in their effort to ‘stabilize’ Afghanistan, the United States has persistently sought to pull Pakistan into their struggle, as a kind of surrogate NATO ally – recall that Pakistan was once a member of the American inspired South East Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO). As the military in Pakistan gained greater predominance in the political governance of that country, they were only too happy to have such an important ally as the United States government more sympathetic to them, than to the dominant political forces led by the on-again off-again Prime Minister Bhutto and his daughter.
But the increasing deterioration of government in Pakistan, has created a situation where the Taliban and al Qaeda forces are said to be taking refuge more and more within Pakistan itself, in a situation in which, as in much of that part of the world, borders are porous, and movements across them hardly constrained by the dictates of ruling regimes. From an American perspective the deterioration of both General Musharraf’s hold on Pakistani politics, and the border situation between Afghanistan and Pakistan had both worsened considerably. And that is why the US seems to have considered that it had no choice but to abandon the General in favour of the Bhutto forces for whom it had never been much attracted.
But the Americans are also beginning to come to grips with two factors: The first is their assumption that if they got rid of President Saddam Hussein of Iraq, on the mistaken presumption or fabricated pretext that he was both harbouring and encouraging al Qaeda forces, they could be well on their way to suppressing the Taliban in Afghanistan and stabilizing that country as well as Iraq. (It is, of course, Iran and not Iraq, that has an extensive border with Pakistan whose territory also stretches on to the Arabian Sea). This assumption has proven to be mistaken; indeed it had the opposite effect of encouraging al Qaeda forces to support anti-American groupings in Iraq itself.
The second factor is that they are involved in an effort of stabilization or subordination of country whose people, fractured as they may be, have historically resisted outside attempts at subordination, and in a sense have become quite schooled in absorbing and then resisting those whom they have considered intruders. The British have been well aware of this for some time having, particularly in the 19th century, contested for influence in that part of the world – south Asia and the land beyond Afghanistan, dominated until the disintegration of the Soviet Union by 19th century Russia and its successor state.
The British Foreign Office has, therefore, always had strong memories of that contestation, which for long persisted between Imperial Russia and what was called British India for dominance in the area and particularly for a certain influence over Afghanistan considered by them to be the important ‘buffer state’ between Russia and themselves. Their designation of Afghan-istan, since the early 19th century, as the location of what their historians have called the ‘Great Game,’ meaning an apparently never-ending contestation for influence, has tended to incline British diplomats to a certain wariness of involvement in Afghanistan. But Tony Blair, in his anxiety to assist the Americans in the al Qaeda fight, seems to go beyond that traditional posture.
It is doubtful, however, whether the Afghans see themselves today as a buffer vis-à-vis the new Russia (with its still unpleasant memories of being virtually besieged in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and ‘the West.’ The whole American and NATO case now in fact rests on the ‘al Qaeda hypothesis,’ whose basic premise was that the Taliban (and then Taliban plus al Qaeda) were and are really in a context to use Afghanistan as a stepping stone to the Middle East.
It is doubtful now whether many governments in the Middle East, and certainly not Afghanistan’s neighbour Iran, accept that hypothesis. Some of them have had to go along with the US in this, in particular Saudia Arabia, whose deeply theocratic political order seems to have been the original source of al Qaeda. But even the Saudis seem to have come to the conclusion that the issues involved in establishing some modicum of stability in the Middle East have little to do with the Americans’ preoccupation with Afghanistan.
So it looks as if the Americans are themselves beginning to come to the conclusion that the Afghanistan-Pakistan instability problem has to be dealt with as an autonomous issue, separate from the internal problems of this or that Middle East country, or the Middle East region The sending of General Petraeus, their military commander in Iraq, to Afghanistan last week, suggests that they believe he can stabilize the slippery situation there, as he is alleged to have done in Iraq. The General is said to be more of an intellectual than most. But he is likely to find that his and his government’s problems now lie more in coping with the disorder within Pakistan, and governmental resistance as they now seek to penetrate that country, to create a flank from which to deal with al Qaeda.
The ‘Great Game’ continues, in yet another form.
