The crisis in Pakistan has created a big change in its thinking, writes PAMELA CONSTABLEin Lahore
PAKISTAN, WHICH once sponsored Taliban forces but turned against them under American pressure in 2001, now hopes to play a role as a broker in proposed negotiations among Taliban leaders and the Afghan government, with support from the United States.
As leaders of more than 60 countries met in London yesterday to discuss how to help Afghanistan stop its downward spiral into instability, the possibilities for reconciliation and talks with Taliban leaders and foot soldiers will top the agenda.
Until recently, Pakistan had been on hostile terms with the neighbouring government in Kabul and had sought to distance itself from the problems of insurgency across the border, while struggling to curb a home-grown Taliban movement that has carried out dozens of bombings and suicide attacks in Pakistan in the past several years.
Now, however, Pakistani officials have taken a sudden interest in promoting peace in Afghanistan, a change analysts attribute to a combination of self-interest and fear. Pakistan, they say, hopes a powersharing arrangement in Kabul that includes the Taliban would be friendlier to its interests, and it worries that if the Afghan conflict drags on, its domestic extremist problem will spin out of control.
However, analysts said any overt mediation role by the Pakistani government could backfire for several reasons, including deep mistrust among Afghan leaders, unpredictable reactions by Pakistani militants, Taliban resentment of pressure from its former backers and unrealistic Pakistani expectations of western gratitude.
“The crisis in Pakistan has created a big change in its thinking. The country is suffering enormously from the Pakistani Taliban, and this may be a way to get off the hook,” said Ahmed Rashid, a Lahore-based expert on the Taliban and Afghanistan-Pakistan relations.
“Pakistan still exerts some influence on the Afghan Taliban, but Kabul will be extremely wary of Pakistani bias. It is a very tricky situation.” Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari, who met Afghan president Hamid Karzai in Turkey this week, said there is an urgent need for peace talks.
Echoing Karzai’s comments about the Taliban being “sons of the soil,” Zardari said that if insurgents are “reconcilable and want to give up their way of life, a democracy always welcomes them back”.
The key Pakistani players in this drama are not civilian leaders but the army and especially the inter-services intelligence agency (ISI), which once sponsored the Taliban, worked closely with the group when it ruled Afghanistan in the late 1990s and reportedly has continued to assist Taliban leaders in exile after the regime was overthrown by US-backed Afghan forces in 2001.
Rashid said the Afghan militants have been chafing under the Pakistani agency’s efforts to control them. Other analysts said Pakistan’s influence on the Taliban waned years ago, when the militia’s leaders ignored Islamabad’s pleas to spare the historic Bamiyan Buddha statues and to turn over al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden to the US.
But the analysts also said that with so many Taliban leaders and their families based in Pakistan, their relations with that nation are still close – perhaps too close for officials in Kabul, who have seen their fledgling postwar democracy torn apart by renewed conflict and hundreds of terrorist attacks in the past several years.
In a newspaper interview with the US McClatchy group published this week, a former Pakistani intelligence official described the Taliban as “big-hearted” and extremely loyal to Mohammed Omar, the movement’s fugitive leader.
He called Omar a reasonable, patriotic man who has no desire to ruin his country. “He’s the only answer,” the officer said.
Omar has vehemently rejected any suggestion of talks, and experts said the Taliban forces, which are now active in 33 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces, feel confident they can outlast the international military presence.
Some analysts who favour talks said they doubted rank-and-file Taliban members could be weaned away from the cause with promises of jobs and money, a pillar of the US and Afghan reintegration proposal.
Several military experts said Pakistan must prove to Afghanistan and the world that after years of trying to manipulate Afghan politics, it now wants to take a constructive and neutral stance.
“Pakistan needs to reassure Karzai and the Americans that it wants to play a very different role this time,” said Talat Masood, a retired Pakistani general and analyst in Islamabad, the capital.
"The Taliban should welcome Pakistan as an interlocutor if they are willing to compromise, but if the ISI overplays its hand, it could upset a very delicate situation." – ( Washington Post)