10-27-2006, 05:03 AM
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Karzai, Musharraf and the Durand Line </b>
FT.com
Khaled Ahmed
<b>The turmoil of non-consensus in Pakistan is a manifestation of nervous expectation of the impending change </b>
President Karzai of Afghanistan went to Washington saying his country was endangered by the extremist Islam infiltrating from Pakistan. During his visit he kept repeating this, cleverly avoiding saying Pakistan was sending in the Taliban fighters. President Musharraf who was also in the city riposted roughly and his message was that Karzai was lying.
The world doesnât believe Karzai when he says all is well with Afghanistan but for Pakistanâs intervention. He has not delivered what he promised when he became head of the state.<b> The world also doesnât believe Musharraf when he says Pakistan has no hand in the trouble the Taliban are causing in Afghanistan. He too has not delivered everything that he promised after 2001 when he became the worldâs warrior against terrorism.</b>
Both are presiding over countries where the writ of the state doesnât run completely. Afghanistan lost the habit of being governed normally almost 30 years ago and now it is a Hobbesean wilderness; some call it a failed state.<b> Pakistan too had large areas where it had little or no governance, but after 20 years of covert wars it waged inside its neighboursâ territories through ânon-stateâ actors, it is losing its âregular governanceâ in many additional areas.</b>
Karzai is not a well-liked man in Afghanistan; he nearly got killed once or twice when attacked; Musharraf too is increasingly disliked in Pakistan and he nearly got killed once or twice. They have agreed to meet each otherâs jirgas. When Karzai comes to Pakistan he will face a jirga that really wants to replace him with the Taliban. When Musharraf meets the Loya Jirga he will face people who have nothing but grievances to address to him.
Karzai is a Pushtun but he clings to Pashtun nationalism with the skin of his teeth. In 2005 he was able to induct an appropriate number of Pushtuns in the Loya Jirga which was skewed against them in the past. But he has not been able to protect his Afghan Pushtuns against the Taliban. In a Hobbesean state, that is very important. People learn to love you if you can protect them. Musharraf has been speaking for the Pushtuns when advising Karzai, but no Pushtuns like him. His defence of the Pushtuns is âstrategicâ rather than real.
The 2002 election In Pakistan empowered the clerical alliance the MMA. The vote the alliance got was not religious but ethnic. And the Pushtun chose the clerics on the promise that they would enforce the Islam of the Taliban in Pakistan. They all despise Musharraf for being a slave of the United States. Since their society is honour-based, they see dignity only in what the Taliban are doing. There is honour only in isolation and defiance. The Pushtuns of Afghanistan and Pakistan dislike Musharraf in equal measure.
In a way Karzai and Musharraf are champions of the rights of the Pushtun but are hated by them. This unites the Pushtuns on both sides of the border. When Pakistan denies that any Taliban are crossing over from Pakistan into Afghanistan and offers to fence the Durand line to stop infiltration, Afghanistan doesnât agree. The reason for that is Pushtun nationalism in Afghanistan. It is curious that Afghanistan decided to recognise Pakistan as a state but did not recognise the international boundary separating the two states.
Pakistan was the big state and Afghanistan the revisionist small neighbour. It feared India but not Afghanistan and therefore left the territory abutting Afghanistan unconsolidated. The Durand Line is difficult to enforce today because populations of both sides will not accept it. Smuggling negates boundaries and Pakistan never stopped it till a large population from its territory became economically cut off from it and became a part of Afghanistanâs large-scale enterprise of smuggling.
<b>Obsession with India also negated the Durand Line. Pakistan â a small revisionist neighbour to India just as Afghanistan is to Pakistan â began to think of Afghanistan as its âstrategic depthâ, </b>which means Pakistan should control Afghanistan enough for its military assets to retreat into it to fight India from a depth that Pakistan doesnât have. This policy was contested by other neighbours of Afghanistan. But it negated the boundary and united a nation whose division had created Pakistan in the first place. The 2002 elections in Pakistan showed that clearly.
<b>The real threat to Pakistan is from Afghanistan</b>. Military course books change too slowly to take account of this, this year or the next. Pakistan no doubt had more strategic traction in Afghanistan than the other neighbours, but it should have avoided competition with them. If Pakistan has tacit control of Nangrahar (Jalalabad), Iran has a similar economic and cultural dominance in Herat and Uzbekistan (backed by Russia) over Mazar-e-Sharif. All three have proved that they will not let these regions of influence be challenged.
Neither Iran nor Uzbekistan has allowed its border with Afghanistan to be obliterated despite intersecting cultural and ethnic identities. Pakistan has done that and has allowed the âdisorderâ of a Caliban state to spread into its own territory. More and more cities are falling under what Pakistanis call Talibanism, a euphemism for the rolling back of the modern state. In Sindh and in many parts of Punjab, people are choosing to accept the illegal jurisdiction of the local jirga instead of the court of law. And in the NWFP, increasingly local governments based on sharia have ousted the state.
<b>Pakistan is vulnerable from the inside.</b> It needs the NATO presence in Afghanistan to prevent Afghanistan from morphing into a kind of âexternal proletariatâ to bring Pakistan down without giving it an alternative governance. The turmoil of non-consensus in Pakistan is a manifestation of nervous expectation of the impending change. This is a threat that the politicians of Pakistan will have to face after Musharraf leaves. It has nothing to do with democracy which simply brings salience to problems but takes too long to resolve them.
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FT.com
Khaled Ahmed
<b>The turmoil of non-consensus in Pakistan is a manifestation of nervous expectation of the impending change </b>
President Karzai of Afghanistan went to Washington saying his country was endangered by the extremist Islam infiltrating from Pakistan. During his visit he kept repeating this, cleverly avoiding saying Pakistan was sending in the Taliban fighters. President Musharraf who was also in the city riposted roughly and his message was that Karzai was lying.
The world doesnât believe Karzai when he says all is well with Afghanistan but for Pakistanâs intervention. He has not delivered what he promised when he became head of the state.<b> The world also doesnât believe Musharraf when he says Pakistan has no hand in the trouble the Taliban are causing in Afghanistan. He too has not delivered everything that he promised after 2001 when he became the worldâs warrior against terrorism.</b>
Both are presiding over countries where the writ of the state doesnât run completely. Afghanistan lost the habit of being governed normally almost 30 years ago and now it is a Hobbesean wilderness; some call it a failed state.<b> Pakistan too had large areas where it had little or no governance, but after 20 years of covert wars it waged inside its neighboursâ territories through ânon-stateâ actors, it is losing its âregular governanceâ in many additional areas.</b>
Karzai is not a well-liked man in Afghanistan; he nearly got killed once or twice when attacked; Musharraf too is increasingly disliked in Pakistan and he nearly got killed once or twice. They have agreed to meet each otherâs jirgas. When Karzai comes to Pakistan he will face a jirga that really wants to replace him with the Taliban. When Musharraf meets the Loya Jirga he will face people who have nothing but grievances to address to him.
Karzai is a Pushtun but he clings to Pashtun nationalism with the skin of his teeth. In 2005 he was able to induct an appropriate number of Pushtuns in the Loya Jirga which was skewed against them in the past. But he has not been able to protect his Afghan Pushtuns against the Taliban. In a Hobbesean state, that is very important. People learn to love you if you can protect them. Musharraf has been speaking for the Pushtuns when advising Karzai, but no Pushtuns like him. His defence of the Pushtuns is âstrategicâ rather than real.
The 2002 election In Pakistan empowered the clerical alliance the MMA. The vote the alliance got was not religious but ethnic. And the Pushtun chose the clerics on the promise that they would enforce the Islam of the Taliban in Pakistan. They all despise Musharraf for being a slave of the United States. Since their society is honour-based, they see dignity only in what the Taliban are doing. There is honour only in isolation and defiance. The Pushtuns of Afghanistan and Pakistan dislike Musharraf in equal measure.
In a way Karzai and Musharraf are champions of the rights of the Pushtun but are hated by them. This unites the Pushtuns on both sides of the border. When Pakistan denies that any Taliban are crossing over from Pakistan into Afghanistan and offers to fence the Durand line to stop infiltration, Afghanistan doesnât agree. The reason for that is Pushtun nationalism in Afghanistan. It is curious that Afghanistan decided to recognise Pakistan as a state but did not recognise the international boundary separating the two states.
Pakistan was the big state and Afghanistan the revisionist small neighbour. It feared India but not Afghanistan and therefore left the territory abutting Afghanistan unconsolidated. The Durand Line is difficult to enforce today because populations of both sides will not accept it. Smuggling negates boundaries and Pakistan never stopped it till a large population from its territory became economically cut off from it and became a part of Afghanistanâs large-scale enterprise of smuggling.
<b>Obsession with India also negated the Durand Line. Pakistan â a small revisionist neighbour to India just as Afghanistan is to Pakistan â began to think of Afghanistan as its âstrategic depthâ, </b>which means Pakistan should control Afghanistan enough for its military assets to retreat into it to fight India from a depth that Pakistan doesnât have. This policy was contested by other neighbours of Afghanistan. But it negated the boundary and united a nation whose division had created Pakistan in the first place. The 2002 elections in Pakistan showed that clearly.
<b>The real threat to Pakistan is from Afghanistan</b>. Military course books change too slowly to take account of this, this year or the next. Pakistan no doubt had more strategic traction in Afghanistan than the other neighbours, but it should have avoided competition with them. If Pakistan has tacit control of Nangrahar (Jalalabad), Iran has a similar economic and cultural dominance in Herat and Uzbekistan (backed by Russia) over Mazar-e-Sharif. All three have proved that they will not let these regions of influence be challenged.
Neither Iran nor Uzbekistan has allowed its border with Afghanistan to be obliterated despite intersecting cultural and ethnic identities. Pakistan has done that and has allowed the âdisorderâ of a Caliban state to spread into its own territory. More and more cities are falling under what Pakistanis call Talibanism, a euphemism for the rolling back of the modern state. In Sindh and in many parts of Punjab, people are choosing to accept the illegal jurisdiction of the local jirga instead of the court of law. And in the NWFP, increasingly local governments based on sharia have ousted the state.
<b>Pakistan is vulnerable from the inside.</b> It needs the NATO presence in Afghanistan to prevent Afghanistan from morphing into a kind of âexternal proletariatâ to bring Pakistan down without giving it an alternative governance. The turmoil of non-consensus in Pakistan is a manifestation of nervous expectation of the impending change. This is a threat that the politicians of Pakistan will have to face after Musharraf leaves. It has nothing to do with democracy which simply brings salience to problems but takes too long to resolve them.
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