Terms of endearment
Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi’s one day visit to Kabul for talks with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and other top officials has yielded a positive sounding agreement of cooperation, if the press release of the Afghan Ministry of Foreign Affairs and media reporting is any guide. This positive note is doubly welcome since the day before the visit transpired, Afghan allegations that the PAF had bombed Afghan territory and our Foreign Office’s vociferous denial exercised minds on either side of the Pak-Afghan border. This brief flurry of the usual ‘repartee’ between Islamabad and Kabul did not deter either side from proceeding to make mutual matters better. Both sides agreed to finalise their bilateral dialogue framework. Pakistan reaffirmed its support for the Afghan government’s peace dialogue offer and reiterated its appeal to the Afghan Taliban to join the reconciliation process without delay. President Ghani and Prime Minister Abbasi discussed the entire gamut of Pak-Afghan relations, including peace and reconciliation in Afghanistan, counterterrorism, the return of the Afghan refugees, bilateral trade and regional connectivity. The bilateral dialogue framework – the Afghanistan-Pakistan Action Plan for Peace and Solidarity (APAPPS) – is seen by both sides as a useful framework for a broad-based and structured engagement on all issues of mutual interest. But this consensus has only been arrived at now after many months and at least three rounds of negotiations on the new engagement framework at the foreign secretaries’ level. The APAPPS will have five groups working on the aspects of the two countries’ relationship and mutual cooperation outlined above. Whatever fine tuning or detailed tailoring is required before APAPPS becomes formally operational will be sorted out in talks between the foreign ministers and national security advisers of both sides. Meanwhile the two sides reaffirmed their commitment (at least in principle) to not allowing their soil to be used against the other. High sounding pious words these, but unconvincing if viewed in the light of the charges the two countries have been trading for years (longer on the Afghan side) of ‘their’ terrorists enjoying safe havens on the other’s territory that allow these malignant forces to attack ‘their’ respective adversary. But perhaps the positives from this rare interaction of the top leaderships of both neighbouring countries first. A softer visa policy for each other’s nationals; a goodwill gesture by Prime Minister Abbasi of a gift of 40,000 tons wheat for Afghanistan; waiver of additional regulatory duty on Afghan exports to Pakistan; rail, road, gas pipeline and energy projects with a regional scope and perspective; these are some of the takeaways from these parleys. Prime Minister Abbasi has invited President Ghani and Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah to visit Islamabad to continue these discussions.
All this is to the good. Even the smallest step that enhances mutual trust and confidence, given the fraught history of the relationship between the two countries, can only be welcomed. That history stretches back over the last 70 years to Pakistan’s independence, Afghan irredentist claims to ‘Pashtunistan’, mutual distrust and suspicion playing out over the last 50 years in supporting each other’s militant rebel groups, leading in the case of Afghanistan to the creation of the mujahideen on Pakistani soil to resist the 1978 communist revolution in Afghanistan, the Soviet invasion and occupation of the country, civil war and the latest virulent avatar of extremism and terrorism in the shape of the Taliban (by now an affliction for both countries). When the US invaded and occupied Afghanistan after 9/11, overthrowing in the process the Taliban government recognized by just three countries – Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the UAE – a new and more complex phase arose. Pakistan attempted to, and arguably stull does, hedge its bets by acting against al Qaeda and allowing safe havens here for the Taliban. Meanwhile a copycat group of Pakistani Taliban emerged in the aftermath of the Lal Masjid episode in 2007. Now both sides face the dilemma of having to cooperate if their respective terrorist threats are to be contained and blunted. Long gone are the days when the US military in Afghanistan dreamt of ‘hammer and anvil’ operations against the Afghan Taliban with the cooperation of the Pakistani military. What has not gone away though is the inescapable logic of cooperation with each other even today to eliminate the threat to each state from ‘their’ Taliban.
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