One of the most damning failures of Pakistan’s foreign policy in the year 2023 is the utter helplessness of the security establishment to compel the Afghan Taliban to do Pakistan’s bidding. The repercussions of this failure will not remain limited to our Afghan policy alone. They will rather come to us as a comprehensive failure of our foreign policy.
The Pakistani ruling elite was visibly jubilant in the wake of the Afghan Taliban’s capture of Kabul in August 2021. But jubilation gave way to utter disappointment when the Afghan Taliban failed or practically refused to control and contain the Pakistani Taliban who, since 2017, were hiding in the border towns and cities of Afghanistan. The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan’s fighters and leaders started tracking their way back into Pakistani territory much before the Afghan Taliban took control of Kabul. Part of Pakistan’s security establishment, in their euphoria after the Taliban victory, fell into the trap of negotiating with TTP leadership under the auspices of Siraj-ud-din Haqqani, the dreaded Interior Minister of the Taliban regime. This allowed TTP to consolidate their positions in the Pak-Afghan border areas to relaunch their terror campaign with renewed aggression.
This was the time when Pakistani diplomats were busy convincing the international community to treat the Afghan Taliban as a legitimate government of Afghanistan. There were clear ground realities—while Washington paved the way for the Taliban takeover of Kabul, Beijing, Moscow and Tehran were hobnobbing with Taliban, all of which convinced Pakistani officialdom that the Taliban were a rising star in the region, and that they could benefit from any leverage they could hold over the Taliban. The Pakistani government wanted to assist the Taliban in using the state structures built and left behind by the withdrawing American forces—Afghanistan State Bank and Finance Ministry were good tools to raise revenues with which to run the government machinery. The Taliban, however, were clueless in how to manage this modern state structure. The Pakistani government offered their help. The Afghan national army and intelligence services raised by the Americans and other western countries during 20 years of occupation disintegrated the moment the Taliban entered Kabul and took control. But these were modern and state of the art security structures in possession of the latest military and security equipment.
The Taliban have not risen above the level of a ragtag militia as far as their organizational structures are concerned. This has meant that the Taliban lack the capacity to act as a modern state and to counter Sunni extremist groups that have emerged in Afghanistan during the past 10 years, which regional powers like Russia, China and Iran wanted dealt with. The Pakistan security establishment again chipped in: Pakistan’s ISI twice hosted regional intelligence chiefs in Islamabad to discuss the security situation in Afghanistan and its implications for the region. Russia, China, Iran and many Central Asian states - all participated. It was agreed that the Taliban would be provided real-time intelligence to tackle the ISIS threat which was rising in North, Eastern and Western Afghanistan—bordering Central Asia and Iran respectively.
The Taliban have not risen above the level of a ragtag militia as far as their organizational structures are concerned. This has meant that the Taliban lack the capacity to act as a modern state and to counter Sunni extremist groups that have emerged in Afghanistan during the past 10 years, which regional powers like Russia, China and Iran wanted dealt with.
While the Pakistani security and foreign policy establishments were busy shoring up the capacities of the Afghan Taliban, they seemed to have turned a blind eye towards what the TTP was doing in the Pak-Afghan border areas. Suicide bombing became more frequent with Pakistani security forces emerging as the favorite targets of terrorists. The Pakistani Taliban became more and more bold in their attacks on Pakistani security forces, as was evident from the attack on Pakistani military check posts in Chitral. Pakistan started sending emissaries to Kabul to cajole the Afghan Taliban into controlling the TTP. The entreaties fell on deaf ears. Pakistani military leaders then used threats to convey to the Afghan Taliban the seriousness of the situation. The TTP didn’t stop. Pak-Taliban government relations started to deteriorate. The Afghan Taliban refused to receive Pakistani aid sent to provide relief to earthquake victims. Pakistan closed the Torkham border for trade, which caused hardship in Afghanistan. At the heart of Islamabad-Kabul tensions is the Afghan Taliban’s reluctance to help Islamabad tackle the TTP problem.
The Pakistani security and foreign policy establishment made an attempt to find a way out of the country's foreign policy predicaments through their efforts to help the Afghan Taliban consolidate their position in Kabul. In the process, the Afghan Taliban started to emerge as a credibly force which would counter Sunni extremist groups like ISIS which were making inroads into northern, eastern and western Afghanistan. Russia, China and the Iranians were all interested to see the Taliban play this role in Afghanistan. Pakistan stood ready to facilitate. The situation apparently seemed conducive. The consequences that emerged on the ground were less than ideal for Pakistan: the Afghan Taliban wholehearted chased and destroyed ISIS organizationally in Afghanistan, but they were not ready to chase out the TTP, which has continued to strike Pakistani forces from their bases in Afghanistan.
This situation proved deeply disruptive for Pakistan’s foreign policy. How can Pakistan continue its efforts to convince the international community to recognize the Taliban regime, when the same Afghan Taliban are not ready to curb the activities of the Pakistani Taliban? How can Pakistan spearhead a regional effort to help the Afghan Taliban militarily counter ISIS in Afghanistan, when the same Taliban are assisting TTP with sanctuaries and state of the art American weapons, which the Pakistani Taliban are in turn using against Pakistani security forces? Therefore, the security situation that emerged on our western borders deeply disrupted our foreign policy objectives.
How can Pakistan continue its efforts to convince the international community to recognize the Taliban regime, when the same Afghan Taliban are not ready to curb the activities of the Pakistani Taliban?
The Pakistani security establishment’s Project Taliban fizzled out, and with it went foreign policy strategy to stabilize the country's western borders and what lies beyond it, down the drain. Could Pakistan’s foreign policy elite have dealt with the Afghan situation and the emerging security situation on our western border any differently? It is now clear that efforts to stabilize the Afghan Taliban were the best option available to us, especially when seen in the light of regional powers’ proclivities to put all their eggs in the Taliban’s basket to tackle the emerging threat of Sunni extremist groups in Afghanistan. In this way, the Americans, Russians and Iranians all paved the way for the Taliban takeover of Kabul.
Engaging with the Taliban was arguably the best foreign policy option for Pakistan. But now, we have fallen out with them. And as a consequence, the whole edifice of our strategy to stabilize Afghanistan and harvest the fruits of this stability has crumbled. The question is - if Pakistan, the chief advocate of the Taliban regime at the regional and international level, could not maintain stable relations with the Taliban regime in Kabul, what could we expect of other regional powers who already had reservations about the Taliban’s credibility?
Few days ago, the media wing of the Pakistan Army released the contents of General Asim Munir’s speech, which he delivered before US think tanks in Washington. “Chief of the Army Staff (COAS) General Asim Munir has said that Pakistan wishes to develop itself as a hub of connectivity and a gateway to Central Asia and beyond,” read the crux of General Asim’s speech. This, perhaps, is the policy brief which General Asim inherited from his predecessor, General Qamar Javed Bajwa.
On March 18, 2021, General Bajwa emphatically advocated for Pakistan’s role as a regional connectivity hub at a security conference in Islamabad. His protracted speech was specifically focused on the idea of Pakistan acting as a hub for regional economic, trade and commercial integration and connectivity. Unlike other military men of Pakistan, he didn’t try to exclude India from his plans for regional connectivity. The former Chief told the audience at the Islamabad conference that he was all for landlocked Afghanistan exporting its goods to India through land transit facilities offered by Pakistan. In fact, he presented a plan, which included the idea of resolution of the Kashmir dispute and the resulting military tensions between Pakistan and India, and possibility of movement towards starting a new era of regional integration and connectivity.
Pakistan’s military establishment was familiar with the history of efforts to make Pakistan a regional connectivity hub, because efforts for this had started decades ago. Successive Pakistani governments signed agreements with the Asian Development Bank to start work on a Central Asia Regional Economic Program—a multilateral agreement to finance connectivity between the Central Asian states and Indian Ocean ports as two of the 11 land routes under this program passed through Pakistani territory. An agreement was inked with USAID to initiate Pakistan’s Regional Economic Integration Activity program—another program for road construction to enhance regional connectivity. General Bajwa demonstrated an acute awareness of this history and the role friendly countries besides China were playing in the efforts to make Pakistan a connectivity hub when he said in his speech, “let me also emphasize that while CPEC remains central to our vision, only viewing Pakistan through the CPEC prism is also misleading.”
The Pakistan military establishment’s attempt to sell connectivity in Washington doesn’t seem to have succeeded for obvious reasons: no security, no trade.
Seen in this context, the visit of a US diplomat to Gwardar in April 2021 absolutely made sense. General Bajwa was making efforts to dilute Chinese marking on the efforts to project Pakistan as a connectivity hub and to make these efforts appease the Americans. Only a few months later, Pakistan’s Ambassador to Washington, Ali Jahangir Siddique authored a report for Washington based think tank Atlantic Council, which is considered close to the US security establishment, in which he presented the efforts of the Pakistan state machinery to develop physical and digital infrastructure in the country to prepare Pakistan for a future role as regional connectivity hub. In his March 2021 speech, General Bajwa referred to Kashmir as a problem which is stalling economic progress and regional integration. His focus, again, was on presenting Pakistan as a regional connectivity hub.
Without the stabilization of Afghanistan’s political and military situation, Pakistan’s dream of acting as a regional connectivity hub will remain a pipedream. The near anarchic situation in Afghanistan and on our western border is the single most powerful hurdle in the way of Pakistan emerging as a connectivity hub. At the regional level, Pakistan’s security establishment is perceived as an actor which has the most influence over the Afghan Taliban. The events of the past six months have proven this image of Pakistan to be a complete myth.
We even failed to ensure our own security when it came to dealing with the Afghan Taliban and its sister organization, TTP. In such a situation, how can we ask other regional powers and countries to invest in a regional connectivity project with Pakistan and Afghanistan as its center pieces? The Pakistan military establishment’s attempt to sell connectivity in Washington doesn’t seem to have succeeded for obvious reasons: no security, no trade.
Even otherwise, Pakistan’s foreign policy stands completely derailed. The stabilization of Afghanistan and connectivity projects could have taken us out of this logjam. We could have appeared as an attractive negotiating partner to New Delhi for peace and stabilization in South Asia. But that didn’t materialize. Now we are faced with a new regional and international security situation. Gone are the days when the demands of post-Cold War geopolitics meant that Washington was eager to get Pakistan and India come to the negotiating table, as equal negotiating partners. Washington is now engaged in a struggle for world dominance with Beijing and they see India as a military ally in this region. In this situation, Washington might still want Pakistan and India to come to the negotiating table, but with a clear policy inclination to see India emerge as a regional hegemon. In such a situation, what will Pakistan’s foreign policy establishment do with its old foreign policy tools except befool domestic public opinion?