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Towards Af-Pak anarchy
- Both the Bonn conference and the one in Istanbul that took place last month were based on the assumption that diplomacy can ensure a successful political transition in Afghanistan.
- The current international diplomatic effort is taking place at a time when the weakness of the United States and its allies is manifest and the domestic support in the West for a long-term military involvement in Afghanistan is fast eroding.
- Diplomacy can be a useful complement to the successful application of military power. But it cannot be a substitute for military victory.
- Having earlier underestimated the resilience of the Taliban, which enjoys the Pakistan army’s support, Washington and its allies are now negotiating from a position of weakness.
- The leaders of the Taliban, meanwhile, had chosen to kill former president Burhanuddin Rabbani, Kabul’s principal interlocutor for negotiating a political reconciliation. That revealed the Taliban’s “commitment” to a “peaceful resolution” of the civil war.
- The history of civil wars in our age reminds us that they are not easily amenable to a negotiated compromise. More often than not, civil wars end in the victory of one party over the others. The Sri Lankan conflict is the latest example of that trend-line.
- Third, diplomacy can succeed only when the divergence of interests between different parties to a conflict is bridgeable, and there is room for finding win-win solutions to all.
In Afghanistan, what we have instead is a zero-sum game. - The world says it wants a strong and centralised state in Afghanistan. Pakistan, in contrast, wants a weak state in Afghanistan that it can control.
- For the US this means either leaving Afghanistan at the mercy of the Pakistan army or turning up military and economic heat on Rawalpindi in order to change its strategic calculus.
- Meanwhile, Washington is in two minds. The Obama administration understands that the Pakistan army is part of the problem in Afghanistan, but is unwilling to follow through with the consequences of such an assessment given its dependence on Rawalpindi for conducting military operations.
- Rawalpindi’s boldness in confronting the US is indeed impressive.
- As Washington dithers and Rawalpindi overreaches, India cannot bet on international conference diplomacy of the kind we have seen in Bonn.
