The Longest August

by Dilip Hiro

  Sharif kept up this theme when he addressed the UN General Assembly on September 27. “We stand ready to re-engage with India in a substantive and purposeful dialogue,” he declared. “We can build on the Lahore Accord signed in 1999, which contained a road map for the resolution of our differences through peaceful negotiations. I am committed to working for a peaceful and economically prosperous region. This is what our people want and this is what I have long aspired for.”67

  By contrast, the following day Manmohan Singh lashed out at Pakistan in his address to the Assembly: “State-sponsored cross-border terrorism is of particular concern to India, also on account of the fact that the epicenter of terrorism in our region is located in our neighborhood in Pakistan.” Expressing his willingness to peacefully resolve all issues, including Kashmir, with Pakistan, he said, “However, for progress to be made, it is imperative that the territory of Pakistan and the areas under its control are not utilized for aiding and abetting terrorism directed against India. It is equally important that the terrorist machinery that draws its sustenance from Pakistan be shut down.”68

  All the same, as agreed before, Singh and Sharif had an hour-long meeting over breakfast at a New York Hotel on September 29. Militants’ attacks on a police station and an army base in Indian Kashmir on September 26, resulting in thirteen deaths, were designed to derail the prime ministers’ meeting but failed in their political objective. The leaders agreed that they needed to stop the recent spate of attacks in the Kashmir region in order for peace talks to advance. They instructed their senior military commanders to find a way to shore up the LoC.69

  Two days earlier, Singh had had a luncheon meeting with President Obama at the White House. “They reaffirmed their commitment to eliminating terrorist safe havens and infrastructure, and disrupting terrorist networks including Al Qaida and Lashkar-e Taiba,” read their joint communiqué. “The Leaders called for Pakistan to work toward bringing the perpetrators of November 2008 Mumbai attacks to justice.”70

  Despite repeated urgings by Delhi to speed up the trial of the suspects involved in the Mumbai attacks, the case in the antiterrorism court of Judge Malik Muhammad Akram in Islamabad had moved at a snail’s pace for a variety of reasons, technical and others. In May 21013 the chief prosecutor, Chaudhry Zulfiqar Ali, was gunned down by suspected militants in Islamabad, where the case had been transferred from Rawalpindi, whose Adiala jail held the suspects.

  In February 2014, Sartaj Aziz, advisor to Sharif on national security and foreign affairs, assured India’s foreign minister, Salman Khurshid, that a verdict was likely in a couple of months.71 His prediction proved grossly optimistic. On March 3 in an attack on a district court in Islamabad, terrorists killed twelve people, including two judges. The latest judge on the case, Atiqur Rehman, demanded deployment of commandos for his security. When the government refused, he stopped his weekly trips to Adiala jail. The case came to a virtual halt. So far the court had cross-examined only thirty-two of the sixty prosecution witnesses.72

  In the final analysis the 2008 Mumbai carnage was linked to the unresolved Indo-Pakistani dispute about Kashmir, which was grounded in the partition of the subcontinent. But there was another rivalry between the twin states that originated with the division: Afghanistan. As long as Britain ruled the Indian subcontinent as part of its empire, Afghanistan served as a buffer between its most prized colony and Russia, governed first by the czars and then by the Bolsheviks. The partition of British India wrought a radical geopolitical change.

  18: Competing for Kabul

  The historic link between the Indian subcontinent and Afghanistan dates to the reign of Emperor Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur. A man of middle stature, stout, fleshy faced, with a scanty beard, Babur founded the Mughal Empire in the subcontinent in 1526. Before capturing the Delhi Sultanate he had ruled the Domain of Kabul—today’s eastern and southern Afghanistan—for twenty-one years. And honoring his wish, his successor in Agra transported his corpse to Kabul for burial a decade after his death in 1530. His enclosed tomb sits at the top of a hill transformed into a walled and terraced garden, called Bagh-e Babur, which is now a popular picnic site.

  This shared history shattered with the partition of British India, with Pakistan sharing its western frontier with Afghanistan. The birth of Pakistan revived an old dispute about the Durand Line, which in 1893 defined the border between British India and Afghanistan, with all the passes of the Suleiman Mountains placed under British jurisdiction. It argued that Pakistan was not a successor state to Britain but a new state carved out of British India. Therefore whatever treaty rights issued from the Durand Agreement expired. Pakistan’s governor-general Muhammad Ali Jinnah rejected this argument summarily.

  The other contending issue was the movement for creating independent Pashtunistan out of parts of North-West Frontier Province (later Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) and Federally Administered Tribal Agencies (FATA), forming one-fifth of West Pakistan. Kabul supported this campaign, which Pakistan derided as “an Afghan stunt.” Afghanistan’s animus toward Pakistan was so strong that it cast the only negative vote on the newborn state’s admission to the United Nations on September 30, 1947.1

  Noting the discontent among the Pashtun tribes along the Afghan-Pakistan border, who had enjoyed semiautonomous status under the British, Jinnah conducted talks with their leaders to work out a new modus vivendi. These failed. Tensions remained high. In June 1949 Pakistan’s planes attacked an Afghan village. Though the government apologized, periodic border incidents continued.

  Animosity toward Pakistan led Afghanistan and India to sign a Treaty of Friendship in January 1950. It alluded to “the ancient ties which have existed between the two countries for centuries.” Indian scholars familiar with the Arthashastra (Sanskrit: literally, text on wealth), a manual on statecraft by Chankaya Kautilya around 300 bce, approvingly quoted his axiom: “A ruler with contiguous territory is a rival. The ruler next to the adjoining is to be deemed a friend.”

  In modern times, however, governing a landlocked country sharing a long frontier with Pakistan limited the area of maneuver for Afghan king Muhammad Zahir Shah. Geography trumped international politics. The Afghan government signed the Transit Trade Agreement with Pakistan in late 1950. It won Afghanistan the right to import duty-free goods through Karachi.

  After founding the South-East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) with Thailand and the Philippines in September 1954, Pakistan succeeded in getting SEATO to endorse the Durand Line. This angered Kabul. In March 1955 it cautioned the Pakistani government not to include the Pashtun area into the proposed single unit of West Pakistan. Its warning was ignored.

  Six years later, after the Pakistani army carried out a major offensive in its turbulent tribal belt, Afghanistan protested. On August 22 Pakistan shut its consulates in Afghanistan and demanded that Kabul should do the same. It refused. Pakistan closed its border with Afghanistan and cut diplomatic links with it.

  The loss of its concomitant commercial ties with Pakistan compelled Afghanistan to strengthen its trade links with the Soviet Union, three of whose constituents—Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan—abutted Afghanistan. This persuaded Pakistan to restore its ties with its western neighbor. Their reconciliation happened in May 1963. In 1965 they signed a fresh Transit Trade Agreement, which restored the situation before the latest spat. Nonetheless, Kabul-Moscow trade would expand to the extent that by the mid-1970s Afghanistan’s commerce with the Soviet Union would account for nearly half of its foreign trade.

  Afghanistan Looms Large in Post-1971 Pakistan

  The loss of the eastern wing of Pakistan traumatized the leaders in Islamabad. They vowed to protect the remaining wing with utmost vigilance from the malevolent designs of India, whose military planners no longer had to have a strategy for combating Pakistan on two fronts. With the generals in Delhi now free to focus on a single front, it became incumbent on their Pakistani rivals to ensure active cooperati
on of Kabul in case of war with Delhi. The long, porous Afghan-Pakistan border offered an escape route for Pakistan’s civilian and military leaders as well as its troops and war materiel. Having a friendly government in Afghanistan, ruled by royals since 1747, became an absolute necessity.

  But, unexpectedly, the situation in Kabul underwent a sea change. In July 1973 Prime Minister General Muhammad Daoud Khan overthrew his cousin Zahir Shah and declared Afghanistan a republic. To consolidate his power he revived the issue of Pashtunistan with Pakistan. His officers started training twelve thousand irredentist Pashtun and Baluch volunteers to harass Pakistan’s army. In return, Pakistani prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto sponsored an unsuccessful anti–Daoud Khan coup in July 1975. Mediation by Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi of Iran eased tensions by 1977. But normal relations between Kabul and Islamabad were disrupted in April 1978, when Marxist military officers mounted a coup against Daoud Khan, who was assassinated. They renamed the country the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA).

  During these tumultuous events, India was a bystander. It recognized the DRA, whereas Pakistan did not. Following the Kremlin’s military intervention in Afghanistan in December 1979, Delhi continued to have cordial relations with the government in Kabul. Indeed, given its 1971 Friendship and Cooperation Treaty with Moscow, it increased its stake in Afghanistan. It cooperated with Kabul in industrial, irrigation, and hydroelectric projects. In the mid-1980s it emerged as the single largest donor to Afghanistan.2 In 1988, for instance, India-based WAPCOS Ltd (Water and Power Consultancy Services) started to reconstruct the Salma Dam on the Hari River in Herat province.

  Contrary was the case with Pakistan. It became the frontline state in Washington’s drive to expel the Soviets from Afghanistan. After the withdrawal of Soviet troops in February 1989, to the chagrin of Islamabad, the government of the leftist Muhammad Najibullah in Kabul did not fall. India stood by Najibullah until he was killed by the victorious Islamist mujahedin in April 1992. It was to Delhi that he had dispatched his family on the eve of the fall of his regime. And it was his failure to catch a flight to the Indian capital at the last minute that led to his mutilation and murder at the hands of the mujahedin.

  During the civil war that erupted in Afghanistan along ethnic lines after the spring of 1992, Pakistan played an active role in conciliating the warring parties. Its efforts failed. It therefore decided to back a new faction, called the Taliban, beginning in 1994. With its active economic and military assistance, the Taliban started to gain control of Afghanistan gradually. It captured Kabul on September 26, 1996. On the eve of its triumphant storming of the Afghan capital, India closed its embassy. In marked contrast, jubilant Pakistan prepared to open its embassy in Kabul.

  Islamabad worked hard to gain the Taliban regime diplomatic recognition. The next five years marked the zenith of its influence in Afghanistan, with the Taliban controlling 95 percent of the country. Yet the one-eyed Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar refused to accept the Durand Line, arguing that “between the [Islamic] Umma [world community] there could be no borders.”3

  In sharp contrast, India backed the Northern Alliance (NA), led by Ahmad Shah Masoud, an ethnic Tajik, which was formed to oppose the Taliban by all means. Controlling a tiny area in northern Afghanistan, it maintained its headquarters in the town of Khwaja Bahuddin with a secure base in the adjoining Tajikistan.

  Russian and Iran were the other two major backers of the NA. Though the Kremlin supplied heavy weapons and helicopters to the NA through Tajikistan, it respected the NA’s opposition to allowing the presence of Russians among its militiamen, who had spent years fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan.

  That created an opening for the Indians, who had been using Soviet-made military hardware for decades. India dispatched technicians to repair and maintain the NA’s Soviet-made weapons. It also provided the NA with arms and other war materiel as well as military advisers. Its Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) intelligence agency sought the permission of Tajikistan to use Ayni Air Base near its capital, Dushanbe, and Farkhor Air Base, eighty-one miles southeast of Dushanbe, to ferry military equipment to the NA; service its tanks, helicopters, and artillery guns; and collect intelligence. It succeeded, but only after Moscow intervened on its behalf.4

  Over the years the Indian armed forces gradually upgraded the Ayni and Farkhor Air Bases, and set up a secret field hospital at Farkhor to treat the NA’s fighters. The hospital received its most prominent patient, Masoud, on September 9, 2001, when he was ferried in by helicopter with shrapnel lodged deep into his brain. At the NA headquarters in Khwaja Bahuddin, he had been taping a TV interview with two Moroccans, Karim Taizani and Bakem Bakkali, posing as journalists with Belgian passports, when Bakkali triggered explosives attached to the videotape as well as to Taizani’s body. He died instantly while Bakkali was killed by Masoud’s bodyguards. Masoud breathed his last at the Indian-run field hospital a few hours after his arrival.5

  Two days later came the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. These outrages orchestrated by Al Qaida leader Osama bin Laden from Afghanistan led President Bush to declare a global “war on terror.” India backed the campaign. Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf prevaricated. But facing the prospect of Pakistan being bracketed with the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, he cut his ties with the Taliban and cooperated with the United States. Later events would show, however, that Musharraf’s U-turn on the Taliban was in essence a temporary adjustment to regain Washington’s trust and support.6

  Following the eight-week-long US-led Operation Enduring Freedom, launched on October 7, 2001, which overthrew the Taliban regime, Hamid Karzai, an ethnic Pashtun, was named Afghanistan’s interim president by an International Conference on Afghanistan in Bonn, Germany, on December 5.

  Post-Taliban Afghanistan

  The fourth son of Abdul Ahad Karzai, a politician and leader of the Popalzai tribe, Hamid graduated from high school in Kabul in 1976 at the age of nineteen. He was then accepted as an exchange student by the Himachal Pradesh University in Shimla, India. He obtained his master’s degree in International Relations and Political Science in 1983.7 During his seven years in India, he acquired fluency in Urdu/Hindi and became addicted to North Indian cuisine and Bollywood movies. Three decades later, during an interview with a British historian, he was reported to be moved “almost to tears” while recalling “the sound of monsoon rain hitting the tin roof of his student lodgings [in Shimla] and the sight of the beautiful cloud formations drifting before his windows.”8

  He then traveled to Pakistan and joined the mujahedin fighters resisting the Soviet military presence in Afghanistan. In 1985, he traveled to Lille, France, to attend a three-month journalism course. When he returned to Peshawar, he served as deputy director of the political office of the National Liberation Front of Afghanistan, a traditional, pro-monarchist religious body, led by Professor Sibghatullah Mujadidi.

  When the mujahedin government was established in Kabul in 1992, Karzai was appointed deputy foreign minister. Two years later, when the civil war between the various mujahedin groups started, he resigned from his post and began to work actively for convening a national Loya Jirga (Pashto: Grand Council). In August 1999, his father, who had been organizing anti-Taliban resistance from his base in Quetta, was assassinated by Taliban agents and their Pakistani backers. He then took over the leadership of the Popalzai tribe and organized its affairs from a refugee camp in Pakistan. At the time of the Pentagon’s war on Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, he was inside the country trying to bolster anti-Taliban resistance.

  On December 22, 2001, both India and Pakistan sent their foreign ministers to Kabul to witness the handover of power by President Burhanuddin Rabbani, a Tajik leader of the NA, to Karzai. The next day India’s foreign minister, Jaswant Singh, reopened the Indian embassy in Kabul and announced that the Indian consulates in Jalalabad, Kandahar, Mazar-e Sharif, and Herat would reopen in “the next few mont
hs.”9 These missions were meant to help build contacts with local leaders, facilitate trade and investment, and acquire better understanding of regional developments. Also, the state-run Air India assisted the Karzai government in returning the ailing Ariana Afghan Airlines to a healthy state by donating a few aircraft and helping it relaunch its international service suspended during Taliban rule.

  Pakistan reopened its embassy in Kabul a month later. It and India each pledged $100 million in aid to Afghanistan at a January 2002 donors’ conference. But given its earlier experience in developing Afghanistan’s infrastructure, India soon outpaced Pakistan in this race. Much to Islamabad’s frustration, an Indian company won the contract to build a road from the border town of Spin Boldak to Kandahar.

  Violating its promise to President Musharraf not to deal with the NA, the Bush administration oversaw the NA’s cooption in the administration of Karzai, much to the delight of Delhi.

  With seven-eighths of the UN-sponsored Loya Jirga delegates voting for Karzai in June 2002, he had his interim presidency confirmed. The Indians were joyous to see an Indophile like Karzai confirmed as president. He envisaged India, a stable, comparatively well-developed democracy, as an ideal partner for his underdeveloped, struggling country. His twenty-nine-strong cabinet maintained the status quo, with General Muhammad Qasim Fahim, a Tajik, as defense minister and other Tajiks retaining among others foreign, interior, and intelligence ministries. The job of the National Directorate of Security (NDS) chief went to Muhammad Arif Serwari, the NA’s erstwhile chief intelligence official.