The Longest August

by Dilip Hiro

  As in the past, the summit of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, held in Colombo on August 2, 2008, provided a chance for the prime ministers of India and Pakistan to confer with each other. Singh broached the bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul with his counterpart, Yusuf Raza Gilani, who promised to investigate but later asked Singh to provide “concrete evidence.”30

  Meanwhile, much to the chagrin of Islamabad, Kabul’s economic relations with Delhi blossomed. Protected by the three-hundred-strong contingent of the Indo-Tibetan Border Force, the Indian Army’s Roads Organization completed the building of the 150-mile Zaranj-Delaram Road, which linked with the Kushka-Herat-Kandahar Highway, by the end of 2008. It did so in the face of assaults by the Taliban. Indian engineers built digitized telecommunications networks in eleven Afghan provinces. And one thousand Afghan students were offered scholarships to Indian universities annually.31 Emulating its earlier practice, India channeled its development aid for mutually agreed-on wells, schools, and health clinics into the Afghan government’s budget.32 This procedure was dramatically different from the one followed by the United States and its allies, who paid the civilian contractors directly or the approved local and foreign nongovernmental organizations.

  Karzai’s Changing Pakistani Interlocutors

  Facing impeachment for violating the constitution by the six-month-old democratically elected coalition government in Islamabad, Musharraf resigned as president on August 18, 2008. While the Indian cabinet withheld comment, Karzai hoped Musharraf’s departure would boost democracy in both countries.

  The Afghan president called Prime Minster Yusuf Raza Gilani “a good man” with “the right intentions.” He welcomed General Ashfaq Parvaz Kayani, Pakistan’s army chief, during the latter’s visit to the US Air Force base at Bagram on August 19. “Afghanistan cannot achieve peace or prosperity without friendly relations with Pakistan,” he told Kayani. Speaking to Aryn Baker of Time, Karzai said, “I hope [Kayani] recognizes that what they are doing [in terms of supporting militancy in Afghanistan] is causing immense damage to Pakistan itself. Someone has to recognize this need for change and for a modern relationship with Afghanistan, a civilized relationship. I hope it will occur.”33

  Karzai’s hope was unfulfilled. Kayani was committed to upholding the Pakistani military’s doctrine that India is its number one enemy and that makes it mandatory for Pakistan to acquire strategic depth in case of an Indian invasion by securing unrivaled influence in Kabul. Karzai, on the other hand, was scathing about both the concept of strategic depth and the means being deployed by Islamabad to achieve it. “If Pakistan is using radicalism as a tool of policy for strategic depth in Afghanistan, well, I wish to tell them that it won’t work,” Karzai averred.34

  Once Asif Ali Zardari was elected president by the provincial and federal lawmakers in September 2008, a civilian democratic system was fully in place in Islamabad as the final arbiter of power—in theory. In reality, though, as before, real power in national security affairs rested with the military. Zardari had neither the intelligence nor the charisma of his wife, Benazir Bhutto, nor the political cunning of Muhammad Nawaz Sharif. However, he held moderate views about both Afghanistan and India.

  He met Karzai in Ankara on December 5 at the initiative of Turkey’s president Abdullah Gul. At the end of the trilateral summit, Karzai said that relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan had improved extremely well since the election of Zardari as president. Both of them discussed fresh ways of curbing Islamist extremists and pledged stronger cooperation against terrorism. “The foreign ministers of Afghanistan and Pakistan are now working together and developing joint strategy against Al Qaida and other terrorist groups [operating in our border regions],” stated their joint communiqué.35

  As a follow-up, Karzai and Zardari met again in Ankara, hosted by Gul, on April 1, 2009, to boost military cooperation against militant Islamists. But civilian control over the military was lacking in Pakistan. This became crystal clear in May 2009, when Zardari transferred the ISI from the military to the interior ministry. General Kayani rejected the order. Within hours, Zardari backtracked.

  The change in Islamabad’s official stance on the Karzai government had no impact on Afghans’ popular perception of Pakistan. According to the February 2009 opinion poll by the Kabul-based Afghan Centre for Socio-Economic and Opinion Research for the BBC, ABC News, and ARD (Germany), 91 percent had somewhat or very unfavorable view of Pakistan. The corresponding figure for India was 21 percent, with 74 percent having a somewhat or very favorable view of that country.36 Part of the reason was the popularity of Bollywood movies and Indian TV soap operas shown widely on Afghan TV channels often dubbed in Dari, the state language of Afghanistan.

  Unsurprisingly, Zardari had failed to convince the Obama administration that Pakistan’s security services had ceased their traditional backing for the militant groups fighting NATO and local forces in Afghanistan.

  The second terror assault on the Indian embassy in Kabul on October 8, 2009, showed that not much had changed. A massive bomb carried in a sport utility vehicle killed seventeen police officers and civilians, wounded seventy-six people, and destroyed vehicles and buildings. The explosion was heard across the capital, as shock waves shattered windows and a huge plume of brown smoke rose hundreds of feet. But because after the July 2008 attack, India had fortified its embassy with high blast walls, heavy steel gates, and a more circuitous entrance, the mission building was unscathed. As in the case of the earlier terror assault, the Taliban claimed responsibility. And as before, this turned out to be a feint. The finger was pointed at the ISI with the telephone intercepts recorded by Washington’s National Security Agency providing the evidence.37

  Karzai’s Second Term of Office

  In the August 20, 2009, presidential election, marred by wide-scale fraud, the all-Afghan Independent Election Commission (IEC) declared Karzai the winner with 54.7 percent of the vote. Facing a flood of complaints, the IEC audited the results thoroughly. In mid-October it awarded Karzai 49.67 percent of the ballots, a shade below the 50 percent plus one vote required for the win. But the second round was called off on November 2, when his rival, Abdullah Abdullah, pulled out. Karzai was victor by default. He took his oath of office on November 19.

  While US-led NATO forces were engaged in fighting Taliban insurgents and training rapidly expanding Afghan troops and policemen—called Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF)—their political masters had to devise and implement an exit strategy. This was the main purpose of the International Conference on Afghanistan in London on January 28, 2010.“We must reach out to all of our countrymen, especially our disenchanted brothers, who are not part of Al Qaida, or other terrorist networks, who accept the Afghan constitution,” said Karzai. He agreed to establish a “national council for peace, reconciliation and reintegration,” and reinvigorate peace overtures to senior Taliban leaders with the help of Saudi king Abdullah. Washington backed his move. “The starting premise is you don’t make peace with your friends,” said US secretary of state Hillary Clinton. “You have to be able to engage with your enemies.”38

  The 2009 BBC/ABC News/ARD opinion poll showed that 64 percent of Afghans favored talks with the Taliban.39 Though India attended the London conference, the prospect of the Karzai government, encouraged by the United States, negotiating with the Taliban worried its policy makers.

  There was no love lost between India and the Taliban. Fresh evidence of the Taliban’s hostility toward Delhi came on February 26, 2010, with a terrorist attack on an Indian target in Kabul. This time it was the Arya Guesthouse, home to Indian doctors, near the luxury Safi Landmark Hotel in central Kabul. It was demolished by Taliban bombers equipped with suicide vests and automatic rifles. The occupants of the guest house were army doctors. But respecting Islamabad’s touchiness about Delhi providing Afghanistan with military assistance, all army doctors and nurses working at the Indira Gandhi Child
Health Institute were dispatched to Kabul, unarmed and in civilian dress. Nine Indian physicians perished in the attack, and many more were injured.

  The assault started at six thirty am, when a car bomb exploded outside the target. The powerful blast razed the building. Then a suicide bomber detonated his vest of explosives outside the crumbling structure. Among the survivors was Dr. Subodh Sanjivpaul. He locked himself in his bathroom for three hours. “When I was coming out, I found two or three dead bodies,” he said at the military hospital in Kabul. “When firing was going on the first car bomb exploded and the roof fell on my head.”40 Karzai went out of his way to condemn the terror attack and thank India for the assistance it was offering his republic.

  Yet at the same time, Karzai tried to lure Taliban leaders to the negotiating table, an enterprise that had Islamabad’s enthusiastic backing. On the eve of his meeting with General Kayani and the ISI director-general Lieutenant General Ahmed Shuja Pasha on June 28 in Kabul, Karzai sacked his NSD chief, Amrullah Saleh. Like his predecessor Serwari, he was an unashamedly pro-India Tajik and was viewed by the Taliban and the ISI as their most vocal antagonist.41 Kayani and Shuja reportedly urged Karzai to give the Taliban a place in a future political settlement. Delhi immediately conveyed its unease at a possible Taliban power-sharing deal, which among other things would block civilian aid and investment by India.42

  Given the zero-sum relationship between the major South Asian nations regarding Afghanistan, a diplomatic setback for Delhi was an automatic gain for Islamabad, which wanted to see the peace process advance in Afghanistan but only under its tutelage. The latest development also highlighted the fact that when it came to reconciling the Kabul government with Taliban insurgents, India had no role to play except to raise objections.

  The high officials in Delhi were also irritated when in the ongoing negotiations between Afghanistan and Pakistan to update their 1965 Transit Trade Agreement, India’s interests were overlooked. Islamabad agreed to Kabul’s request to allow Afghan trucks to proceed to the Indian border at Wagah as well as to the ports of Karachi and Gwadar. This was incorporated in the Memorandum of Understanding that Pakistan and Afghanistan signed in July 2010. In marked contrast, Islamabad summarily rejected Delhi’s proposal to let Indian trucks drive through its territory to deliver goods in Afghanistan. Pakistan was Afghanistan’s leading export partner and second most important import partner after the United States. Intent on maintaining its current commercial hegemony over Afghanistan, it wanted to rule out India as a competitor.

  Afghanistan’s transit trade through Pakistan was also a lucrative source of revenue for the Karachi port, through which most of Afghanistan’s external trade passed, and for Pakistani road transport companies, many of which were owned by the army. Furthermore, Pakistani officials feared that if they allowed direct Afghan-India commerce through their country, the Afghans might start using the Mumbai port for part of their foreign trade, thereby curtailing Pakistan’s revenue.

  In November 2010, Afghanistan and Pakistan formed a joint chamber of commerce to expand trade. Official commerce between Afghanistan and Pakistan commerce had been rising steadily, from $830 million in 2006 to $2.5 billion in 2012. The informal trade, including smuggling, in that year amounted to $2 billion.43

  Denied the use of Pakistani territory for its commerce with Afghanistan, the Indians resorted to making greater use of Iran as a route to trade with Afghanistan. As a result of the 2003 Indo-Afghan Preferential Trade Agreement, which reduced customs duty on a range of goods, bilateral trade increased to $600 million in 2011.44

  In the political arena, to Delhi’s relief, rapprochement between Karzai and Kayani fell apart after about a year for reasons beyond their control. The Obama administration had been increasingly using drone attacks to carry out targeted killings of jihadist militants in Pakistan. On May 2, 2011, US troops, acting unilaterally, killed Osama bin Laden in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad. Though Washington had allocated $20 billion in aid to Pakistan since 9/11,45 it could not rely on its government to cooperate in strict secrecy in the capture or assassination of the Al Qaida chief.

  The Pentagon’s operation enraged the Afghan Taliban as well as the four-year-old Pakistani Taliban. The latter vowed to avenge bin Laden’s murder by escalating violence in the Afghan-Pakistan tribal belt and eastern Afghanistan. Also, before withdrawing from bordering provinces of Afghanistan to let local forces deal with security, US-led NATO commanders encouraged Afghan soldiers to attack Pakistani border posts. As a result, cross-border shelling increased sharply.

  On June 26, Karzai claimed that Pakistan had fired 470 rockets into two eastern Afghan provinces, evacuated by NATO troops, over the past three weeks, killing thirty-six people. He held Islamabad responsible for this bombardment even if regular Pakistani soldiers were not involved.46

  The Pakistan military’s artillery backing for the Afghan Taliban’s operations illustrated partly a lack of civilian control over the armed forces in Islamabad and partly Pakistan’s continued double-dealing with the United States regarding the Afghan Taliban.

  As a consequence, the Afghan-Pakistan border region remained unstable. On September 25 Kabul claimed that more than 340 rockets had been fired over four days from Pakistan. Two weeks later Pakistan’s security forces claimed that they had killed thirty Afghan militants when a group of two hundred insurgents from Afghanistan crossed the border into Pakistan.47

  Following the September 20, 2011, suicide bombing in Kabul, which killed former Afghan president Burhanuddin Rabbani, the Tajik head of the High Peace Council (HPC), the Karzai government accused the ISI of involvement. In its view, Islamabad resorted to this tactic when it realized that it was being excluded by the HPC while pursuing peacemaking with the Taliban. By so doing, Pakistan underscored its control over the reconciliation process and its assertion of a key role in any talks on ending violence as well as its ability to sabotage the peace negotiations when it was sidelined.

  Kabul’s Strategic Partnership with Delhi

  On October 4, 2011, Karzai and Indian prime minister Singh signed the Agreement on Strategic Partnership between India and the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. It was the first pact of its kind that Kabul signed after its treaty with the Soviet Union in 1979. Significantly, this document referred to the 1950 Treaty of Friendship between the two countries and stated that it was “not directed against any other State or group of States.” Under its “Political and Security Cooperation” provision, India agreed to “assist, as mutually determined, in the training, equipping and capacity building programs for Afghan National Security Forces.” The bulk of the agreement covered cooperation in trade and economic development. The strategic partnership was to be supervised by a Partnership Council, cochaired by the foreign ministers of the two countries.48

  At the joint press conference Singh said that violence in Afghanistan was undermining security in South Asia and that India would “stand by Afghanistan” when foreign troops withdrew from the country by December 2014. He pointedly made no reference to Delhi’s commitment to increase its training of Afghan security forces, including the police.49 The next day Karzai explained that the accord simply made official the years of close ties between India and Afghanistan’s post-Taliban government, with Delhi providing a significant amount of civilian aid to Kabul since 2002.

  Pakistan responded in a convoluted fashion. Stressing that this was “no time for point scoring, playing politics or grandstanding,” its Foreign Ministry spokeswoman added, “At this defining stage when challenges have multiplied, as have the opportunities, it is our expectation that everyone, especially those in position of authority in Afghanistan, will demonstrate requisite maturity and responsibility.” By contrast, Talat Masood, a retired Pakistani general and a frequent commentator on national security, was direct. Alluding to Pakistan’s long-held perception that “it is being encircled by India from both the eastern and western borders,” he said tha
t “the agreement will heighten Pakistan’s insecurities.” The influential Dawn newspaper expressed concern that the pact could lead to “ill-advised efforts to ramp up Pakistani involvement in Afghanistan.”50

  Islamabad’s fear was enhanced when the Coulsdon-based IHS Jane’s Defence Weekly published the details of India’s promised military assistance provided by its Delhi correspondent Rahul Bedi on November 29. The plan was to fly twenty to thirty thousand Afghan recruits over the next three years for training in regimental centers in the north and east of India. The most promising troops would receive further training at the army’s Counter Insurgency Jungle Warfare School in the northeastern state of Mizoram. The Afghan trainees would be equipped with assault rifles and other small arms, with the possibility of transferring rocket launchers, light artillery, and retrofitted Soviet T-55 tanks to them later.51

  The figure of twenty to thirty thousand Afghan trainees turned out to be wildly inflated. During Karzai’s visit to India in December 2013, the two governments announced that India would raise the number of ANSF trainees each year to one thousand, with the focus of the training being on counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operations.52

  Around the same time, the Karzai government decided to allocate three of the four iron ore blocks, containing 1.8 billion tons of iron, in central Afghanistan to the Afghan Iron and Steel Consortium of Indian companies, led by the state-owned Steel Authority of India Limited. The deal required an investment of $10.3 billion, the largest in the war-torn country so far.53 But two years later, unable to raise capital on favorable terms and facing increased security risks, the consortium considered slashing its initial outlay to $1.5 billion.54

  To balance his pro-India bias, Karzai suggested a Strategic Partnership Agreement (SPA) with Pakistan during the Afghanistan-Pakistan-Britain summit chaired by British prime minister David Cameron on September 27, 2012, on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly session in New York. This was warmly welcomed by President Zardari. On his return to Kabul, however, Karzai came up with a precondition. Pakistan, he said, must stop “the export of terrorism, suicide bombers, interference and all the other things which result in killing and disturbing the Afghan people’s tranquility and [is] destabilizing Afghanistan.”55 This unexpected move by Karzai slowed progress toward an SPA between the two neighbors.