Farooq Ganderbali
The recent admission by Sartaj Aziz Adviser to the Pak Prime Minister on Foreign Affairs that Pakistan hosts the Taliban is not a new revelation. Speaking in the US, Aziz admitted that families of the Taliban had lived in Pakistan and this gave Islamabad a certain degree of leverage over the Afghan Taliban who had been fighting the US and the Afghan government in Afghanistan. A few days later, the Pak Foreign Office spokesperson in Islamabad refused to be drawn into a discussion on the remarks made by Aziz, but as they say the cat is out of the bag!
Sartaj Aziz is a astute diplomat and knows just when to say the right thing. The venue for his remarks, Washington, was appropriate as the 4th meeting of the Quadrilateral on Afghanistan has just taken place in Islamabad. Aziz told (4 March 2016) an audience at the Council for Foreign Relations that Pakistan had “some influence” in convincing the militant insurgent group to the negotiating table “because their leadership is in Pakistan.” It is this influence that Pakistan has used and is therefore proposing that direct talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government were likely to take place sometime in the first week of March 2016.
For some time now, the focus of Pakistan’s attention has been to use Afghanistan as a tool of foreign policy in its ties with the US with the aim of convincing the Americans that only Pakistan can solve the riddle in Afghanistan. Towards this objective, Pakistan has worked at informing the world that it has ‘influence’ over the Taliban. That is the word used by Aziz. Let the world make no mistake about this; Pakistan does have influence over the Taliban. The ‘Talib’ (students in Pashto) were creations of the Pak state who in the Pakistani system did so is immaterial now. Some would have us believe that it was Naseerullah Babur, former Interior Minister to Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto who created the Taliban. Others say it was President Zia-ul-Haq who in cahoots with the CIA created the Mujahideen force that morphed into the Taliban. For those interested, please re-read “The Bear Trap” by M. Yousaf who recalls that the ISI mothered the fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan by creating the Mujahideen force.
Anyhow, the point is that with Pakistan’s backing, the Taliban rode in triumph to Kabul in 1996 and became the ‘Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan’. This lasted till 2001. The point is that since then the Taliban has persisted as an organization and it is only after the US operation Enduring Freedom in 2001 that Pakistan officially became an ally of Washington in the global war on terror. Till such time that Mullah Omar was alive, it was okay for Pakistan, but once he died (or was killed by the ISI) the factionalism within the Taliban re-surfaced. It could well be that having ‘sacrificed’ Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden to the US in operation Neptune Spear, the ISI decided to get rid of Mullah Omar also in 2013 as he was getting in the way of peace talks with the Afghan government.
Which brings us to more recent developments. In late 2015, the Pakistanis informed the Afghan government that Mullah Omar had died in 2013. This created a succession struggle within the Taliban. This intensified after it was decided to nominate Mullah Mansoor Akhtar, the Taliban’s deputy as the new Amir. What sets out Akhtar from the ‘Taliban five’, who were released from Guatanamo Bay in exchange for Sgt. Berghadal, is that he is an agent of influence of the ISI, unlike the earlier set of Talib leaders who were all Afghanistan residents. Akhtar worked his way up the Taliban ranks as others got eliminated and when he was appointed Amir in July last year, the Quetta Shura reportedly walked out in a huff saying he could not become the chief. Clearly, Mansoor Akhtar is the ISI’s own man now leading the Taliban. Recall that in 2013, when Qayyum Zakir, another former member of the Quetta Shura became too powerful, the ISI created a rift internally and had him replaced by Ibrahim Sadr, who had been in a Pakistani jail. So much for the ISI.
Note that all members of the Quetta Shura and their families, including Mullah Akhtar live in Quetta. Many have been issued Pakistani passports for travel abroad. Akhtar himself travels frequently to Dubai where he has business interests and it helps to promote his drugs empire also. Akhtar could well be Pakistan’s ‘el chapo’! Therefore, the announcement of Mullah Omar’s death served to give the ISI control over the various factions of the Taliban, the only challenge was that the differences came out in the open. Mullah Rasool, who along with the now deceased Mullah Dadullah formed a new faction to oppose Akhtar alleged publicly that the ISI had asked him to do their ‘dirty’ work, meaning, indulging in political assassinations. Also, another Taliban faction namely the Fidayee Mahaz moved towards the ISIS and even went on record to say that there was no issue with ISIS doing its work within Afghanistan.
Pakistan is thus trying to bring the Taliban to heel. This is necessary at this stage if the quadrilateral process is to succeed. However, as global experience suggests, these things don’t always go according to plan. It is a wait and watch situation for everyone. The real challenge for Pakistan is two-fold. First, it needs to get the talks’ constituency within the Taliban together and in front of the Afghan government. This would then give Pakistan credibility in the eyes of the world. The other is to get Mullah Akhtar (assuming that he is still alive) to agree to a bargain with Kabul wherein he offers peace in return for control over a couple of provinces in Afghanistan. This is something that Hamid Karzai, former President of Afghanistan is aware of and has stated publicly. In fact, some reports suggest that the Quetta Shura has already moved to Helmand province precisely in anticipation of just this idea. If this were to happen then the ideation of Afghanistan as a single country will go down the drain.
This is an interesting situation where the onus is on Islamabad to do its bit for peace in Afghanistan. Their real objective is not so much peace in Afghanistan but to give the Afghan Taliban a piece of the cake. This is something that the US is a party to. After all, one should not forget that the CIA was willing to do business with the Talib while they were in power and in 2001 they reportedly asked Mullah Akhtar to bump off Mullah Omar so that they could do business with the Taliban. Clearly, the ISI-CIA nexus runs deep in Afghanistan. That of course, does not mean that the peace and reconciliation process will succeed.
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