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Afghan-Pakistani ties in a tailspin, with botched British diplomacy blamed | World news | guardian.co.uk
Afghan-Pakistani ties in a tailspin, with botched British diplomacy blamed
Pakistan points finger at Hamid Karzai, but many analysts believe diplomatic impasse stems from summit at Chequers
It's been five months since David Cameron last lowered himself into the bear pit of Afghanistan-Pakistan relations by opening up his official Buckinghamshire residence to the civilian and military leaderships of the two countries.
Immediately after the Chequers summit, British officials expressed their delight at what they thought had been a breakthrough initiative to bring together an unprecedented number of top players from both sides, including the two presidents, as well as army and spy chiefs.
But it's now clear that Chequers was the exact moment when the fraught relationship between the two sides went into a tailspin, with some critics holding botched British diplomacy partly to blame. Unknown to the UK, which judged the conference a huge success, the Afghan side left feeling deeply aggrieved.
"It was clear it had not been a success," said one diplomat from a third country that was briefed by the entourage of the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, soon after Chequers. "The [Foreign Office] gave a very different readout in London and elsewhere. They thought they had discerned a strategic shift in the Pakistani attitude to Afghanistan. But the Afghans were using words like 'zero result'."
With the return of the prime minister to the fraught subject this weekend during a whistle-stop regional tour taking in Kabul and Islamabad, the February summit at Chequers offers lessons about the limits of Britain's powers of persuasion when it comes to the complex realities of what foreign policy wonks like to call "Af-Pak".
With hindsight, the official joint statement produced at the end of the summit now seems ludicrously ambitious. It committed all sides to take steps to "achieve the goal of a peace settlement [in Afghanistan] over the next six months".
But since then, Pakistan has shelled positions on the Afghan side of the disputed border and Pakistani newspapers are full of articles disparaging Karzai. The Afghan president was particularly incensed when a senior Pakistani official was quoted in the international media in March as saying Karzai was the "biggest impediment to the peace process" and that he was "taking Afghanistan straight to hell".
Kabul has responded with its own war of words. In May, hundreds of people in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar staged protests, complete with chants of "Death to Pakistan". Bismillah Khan, the Afghan army chief, is said to have despaired at Karzai's emotional outbursts. One diplomat reported that he has complained his president appears to want "a war with Pakistan".
These cross-border hatreds are a major stumbling block for hopes of a negotiated settlement to the conflict in Afghanistan. Pakistan is believed to have a veto over any such deal in effect because of the strong influence it has over the Afghan Taliban, whose headquarters are in Pakistani territory.
In an attempt to piece together what went wrong at Chequers, the Guardian talked to senior officials from both sides. Some blame the lack of normal diplomatic niceties for causing friction. Karzai is said to have taken umbrage at one discussion where he found himself sitting opposite Hina Rabbani Khar, then Pakistan's foreign minister, and not his opposite number, President Asif Ali Zardari.
A number of diplomats involved in Afghan and Pakistani affairs say they thought it extraordinary that neither Adam Thomson, the British high commissioner to Pakistan, nor Richard Stagg, the ambassador to Afghanistan, were present. The seasoned diplomats may have been able to smooth ruffled feathers.
But it was a politician, David Cameron, who led the discussion. The brainchild of the prime minister, the trilateral summit was launched amid sky-high hopes that it might start a process that could fix all the outstanding problems between the two countries. But his chairing of the meeting angered the Afghans, who thought Cameron often took the side of Pakistan in discussions.
Honest broker
"We have many in Kabul who think that London has an inherent pro-Pakistani bias, in the same way the US is not seen as an honest broker in the Middle East because of its pro-Israel bias," said Davood Moradian, an analyst in Kabul and confidant of Rangin Dadfar Spanta, Karzai's national security adviser.
"The reason Karzai accepted Cameron's invitation was that he thought the prime minister would attempt to exert some control over their errant child, Pakistan."
The difficulties went deeper than protocol, however. The Afghans left the meeting angry with what they believed were unacceptable demands by Pakistan, which Kabul fears still clings to its old policy of trying to dominate Afghanistan to prevent it making claims on its territory, or giving a perch for India to threaten Pakistan.
One of Afghanistan's senior policymakers told the Guardian that the Afghan side was taken aback by the frankness of the Pakistani team. "For the first time real clarity emerged," the government adviser said. "Some politicians, when they see clarity, they cannot digest it. Some senior politicians are still struggling with that reality."
According to him, that new reality was expressed by Zardari, who articulated his country's concern at the "unproportional increase of the Indian footprint in Afghanistan," he said. They also reportedly pushed for Afghanistan to recognise the Durand Line, the border drawn up the British Raj at the end of the 19th century, which deprived Afghanistan of swaths of territory. Accepting its status would be political suicide for any Afghan leader even the Taliban regime of the 1990s refused to accept the demands of Pakistan, then its closest ally.
Khar, the Pakistan foreign minister, said such claims were "classic examples" of how Afghanistan "misinterprets everything we say". "I don't think we even used the words 'Durand Line'," she said. "What we do want to talk about is better border management because you cannot afford to have 50,000 people cross every day, unsupervised, unwatched and creating havoc in both countries."
Khar, who said she was "exasperated and discouraged" by the failure of the Chequers summit, said Afghanistan's leaders had been guilty of "playing to the public gallery" and not showing "seriousness of purpose and approach".
But the Afghans see it differently. "We thought we had an understanding with Pakistan that their contribution to the peace process will be non-conditional," the Afghan official said. "In Chequers we found that was not the case."
Pakistani officials respond with their own list of complaints about Kabul. Foremost is the Afghans' habit of blaming Pakistan for almost every big attack launched by the Taliban: many Afghans believe they are directed by Pakistan's military intelligence service. Pakistan has responded with counter-claims that Afghanistan supports and harbours groups attacking Pakistan.
At Chequers, Pakistan demanded an end to "safe havens" they believe the Pakistani Taliban enjoy inside Afghan territory and the extradition of a senior Pakistani Taliban commander held by the Afghans.
Pakistani intelligence officers even claim to have intercepted phone calls "from Kandahar" ordering an attack on 15 June claimed by separatists in Baluchistan province on one of Pakistan's most revered national monuments a colonial-era house where the country's founder spent much of the last few week of his life.
Pakistan makes no secret of its anxiety to match the influence of India, which in October 2011 signed a strategic partnership agreement with Afghanistan. Kabul is dragging its feet on a similar deal with Pakistan, demanding progress on its areas of concern first.
Pakistan is also determined to become involved in training the Afghan security forces, but Kabul has consistently turned down offers of places for its officers at Pakistani military academies.
Greatly adding to Islamabad's fury, in March a senior Afghan official was quoted claiming that any Afghans who received training in Pakistan would be regarded as spies and traitors when they returned home. At the same time Afghan officials are disillusioned by what they claim are broken promises made in 2011 to help facilitate a dialogue with the Taliban.
These promises included the release of Taliban prisoners held by Pakistan, support for a conference of senior Afghan and Pakistani clerics in Kabul that it was hoped would have issued a religious fatwa condemning the Taliban tactics of suicide bombing. Although some prisoners were released, they were minor players of whom few people had heard. Afghan officials have questioned whether some of them were insurgents at all.
Pakistan has also held on to Abdul Ghani Baradar, one of Karzai's fellow tribesman who was arrested in Karachi in 2010 after he attempted to start a secret dialogue with Kabul.
The conference of clerics was torpedoed by Tahir Ashrafi, a senior Pakistani mullah, who declared the Afghan Taliban were waging a legitimate jihad against foreign occupation.
And Afghan officials claim Pakistan did nothing to facilitate dialogue, although Pakistani officials deny this. "We had high hopes from this process," the Afghan official said. "But it was a total failure."
Afghan suspicions that Pakistan is not committed to helping the Kabul government talk directly to the Taliban is a key factor poisoning the relationship, a western diplomat said. The Taliban has long refused to negotiate with Karzai, whom it claims heads an illegitimate "puppet" regime.
Last week, Pakistan's official statement welcoming the opening of the Taliban office in Doha merely said it welcomed "the start of direct talks between the US and the Taliban", making no mention of any role for the Afghan government.
Khar said she has been "very, very disappointed" by events since Chequers because her government had worked hard to patch up differences after the open contempt the former president Pervez Musharraf used to show Karzai.
Poisonous roadblock
Recently, however, Pakistan's newspapers have carried prominent stories quoting unnamed foreign ministry and military officials savaging Karzai, who was described as a "poisonous roadblock" to peace. One Pakistani military official was quoted as saying that the US now had no choice but to "accept Taliban as a legitimate power in Afghanistan, talk to them, [and] accommodate their main demands even it meant abandoning assets like Karzai."
A former Pakistani diplomat said the country's army had reasserted full control over Afghan policy by taking advantage of a weak Pakistani foreign ministry during the two-month tenure of a non-political caretaker government before elections on 11 May.
During that time, Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the army chief, represented Pakistan at an important meeting with John Kerry, the US secretary of state, and Karzai in Brussels.
Pakistan's new prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, has not appointed a foreign minister and appears far more interested in India than Afghanistan. "Sharif has allowed this issue to be run by the military but they just don't have the patience required to deal with a man like Karzai," the former diplomat said. "Karzai is the head of state, not a colonel in the Pakistani army who can just be given orders."
Pakistan's army is impatient for the US to negotiate directly and quickly with the Taliban because the military are desperate to split the Afghan Taliban from the Pakistani Taliban, said Syed Talat Hussain, a journalist who wrote one of the recent articles reflecting Pakistan's new priorities.
"No nation or leader in the world would accept the kind of dictation [Pakistan] is giving Afghanistan," he said. "But the current Afghan leadership is not a real sample of the sentiment of Afghanistan."
Given the vexed history of a complex dispute and the deep distrust between the two sides, the Kabul analyst Moradian said he had been astonished by the "British naivety in expecting a resolution to an entrenched conflict in just six months".
"Chequers was a British version of a south Asian social institution: the forced marriage," he said. "It was an attempt to force Pakistan and Afghanistan together. But like many forced marriages, it was never likely to last long."
Afghan-Pakistani ties in a tailspin, with botched British diplomacy blamed
Pakistan points finger at Hamid Karzai, but many analysts believe diplomatic impasse stems from summit at Chequers
It's been five months since David Cameron last lowered himself into the bear pit of Afghanistan-Pakistan relations by opening up his official Buckinghamshire residence to the civilian and military leaderships of the two countries.
Immediately after the Chequers summit, British officials expressed their delight at what they thought had been a breakthrough initiative to bring together an unprecedented number of top players from both sides, including the two presidents, as well as army and spy chiefs.
But it's now clear that Chequers was the exact moment when the fraught relationship between the two sides went into a tailspin, with some critics holding botched British diplomacy partly to blame. Unknown to the UK, which judged the conference a huge success, the Afghan side left feeling deeply aggrieved.
"It was clear it had not been a success," said one diplomat from a third country that was briefed by the entourage of the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, soon after Chequers. "The [Foreign Office] gave a very different readout in London and elsewhere. They thought they had discerned a strategic shift in the Pakistani attitude to Afghanistan. But the Afghans were using words like 'zero result'."
With the return of the prime minister to the fraught subject this weekend during a whistle-stop regional tour taking in Kabul and Islamabad, the February summit at Chequers offers lessons about the limits of Britain's powers of persuasion when it comes to the complex realities of what foreign policy wonks like to call "Af-Pak".
With hindsight, the official joint statement produced at the end of the summit now seems ludicrously ambitious. It committed all sides to take steps to "achieve the goal of a peace settlement [in Afghanistan] over the next six months".
But since then, Pakistan has shelled positions on the Afghan side of the disputed border and Pakistani newspapers are full of articles disparaging Karzai. The Afghan president was particularly incensed when a senior Pakistani official was quoted in the international media in March as saying Karzai was the "biggest impediment to the peace process" and that he was "taking Afghanistan straight to hell".
Kabul has responded with its own war of words. In May, hundreds of people in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar staged protests, complete with chants of "Death to Pakistan". Bismillah Khan, the Afghan army chief, is said to have despaired at Karzai's emotional outbursts. One diplomat reported that he has complained his president appears to want "a war with Pakistan".
These cross-border hatreds are a major stumbling block for hopes of a negotiated settlement to the conflict in Afghanistan. Pakistan is believed to have a veto over any such deal in effect because of the strong influence it has over the Afghan Taliban, whose headquarters are in Pakistani territory.
In an attempt to piece together what went wrong at Chequers, the Guardian talked to senior officials from both sides. Some blame the lack of normal diplomatic niceties for causing friction. Karzai is said to have taken umbrage at one discussion where he found himself sitting opposite Hina Rabbani Khar, then Pakistan's foreign minister, and not his opposite number, President Asif Ali Zardari.
A number of diplomats involved in Afghan and Pakistani affairs say they thought it extraordinary that neither Adam Thomson, the British high commissioner to Pakistan, nor Richard Stagg, the ambassador to Afghanistan, were present. The seasoned diplomats may have been able to smooth ruffled feathers.
But it was a politician, David Cameron, who led the discussion. The brainchild of the prime minister, the trilateral summit was launched amid sky-high hopes that it might start a process that could fix all the outstanding problems between the two countries. But his chairing of the meeting angered the Afghans, who thought Cameron often took the side of Pakistan in discussions.
Honest broker
"We have many in Kabul who think that London has an inherent pro-Pakistani bias, in the same way the US is not seen as an honest broker in the Middle East because of its pro-Israel bias," said Davood Moradian, an analyst in Kabul and confidant of Rangin Dadfar Spanta, Karzai's national security adviser.
"The reason Karzai accepted Cameron's invitation was that he thought the prime minister would attempt to exert some control over their errant child, Pakistan."
The difficulties went deeper than protocol, however. The Afghans left the meeting angry with what they believed were unacceptable demands by Pakistan, which Kabul fears still clings to its old policy of trying to dominate Afghanistan to prevent it making claims on its territory, or giving a perch for India to threaten Pakistan.
One of Afghanistan's senior policymakers told the Guardian that the Afghan side was taken aback by the frankness of the Pakistani team. "For the first time real clarity emerged," the government adviser said. "Some politicians, when they see clarity, they cannot digest it. Some senior politicians are still struggling with that reality."
According to him, that new reality was expressed by Zardari, who articulated his country's concern at the "unproportional increase of the Indian footprint in Afghanistan," he said. They also reportedly pushed for Afghanistan to recognise the Durand Line, the border drawn up the British Raj at the end of the 19th century, which deprived Afghanistan of swaths of territory. Accepting its status would be political suicide for any Afghan leader even the Taliban regime of the 1990s refused to accept the demands of Pakistan, then its closest ally.
Khar, the Pakistan foreign minister, said such claims were "classic examples" of how Afghanistan "misinterprets everything we say". "I don't think we even used the words 'Durand Line'," she said. "What we do want to talk about is better border management because you cannot afford to have 50,000 people cross every day, unsupervised, unwatched and creating havoc in both countries."
Khar, who said she was "exasperated and discouraged" by the failure of the Chequers summit, said Afghanistan's leaders had been guilty of "playing to the public gallery" and not showing "seriousness of purpose and approach".
But the Afghans see it differently. "We thought we had an understanding with Pakistan that their contribution to the peace process will be non-conditional," the Afghan official said. "In Chequers we found that was not the case."
Pakistani officials respond with their own list of complaints about Kabul. Foremost is the Afghans' habit of blaming Pakistan for almost every big attack launched by the Taliban: many Afghans believe they are directed by Pakistan's military intelligence service. Pakistan has responded with counter-claims that Afghanistan supports and harbours groups attacking Pakistan.
At Chequers, Pakistan demanded an end to "safe havens" they believe the Pakistani Taliban enjoy inside Afghan territory and the extradition of a senior Pakistani Taliban commander held by the Afghans.
Pakistani intelligence officers even claim to have intercepted phone calls "from Kandahar" ordering an attack on 15 June claimed by separatists in Baluchistan province on one of Pakistan's most revered national monuments a colonial-era house where the country's founder spent much of the last few week of his life.
Pakistan makes no secret of its anxiety to match the influence of India, which in October 2011 signed a strategic partnership agreement with Afghanistan. Kabul is dragging its feet on a similar deal with Pakistan, demanding progress on its areas of concern first.
Pakistan is also determined to become involved in training the Afghan security forces, but Kabul has consistently turned down offers of places for its officers at Pakistani military academies.
Greatly adding to Islamabad's fury, in March a senior Afghan official was quoted claiming that any Afghans who received training in Pakistan would be regarded as spies and traitors when they returned home. At the same time Afghan officials are disillusioned by what they claim are broken promises made in 2011 to help facilitate a dialogue with the Taliban.
These promises included the release of Taliban prisoners held by Pakistan, support for a conference of senior Afghan and Pakistani clerics in Kabul that it was hoped would have issued a religious fatwa condemning the Taliban tactics of suicide bombing. Although some prisoners were released, they were minor players of whom few people had heard. Afghan officials have questioned whether some of them were insurgents at all.
Pakistan has also held on to Abdul Ghani Baradar, one of Karzai's fellow tribesman who was arrested in Karachi in 2010 after he attempted to start a secret dialogue with Kabul.
The conference of clerics was torpedoed by Tahir Ashrafi, a senior Pakistani mullah, who declared the Afghan Taliban were waging a legitimate jihad against foreign occupation.
And Afghan officials claim Pakistan did nothing to facilitate dialogue, although Pakistani officials deny this. "We had high hopes from this process," the Afghan official said. "But it was a total failure."
Afghan suspicions that Pakistan is not committed to helping the Kabul government talk directly to the Taliban is a key factor poisoning the relationship, a western diplomat said. The Taliban has long refused to negotiate with Karzai, whom it claims heads an illegitimate "puppet" regime.
Last week, Pakistan's official statement welcoming the opening of the Taliban office in Doha merely said it welcomed "the start of direct talks between the US and the Taliban", making no mention of any role for the Afghan government.
Khar said she has been "very, very disappointed" by events since Chequers because her government had worked hard to patch up differences after the open contempt the former president Pervez Musharraf used to show Karzai.
Poisonous roadblock
Recently, however, Pakistan's newspapers have carried prominent stories quoting unnamed foreign ministry and military officials savaging Karzai, who was described as a "poisonous roadblock" to peace. One Pakistani military official was quoted as saying that the US now had no choice but to "accept Taliban as a legitimate power in Afghanistan, talk to them, [and] accommodate their main demands even it meant abandoning assets like Karzai."
A former Pakistani diplomat said the country's army had reasserted full control over Afghan policy by taking advantage of a weak Pakistani foreign ministry during the two-month tenure of a non-political caretaker government before elections on 11 May.
During that time, Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the army chief, represented Pakistan at an important meeting with John Kerry, the US secretary of state, and Karzai in Brussels.
Pakistan's new prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, has not appointed a foreign minister and appears far more interested in India than Afghanistan. "Sharif has allowed this issue to be run by the military but they just don't have the patience required to deal with a man like Karzai," the former diplomat said. "Karzai is the head of state, not a colonel in the Pakistani army who can just be given orders."
Pakistan's army is impatient for the US to negotiate directly and quickly with the Taliban because the military are desperate to split the Afghan Taliban from the Pakistani Taliban, said Syed Talat Hussain, a journalist who wrote one of the recent articles reflecting Pakistan's new priorities.
"No nation or leader in the world would accept the kind of dictation [Pakistan] is giving Afghanistan," he said. "But the current Afghan leadership is not a real sample of the sentiment of Afghanistan."
Given the vexed history of a complex dispute and the deep distrust between the two sides, the Kabul analyst Moradian said he had been astonished by the "British naivety in expecting a resolution to an entrenched conflict in just six months".
"Chequers was a British version of a south Asian social institution: the forced marriage," he said. "It was an attempt to force Pakistan and Afghanistan together. But like many forced marriages, it was never likely to last long."
