Experts say the impending departure of NATO combat forces from
Afghanistan could push India and Pakistan toward a proxy war in the
conflict-ridden state, as New Delhi and Islamabad fight for influence in
the country.
"If Indians are using some ethnic groups in Afghanistan, then Pakistan
will use its own support, and our ethnic allies are certainly Pashtuns,"
Musharraf continued.
Musharraf, a former military dictator who ruled the Islamic country from 1999 to 2007, has been
under house arrest on treason charges,
but his words still carry weight. Some Pakistani observers believe that
the former general is still close to the current military leadership of
the nuclear-armed state, and that he is probably only echoing his
former institution's views on India and Afghanistan.
The South Asian country's civilian leadership, too, has similar views
on Afghanistan, terrorism and Islamist militants. On November 17,
Sartaj Aziz, national security adviser to Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif,
told the BBC that there was no need for Pakistan to target militants who
did not threaten the country's security.
"Why should enemies of the US unnecessarily become our foes," Aziz said.
"Some of them were dangerous for us and some are not. Why must we make
enemies out of them all?" he said, referring to the militant Haqqani
network.
These are two different statements by two Pakistani leaders but they
carry a single narrative: Islamabad feels threatened by New Delhi's
close ties with Kabul; hence it will likely
continue to use some factions of the Taliban as counter-balancing forces in its western neighborhood.
Same old policies
There is nothing new about Pakistan's Afghanistan policy though. The
country's military and civil establishment, analysts say, still consider
the Taliban an important strategic ally, who they think should be part
of the Afghan government after the NATO pullout. Observers say that the
Pakistani military hopes to regain the influence in Kabul it once
enjoyed before the United States and its allies toppled the pro-Pakistan
Taliban government in 2001.
"Kabul is friendlier towards New Delhi now, whereas Islamabad continues
to back the Taliban, as now officially admitted by Sartaj Aziz. Pakistan
wishes to change this scenario and turn Afghanistan into its political
backyard once again," London-based journalist and researcher Farooq
Sulehria told DW.
Matt Waldman, a researcher on the Afghanistan conflict at Harvard
University, believes that Pakistan won't relinquish its support for the
Taliban until the regional dynamics undergo a transformation. "The
evidence indicates that the Pakistan hasn't fundamentally changed its
Afghanistan policy," Waldman told DW.
Siegfried O. Wolf, a political science expert at Heidelberg University,
is of the same view. He told DW that he was convinced that several
elements within the Pakistan security apparatus still believe that the
Taliban could be used as a strategic tool to counter Indian presence in
Afghanistan.
