M.A. Niazi

The logic of the situation demands that Afghanistan be involved, so that the Great Game may continue. After all, Afghanistan is very much part of the Great Game, as are both Pakistan and India, as the successor states of Britain, which started the Great Game as part of its policy towards the policing of both Asia and the Czarist empire. Modern Afghanistan is not very different from the state which the British dominated that, until the 1920 Treaty of Rawalpindi, they were formally committed to controlling Afghanistan’s foreign policy, just as they were committed to determining Nepal’s. The British found such treaty arrangements convenient, whereby they got what they really wanted, control over the foreign and defence policies, while leaving day-to-day administration to “native” dynasties that were there before, and which the British did not want to disturb, though they insisted on having someone on the throne favourable to them. This was the pattern of all the princely states of India. Thus, after independence, Afghanistan was thrown even looser, though it still looked to New Delhi for the answers to its foreign policy and defence policy questions. Kabul was ruled by a King who had inherited from an assassinated father, who had himself been installed by the British, and who had almost declared war on Britain during World War II. But the departure of the British had meant that Afghanistan went on looking to New Delhi for guidance, such as when Afghanistan opposed Pakistan’s admission into the United Nations.

Though also Muslim, Pakistan always saw Afghanistan as a troublesome neighbour, not the least reason being Pashtun revanchism. With the province closest to Afghanistan being overwhelmingly Pashtun, the policy of Pashtunistan was popular, especially when spearheaded by as charismatic and popular a leader as Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan. The Pashtunistan movement died down as Ghaffar Khan grew old, and the King who saw the British depart from the subcontinent, Zahir Shah, was replaced by coup by a cousin and ex-PM, Sardar Daud, who preferred to be president, and thus opened the office to ordinary people, like the presidents imposed by the Soviets, who started with Noor Muhammad Tarakki in 1978, and continued with Babrak Karmal.

Karmal was replaced by Mullah Umar, who took the Islamic title of Amir, which had also been the title used by Kabul rulers in the nineteenth century, until they became Kings with the Treaty of Rawalpindi, and named the country an Islamic Emirate. While that might be the reality publicly shown, and while that might have provided the ruling ideology, there was also no doubt that Afghanistan had escaped Indian bonds and fallen in with Pakistani wishes. From the time of Ghaffar Khan, as some within the Pakistani establishment had seen Afghanistan not as a huge irritant left behind by the British, but with the right regime in Kabul, the last bulwark of Pakistan against India. The Taliban seem to have provided the regime. The friendship was managed by the ISI, and it was the DG ISI who took an unaccustomed public role in the endgame with the Taliban.