The relentless focus on India’s bilateral engagement with Pakistan means that far more important developments in and around our neighbour are ignored in the Indian public discourse. Even a brief look at the Durand Line that separates Pakistan and Afghanistan today could be far more revealing than the speculation on External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar travelling across the Radcliffe Line to Pakistan this week.
The just-concluded Pashtun Qaumi Jirga in Jamrud area of the Khyber district on Pakistan’s western frontier might hold more clues to the future of our region than the likely interaction between Jaishankar and his Pakistani hosts.
One of the many paradoxes of India’s relations with Pakistan is that the hype about bilateral diplomacy rarely matches the outcomes. Since India and Pakistan loom large in each other’s mind space, every diplomatic engagement draws much enthusiasm, anxiety, and apprehension.
Jaishankar’s brief visit to Islamabad, the first by an Indian foreign minister in a decade, is no exception. Despite both sides insisting that there will be no bilateral talks, there is expectation on both sides of the Radcliffe Line that some good may come out of the visit for the stalled bilateral relationship.
But here is an uncomfortable fact: Despite occasional advances in bilateral relations, minor and major, over the last many decades, the deeply problematic structure of the relationship has not changed. Big breakthroughs in bilateral ties often looked so close, but have remained quite far and elusive. Even if some positive results come from Jaishankar’s visit, they are unlikely to make a serious difference to the congealed character of the relationship.
That the relationship has remained frozen for decades means it is of little consequence either for the region or the world beyond. Occasional military crises, following terror attacks in India, draw the world’s attention to the dangers of escalation of the conflict between India and Pakistan to the nuclear level.
The negative nuclear stability, if you will, in India-Pak relations looks reassuring in comparison to the world historic developments in Pakistan’s western borderlands over the last many decades. Two of them, which took place in 1979, have had an enduring impact on the geopolitics of our region and the world. One is the Iranian Revolution, which led to the establishment of an Islamic Republic in Tehran.
The continuing conflict between Iran and its neighbours, and Tehran’s confrontation with the West continues to rock the world. With the stage now set for a war between Iran and Israel (backed by the US) and the talk of a regime change in Iran, many fear that the dynamic around Iran could trigger the Third World War.
The other was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to protect a revolutionary regime in Kabul that came to power in 1978. The radical Islamic jihad against it, organised by the US and its regional allies, including Pakistan, succeeded in bleeding the Russian bear, and ousting it from Afghanistan by the end of the 1980s.
But it normalised Islamic militancy and, more broadly, religious extremism in the Subcontinent. Pakistan, which actively supported the jihad in Afghanistan, was also consumed by it at home, thanks to the politics of Islamisation under General Ziaul Haq in the 1980s.
A major offshoot of the Afghan jihad was the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan and its support for al Qaeda, which directed the terror attacks against Washington and New York in September 2001. That in turn led to the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and a massive but failed effort to drain the swamps of violent religious extremism and build a modern Afghan state. That failure ended in the Taliban walking back to power in Kabul in August 2021.
The return of the Taliban has intensified the turbulence in the Pashtun lands straddling the Durand Line between Pakistan and Afghanistan. One, Pakistan’s hopes of controlling Afghanistan through the Taliban have been dashed. The Taliban is asserting its autonomy and raising the many traditional demands of the Pashtun people against Rawalpindi.
Two, Kabul has been accused of sheltering the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) that is trying to carve out autonomous zones within the Pashtun lands along the Durand Line and undermining the writ of the Pakistani state. Rawalpindi’s promotion of Islamic militancy in these regions in the past and its current counter-terror operations have made life miserable for the Pashtun people of Pakistan.
That brings us to the third factor, the rise of the Pashtun Tahafuz (self-respect) Movement (PTM). Instead of addressing the genuine Pashtun grievances articulated by the PTM, the Pakistan government banned it earlier this month. The Pashtun Qaumi Jirga convened by the PTM concluded its deliberations this week with a list of 22 demands.
The PTM wants the Pakistan Army and the militants to vacate the Pashtun lands within the next two months, account for the many state-organised “disappearances” of its activists, deliver the benefits of its natural resource exploitation in the Pashtun lands to the local people, restore visa-free trade and travel across the Durand Line. In terms of their organisational character and ideological orientation, the Afghan Taliban, the TTP, and the PTM are all quite different. But they have many similar demands — including an open Durand Line that allows the reconstitution of the cultural and economic unity of the divided Pashtun lands.
This, in turn stokes Rawalpindi’s neurosis about an independent Pashtunistan that could undermine Pakistan’s territorial integrity and unity. The Pakistan Army is strong enough to crush Pashtun separatism by dividing them, using force, and leveraging religious sentiments. But the bitter harvest from 50 years of societal churn in the Pashtun lands can’t be bottled up.
Add to it the growing restiveness in the Baloch lands that today witness growing violence against the Chinese nationals working there and the Punjabi settlers. The rising economic and political discontent fueling Pashtun and Baloch nationalism are likely to keep Pakistan’s western frontiers unstable for years to come. The destabilisation of Pakistan will inevitably impact its neighbours, including India.
For the last half century, the geopolitical churn in Pakistan’s western borderlands did much to shape the internal, regional, and international relations of South Asia, including the bilateral ties between India and Pakistan. We are entering a new phase in that historical trend line. The answers to India’s problem on the Radcliffe Line might well depend on the kind of lessons that Pakistan might draw from the turbulence on its western frontiers.
The writer is a contributing editor on international affairs for The Indian Express
