EDITORIAL: Region at risk from Afghanistan

The former US deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage, says that Afghanistan might jeopardise stability in neighbouring Pakistan and have a knock-on effect on India, and that ‘persistent violence in that country might wreck Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf’s efforts to defeat forces of religious extremism at home’. He thinks the stakes in Afghanistan are larger than in Iraq in the near term and that India ‘might already perceive itself to be surrounded by failed or failing states such as Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh’. Mr Armitage also implied that future American decisions in the field might be delayed because of a heightened level of deliberation and oversight and that it was — by implication — possible that NATO might be affected by slow reaction and growing lack of interest and commitment in the West. Should the fighting in Afghanistan continue at the current pace, he suggested, it might overturn Pakistan’s efforts to yank itself out of the quagmire of religious fanaticism. Meanwhile, India would be endangered: by the disorder of malfunctioning peripheral states.

It is correct to argue that if Pakistan is engulfed in an inferno that replicates Afghanistan, it is bound to radiate its trouble into India which is already facing an incipient wave of home-grown terror with external input. So it is not difficult to see the logic of Mr Armitage. Indeed, we have already seen some of it in the form of two blowbacks from Afghanistan which have affected its neighbourhood and definitely damaged Pakistan. Afghanistan was the crux of the domain of disorder created by ‘covert wars’ involving non-state actors. The neighbours were faced with a replication of this disorder but have so far managed to save themselves from succumbing to it fully.

The first nation that protected itself against the blowback was Iran. It followed a very well thought out policy of not letting the battlefield Shia Afghans jihadis influence Iranian civil society. Their training camps were sealed from the Iranian population and their movements were carefully restricted. The second state that staved off the seduction of Afghanistan successfully was Uzbekistan where a dictator suppressed the agents of disorder with great force and drove them back into Afghanistan. The third state, Tajikistan, fell under the spell for some time but here too the influence of Uzbekistan was effective in rolling back chaos that was disguised as a potential Islamic revolution.

But while the other neighbours of Afghanistan were successfully inoculating themselves against the virus of state failure, Pakistan was slowly but surely embracing it as a doctrine of covert, low-intensity warfare. It trained the world’s desperadoes as religious warriors and sent them into the purgatory of Afghan jihad. Then it used the case-hardened veterans of Afghanistan to try and solve the Kashmir dispute, but succeeded only in injecting Pakistan with the deadly virus of state malfunction. In time, the covert private warriors recoiled on Pakistan with their weapons and foreign funding and began to tear the confessional fabric of the state apart.

Afghanistan has no internal sovereignty. Its warlords control its outlying regions. Pakistan, likewise, has severe limitations on its internal sovereignty with large swathes of its territory falling to the agents of chaos who dream of replicating the dystopia of Afghanistan. Even President Musharraf admits that Pakistan is vulnerable to Talibanism and must get rid of it if it wants to survive. But he should realise that he has to play a powerful role in averting such a disaster by purging Pakistani territory of the Taliban raiders. Equally, he must lose no opportunity to mend Pakistan’s fences with India and take the process of normalisation into its next more significant economic phase. *