The McCain shuffle

McCain visit has been little more than cosmetic — nothing achieved or perhaps expected beyond a holding operation

Decoding the visit of Senator John McCain to Pakistan and Afghanistan is fraught as the messages at either end of his shuffle between the two are capable of a variety of interpretations. He is chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, a powerful and influential post and he told Afghan Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah when he called to see him on July 4 that he has pressed the leaders of Pakistan (but presumably not the prime minister himself) to take greater practical steps against the Haqqani network, a Taliban franchise that has been the bete-noir gnawing at the vitals of the stumbling peace process between Pakistan and Afghanistan, as well as chewing on the writ of the Afghan government itself.

The day before, July 3, he had been fulsome in his praise of Pakistan’s efforts on the anti-terror front and expressed his satisfaction at the improved security situation in North Waziristan — an area to which the Haqqani network members are not exactly strangers. Until 2014 and the start of Operation Zarb-e-Azb, most of North Waziristan was in the fiefdom of the Haqqani network and the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan. Neither has been defeated militarily though there have been losses, and they have decanted to the Afghan side of the border which makes them a problem for Afghanistan — and the US which operates air assets in the region. It is difficult to reconcile the two messages. On the one hand, Pakistan has done well and enough, and on the other it has fallen short and needs to deal more effectively with the Haqqanis. Hot pursuit is presumably not an option in this instance neither the use of our own armed drones over Afghan territory. There are undoubtedly common grounds in both Kabul and Islamabad that the US seeks to strengthen and nurture; but the peace process has been in the diplomatic equivalent of a medically-induced coma for months. The McCain visit has been little more than cosmetic in reality — nothing achieved or perhaps expected beyond a holding operation. The Game for now is where it was a week ago — stuck in ‘neutral’.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 6^th, 2016.

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