Should we be at war with Afghanistan?

The morning was lit up with the news that Pakistan carried out air strikes on targets in Afghanistan. The whole afternoon the news was not confirmed by official sources in Pakistan until the DG ISPR conducted a press conference in the evening. To the explicit question to confirm the validity or otherwise of this claim, the DG ISPR gave no direct answer. Yet the news was making round in the international media and in the end the Afghanistan government also accused Pakistan of carrying out air strikes on its territory.

My first reaction to this news is that Pakistan and Afghanistan are not at war, they cannot be at war. The conflict with Afghanistan can never be seen as a war in its traditional sense because it will never be an open, declared and a hostile conflict. Historically, our conflict with Afghanistan is characterised more by our own and Afghanistan's internal problems, some of them are of our own making and they spill over a long and porous shared border.

But clearly, today we may have witnessed the beginning of the unfolding of a new military strategy to resolve the Afghan problem. But is this the right strategy? The answer to this question is something reflected in the American experience in Afghanistan. I would like to quote two American-led Western assumptions that went horribly wrong in the decades that followed the end of Cold War. One was liberal and the other was illiberal.

The liberal assumption was that history is dead and has been replaced by interdependence and the illiberal assumption was that hard power could deliver political outcomes. Russia's resurgence from the death of Soviet Empire and China's rise devastated what was left of the fragmented world order that the US created in the unipolar moment. Not interdependence but the great powers competition resurfaced and became the new geopolitical reality, thus proving this liberal assumption wrong.

American use of hard power in Afghanistan and Iraq and supporting Israel to use it in Gaza and the 12-day war with Iran failed to deliver the political results. Iraq experienced a long civil war, Afghanistan became another story of how another superpower was forced to retreat, finding little answer to the asymmetric warfare it was exposed to and the losses that it suffered. Iran may continue the enrichment of uranium and may now be more inclined to acquire enough weapon-grade uranium to produce a bomb, and after the return of the hostages, it remains to be seen how long the ceasefire will hold on whether peace will be the final outcome of this deal.

Israel's dream of seeking recognition from the Muslim world, signing Abraham Accords and live in conditions of relative peace may still be a far-fetched dream. There is nothing wrong in perusing the idea of Abraham Accords but the method Israel has used to force the Muslim world to submit to this idea will never be popular with the general public in the Arab monarchies or elsewhere in the Muslim world. We are getting a sense of what it may mean in the form of the ongoing TLP street protest in Pakistan.

The lesson for Pakistan from both these assumptions in the context of our relationship with Afghanistan is important. When the West led by America was calling history dead, and it proceeded to bring back Afghanistan to the only living and thriving civilisation represented by the democratic world it failed. No military intervention and no interference in the internal affairs of Afghanistan is a lesson that the US and the superpowers before it have left behind. We shouldn't try to re-write history. The second lesson is that hard power should be used only as the last resort when diplomacy has failed, but has diplomacy failed? Diplomacy cannot be allowed to fail because that means the beginning of war.

The DG ISPR during his briefing said that "status quo will not be tolerated any more" and that all unilateral and multilateral engagements with Afghanistan had failed to deliver the results. The general impression that the DG ISPR gave was that a political government that is against the military operation against Taliban may not be acceptable to the military. The central point here is the political and military disconnect in whether the military operation in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa should continue or not. That to me is the pivot and the fundamental question around which our policy on Afghanistan revolves.

It is the decisive element that may ensure the success or failure of our Afghan policy and thus the setting of the pivot becomes the crux of our strategy formulation. It will decide what kind of effort is to be concentrated — military or diplomatic? Only after we have answered this fundamental question and rightly determined the pivot to our Afghan policy that we may be able to align the means to achieve the right political end.

In classic military terms, pivot was always a geographical position like a fortress or a fortified position or a natural landmark like a river or a mountain range, but today the idea has expanded to include a political idea as pivots centre of gravity. Thus, diplomacy or military operation is the fundamental question, the pivot, the crux — the point where decision, resources and movements must converge to produce strategic coherence to achieve the end. Politically, it must be decided what matters the most to us and what we should protect at any cost, and what both Pakistan and Afghanistan can leverage to each other to reach an amicable accord.

Without the pivot, the military strategy will have no direction or focus, it is the axis of movement and without it and the public support that comes with it no military operation can make the headway. 'Pivot to Asia' of the US, almost a decade-old strategy, is a good example because the American pivot is not geographic alone but a geopolitical pivot based on a deliberate shift of strategic focus and resources towards the Asia-Pacific — a political decision that stems from recognising that the balance of power in Asia is central to future global order. Our strategic focus on Afghanistan must also be clear — diplomacy or military action?

My last observation is that the modern age and the complexity of problems that we face demands that National Security Council must be utilised as the right forum for interaction between the military and the politicians. The US has it since 1947, Britain and France since 2010, so why can't Pakistan have this forum where typically all stakeholders indulge in consultation and can unilaterally undertake a decision which underlines a unity of action — something we need the most.