An angry goodbye to Bonn

Pakistan was expected to have moral high ground at Bonn, standing better chance of pushing its proposals on peace.

The Parliamentary Committee on National Security has also — regrettably — recommended that Pakistan not attend the Bonn Conference on the future of Afghanistan (it opens on December 5). It has thus endorsed the earlier decisions by the cabinet, its defence committee and the Senate, to boycott the conference by removing Pakistan from the gathering of 1,000 delegates reviewing progress on what was decided 10 years ago in 2001. While the nations represented at Bonn still swear by Pakistan’s importance and hope to lure Pakistan in, it has chosen isolation to express its outrage at the attack by US-Nato forces on a Pakistani checkpost on November 26, killing 24 Pakistani soldiers.

It is presumed that Pakistan holds some important trump cards and will be able to achieve the results it wants by this diplomatic device: it sits atop Nato’s supply route and it has liaison with the Afghan Taliban who are required to contribute to the most crucial issue at Bonn, namely, achieving peace and negotiating a political transition in Afghanistan after 2014. It is yet to be seen whether Pakistan has enough leverage on the so-called Quetta Shura of Mullah Omar to deliver what Bonn wants. So far, the Taliban, whom Pakistan presumably supports as its candidate for the post-withdrawal government in Kabul, have rejected American offers for peace talks, saying Nato forces must withdraw first. While Mullah Omar is diplomatic, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, together with Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), have denounced Pakistan for being “a slave of the United States”. The Pakistani Taliban owe allegiance to Mullah Omar and al Qaeda. A sign of what may be the al Qaeda strategy appeared when the Afghan ‘peace negotiator’ Burhanuddin Rabbani was killed in Kabul. The Taliban were not invited in 2001; they, together with Pakistan, are not going in 2011.

Either way, there is clearly a considered view which thinks that it will be pointless for Pakistan to attend Bonn, given its stance. The conference itself, this view holds further, is unlikely to achieve much. It was convened a decade ago to restore to Afghanistan its representative institutions, by holding elections, giving it a new constitution and installing an elected government. Afghan President Karzai who hardly satisfies the moral and ethical yardsticks of many delegates at the Bonn Conference, is still in power after a decade, and the Loya Jirga he convened in November in anticipation of the conference did not please all the parties in Afghanistan who thought that the jirga was ‘selective’ and did not represent the entire population of Afghanistan.

The national consensus in Pakistan is emotional rather than rational because the military, which is endorsed in its stance by this consensus, has not encouraged the political players to plan an appropriate strategy after the Mohmand attack. As its details came to light, Pakistan was expected to gain the moral high ground at Bonn and stood a better chance of pushing through its own proposals on post-withdrawal Afghanistan, and that is why attending it would have been a better option. The Americans might have been pressured after that to render to Pakistan the apology it needs to assuage its rage.

The West, which was supposed to contribute financially to post-withdrawal Afghanistan’s security and economic development, is today mired in its own economic crisis of historic proportions. The conference will probably end up exhorting the ‘concerned nations’ and Afghanistan’s neighbours to do their best to bring durable peace to Afghanistan on the basis of a peace process involving all Afghan factions. As for Pakistan, it is absenting itself because it is not sanguine about the conference’s outcome. However, the outcome it wants — which is mostly India-centric — has not found favour with the international community. Pakistan will have to face the outcome: it will have to continue to harbour important Afghan players, and the regional states led by India will go on looking at Pakistan as a troublemaker and will see to it that the Taliban don’t ‘conquer’ Afghanistan the way they did in 1996. Isolationism as an expression of anger at this point does not suit Pakistan.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 4^th, 2011.