Of rocks and hard places

There is a large shopping list, and one Pakistan may find difficult to fulfill to the satisfaction of President Ghani

There must be few jobs in the world as unenviable as that of the president of Afghanistan. President Ashraf Ghani is trying to hold together an extremely fragile government in Afghanistan. Some of those tensions revolve around the recent improvement in relations with Pakistan, which not all parties in Afghanistan — or Pakistan for that matter — are entirely comfortable with. Nor are other players, notably India, which is going to do all it can to foster a climate of managed instability, keep the pot of tension simmering and doing nothing to promote regional peace and stability. The most recent point of sensitivity concerns the possibility of intelligence-sharing between agencies from both countries in an effort to battle the extremists better that flow back and forth across our mutual borders. President Ghani has faced severe domestic criticism for allowing this development, and he has now written to our government seeking assistance in his struggle to balance opposing internal forces.

Specifically, he is calling for tougher action against the Afghan Taliban in border regions, and moves against what are seen as ‘sanctuaries’ in the tribal areas, as well as seeking house arrest for known Taliban leaders in Quetta and Peshawar and the arrest of members of the Haqqani network. This is a large shopping list, and one Pakistan may find difficult to fulfill to the satisfaction of President Ghani. There does appear to be a willingness at least in principle to cooperate, and the head of a parliamentary panel has said that Pakistan should hand over members of the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani network to Kabul — which is a significant shift from the position of a year ago where complete denial was the only agenda item. Pakistan in many ways is in no less of a dilemma as Afghanistan. Changing course after years of following the same route is never going to be easy. That said, we strongly support both President Ghani and our own government in this essential rewriting of the Pakistan-Afghanistan relationship.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 4^th,  2015.

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