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A Tale of Sacrifices

Pakistan has sacrificed much in order to accommodate the interests of the world’s major powers in the region but it is still accused of playing a ‘double game.

By Lt. Gen. Asad Durrani (Retd) | April 2020

Afghan Taliban militants and villagers celebrate the U.S. peace deal Monday in the Alingar district of Laghman Province. The group resumed offensive operations against Afghan security forces this week, ending a partial truce.

Sacrifice is a voluntary act in pursuit of a cause that often extracts an unintended price.

Our founding fathers indeed sacrificed for the creation of Pakistan. They gave up their comforts, agitated on the streets, and some even landed in jails. Millions died or were uprooted when the movement succeeded.

For the liberation of Kashmir on the other hand, we never made a sacrifice. Though some of us did join the Kashmiris in their struggle and we also made an odd half-baked attempt to clinch the issue, the redline always read: “at no risk to Pakistan”. The price for a lingering crisis still had to be paid. Our commitment, or the lack of it, was made quite clear when in August last year Delhi revoked Kashmir’s special status and we responded only bombastically. We had no money for anything more, or so we said.
Afghanistan is an archetypal illustration of confounding costs and benefits.

The country was accepted as a buffer between the Russian Empire and British India. It continued to serve this purpose when we inherited the Durand Line in 1947—and not only against the Russian successor, the Soviet Union. In our wars against India, Kabul beseeched us to move our troops from the western borders since we needed them direly on the eastern. The Afghans did so because Pakistan provided them the quintessential strategic depth. We were their window to the world and a duty-free source of most of their livelihood. More importantly, if they were again invaded, as so often in the past, millions of them could find refuge only in Pakistan. This foresight has stood the Afghans in good stead ever since.

The two countries thus found a convergence of interest: we in an independent Afghanistan that would protect our rear flank in case of another war with India; and the Afghans in a viable Pakistan that could provide safe havens to their resistance against a potential foreign occupation. After the Soviet invasion in December 1979, we took great risks to fulfil that role, initially all by ourselves, and two years later with American support. We also hosted millions of refugees at a great cost – but there were also benefits. Some might have sought salvation in meeting a religious or a moral obligation, even honouring a tribal tradition. Others were convinced that the goodwill thus created was an investment in our future relations with a neighbour.

The socio-economic implications of this policy remain contentious because hardly any credible study has been subjected to a critical discourse. We are indeed aware of some conflicts between the locals and the refugees, but also of many examples where the two communities worked out a mutually beneficial arrangement. In a rather unusual one, some Baloch landowners, though unhappy that the ethnic balance had tilted against them, had no qualms employing Pashtun migrants because of the latter’s expertise in arid-area agriculture.

When the Soviets withdrew in the late 1980s, all our sacrifices seemed to have been worth their while. If, in its aftermath peace and stability in Afghanistan was not restored, it was more due to the complexities of putting the Afghan Humpty together, and not because getting an aggression vacated was a bad idea. In fact it was an essential pre-requisite to forge a grand consensus that has always been the sine qua non for a unified Afghanistan. The dynamics of this process was again in play after the US invaded Afghanistan.

Our support for the Taliban may have been more covert and less military, but its logic remained the same: The Afghan resistance had to be kept alive to one day see-off one more foreign military presence. That we could not afford to have another estranged faction in the region with whom we were to live long after the US had packed-up and gone home, was both good thinking and a sound argument for our Taliban policy. The threats and the drones that we received in return was the price paid to ensure the realisation of a crucial condition for an intra-Afghan dialogue: a firm commitment by the US to withdraw its military forces.

What now ensues may not be much different from the post-Soviet syndrome, but at least in the present case the regional countries had enough warning to prepare for the outcome. And indeed a number of regional countries have been in close touch precisely for that purpose.

Before the Doha agreement between the US and the Taliban, an accusation that was most frequently levied against us was that we were playing a double-game: taking money from the US and helping its enemy. I am not aware of any country in a situation like ours that ever played a single-game. Lord Robertson, a former secretary general of NATO, once laconically advised: “if you cannot ride two horses, you have no business to join the circus”. And then we have been balancing conflicting interests so often in the past – successfully, and in our interest. We resisted American pressure in the 1960s and built a robust relationship with China. At the cost of US ire, we maintained a working relationship with the post-revolutionary Iran. And of course we always had to walk a thin line when dealing with Saudi Arabia and Iran.

It seems we have lost that ability. When called upon to join an important league with Turkey, Iran, and Malaysia, we got cold feet – just because the price, a measly few billion dollars, we had no stomach to pay

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