One often cited issue in the current Afghanistan war is the support given to the Taliban by various elements within Pakistan's governmental and military structures. The underlying questions that have been attempted to be answered lie within the framework of the regional geopolitics that encapsulates the current Afghan-Pakistan dilemma. One of those questions and the answer to that question that is predicated within the geopolitical dynamic of the region is. Pakistan’s lack of territorial strategic depth:
India has courted the Afghan government since its inception in 2001, providing it with financial and infrastructural support. Pakistan’s fear is that Afghanistan will serve as a hinge of India’s grand strategy of encircling Pakistan. Thus, Pakistan’s mission in Afghanistan is to subvert Indian influence by creating an atmosphere of instability via the promotion and or tacit consent of Taliban infiltration from its bases in Pakistan across the border.
However, there are other factors that require analysis so that a more comprehensive understanding of Pakistan’s intentions in Afghanistan can be well understood. One element which has garnered little attention but has played a significant role in Pakistan’s strategy in Afghanistan is the great rift that is currently taking place within the internal political dynamic of the country. Pakistan is undertaking a decade’s long internal political struggle that has manifested itself in the current schizophrenic policy towards Afghanistan.
Dislocation within the political and military elite of Pakistan is a manifestation of the changing geopolitical landscape of South Asia. Pakistan is caught between the crosswinds of two significant and interrelated geopolitical forces which have ostensibly transmuted its policy towards Afghanistan and even more significantly will circumscribe the future course of its foreign policy. The First force at play is the sustained meteoric rise of China as a significant force in Central Asia, corresponding with the rise of China as a global power and the relative weakening of American power regionally and internationally. The second interrelated force at play is the diminution of Pakistan’s once significant position as the bulwark against Russian encroachment into Asia, resulting in the slow but systematic post Cold War realignment of the Unites States strategic interests away from Pakistan and closer to India. India has now emerged as the United State key strategic ally blocking the rise of China as a world superpower. Thus, India has subverted the role Pakistan once played for the United States; as a barrier against the rise of a world power in Asia.
What have emerged from the geopolitical crosswinds discussed above are two contradictory and often conflicting geostrategic viewpoints in Pakistan leading to a cleavage within the governmental and military structure of the Nation.
The first option is to remain within the geopolitical alliance with the United States. This course of action would predictably entail entering into closer and more peaceful relations with India the United States most vital post cold war strategic partner in the region. Under this course of action United States power, economic political and military, would provide the needed lubricant to maintain the regional pact between the two South Asian rivals. Significant to Pakistan’s internal political discord, a US facilitated detent with India will mostly likely impose a South Asian geopolitical framework in which Indian controlled Kashmir will remain under Indian suzerainty. Thus the maintenance of a strategic partnership with a United States entails Pakistan’s acquiescence of India’s control over a territory that the two nations have fought many wars since the partition of South Asia sixty years ago. Thus, a cleavage is or will naturally form within Pakistan’s political and military elite between those who wish to remain within the strategic partnership with the US and those who would rather maintain hostile relations with India in the hopes of eventually incorporating Kashmir into an enlarged Pakistan.
The second option is a decoupling Pakistan’s strategic alliance with the United States and the establishment of a closer geostrategic partnership with China. The prevailing argument is that Chinas long rivalry with India will facilitate and sustain Pakistan’s quest for the absorption of Kashmir; while an American strategic partner with ever increasing alliance with India will be less likely to tolerate Pakistan’s bellicose stance. Thus, closer relations which China will lead a higher probability of conflict with India, likely entering a new arc of increased tension perhaps manifesting themselves in border skirmishes that may lead to outright war.
Jingoistic forces in Pakistan see the decoupling of Pakistan’s alliance with the United States and closer strategic alliance with China as favorable factors in maintaining their long favored position of increased tension in South Asia as the appropriate strategy towards the recapture of Kashmir. Often it is Islamist elements, historically sponsored by the military and governmental structure of Pakistan, which support such a strategy. This is the key to understanding Pakistans pro Taliban and corresponding anti US-Indian stance in Afghanistan.
Pakistan has and will always view its foreign policy via the prism of checking India, its South Asian arch rival. In the next chapter I will attempt to provide an explanation of Pakistan’s Schizophrenic policy towards Afghanistan by examining the regions changing geopolitical landscape.
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