Pakistan’s foreign policy on Afghanistan has had two phases; the first was between 1947 and 1973 and the second phase has lasted from 1973 until now. Although at the very outset of Pakistan’s emergence, Afghanistan had laid claims to large swathes of Pakistan territory inhabited by ethnic Pashtuns, Pakistan still did not have a comprehensive Afghan policy. In the second phase Pakistan has had an elaborate Afghan policy realising that Afghanistan’s irredentist claims and its actions are profound threats to Pakistan’s territorial integrity because of Soviet and Indian backing for Kabul. Under Pakistan’s elaborate second phase Afghan policy, religious-minded Afghans or mullahs were to be promoted to counter anti-Pakistan Afghan nationalists and communists. Given Pakistan was formed on the basis of Islamic nationalism many scholars in the West and India started believing and, in the case of Delhi also propagandizing, that Pakistan’s policy of nurturing Afghan mullahs and giving them militant training inside Pakistan was part of regional-wide plan to create an Islamic Emirate to provide a base for regional and global Jihad against non-Muslim forces. This has been a fallacious comprehension of Pakistan’s Afghanistan policy. Instead Pakistan’s policy has been driven by pure national interest as expounded by realist and rational theories of international politics.
Genesis of Pakistan’s Afghan Policy
The border region of Afghanistan and British India (1848-1947) was an important part of the Great Gamebetween the British Empire and Czarist Russia in the 19th Century. In 1947, Pakistan became one of the successor states of British India and inherited the troubles of the Afghan-India border region. Rugged and remote, the same border region has been a source of great tension between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Due to Pakistan’s consistent support for Afghan Mullahs, Mujahideen and then the Taliban, all Islamic titles, most scholars think that Pakistan policy towards Afghanistan has been determined by religion or Islamic doctrines. This is a fallacious conclusion as analyzing Pakistan’s Afghan policy within its historical context reveals that it has been determined by realism and rational choice like any other modern secular nation-state’s foreign policy.
Afghanistan has never recognised the border as permanent and has claimed large tracts of Pashtun-inhabited territory on the Pakistani side. When Afghanistan objected to the membership of Pakistan in the United Nations in September 1947, the seeds of interminable rivalry between the two states had been sown. Afghanistan’s irredentist claims unnecessarily made the status of an internationally recognized border controversial, which Kabul itself agreed to under the Durand Line Agreement of 1893 between the British Foreign Secretary for India, Sir Mortimer Durand and the Afghan King, Abdul Rahman.
Succeeding Afghan kings including Habibullah Khan (who reigned between 1901-1919) and Amanullah Khan (who ruled between 1919-1929) tried to question the legality of the border between Afghanistan and British India. However, Afghan King Zahir Shah (1933-1973) felt that these irredentist claims across an internationally recognized border were futile. Thus during his rule there was relative stability in relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan. On their part, British rulers just before India and Pakistan became independent in 1947 held a referendum in the then India’s Pashtun-inhabited, North West Frontier Province (renamed Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in 2010), in which Pashtuns overwhelmingly (nearly 98 percent) freely voted to make the province part of Pakistan.
In this context, Islamabad did not feel it was necessary to have an elaborate Afghan policy from 1947 to 1973. As Afghanistan had raised claims for Pakistani territory when Pakistan came into existence, Islamabad’s only foreign policy objective during the early era was to preserve Pakistan’s territorial integrity in case of an armed uprising supported by Afghanistan. Pakistan did not feel a grave threat then from Afghanistan because Afghanistan was militarily far weaker to Pakistan, which was at the time in Hans Morgenthau’s categorization a Middle Power and the largest Muslim country. Moreover, Pakistan was an ally of the US and the Afghan King Zahir Shah was friendly towards Islamabad. This can be gauged from the fact that throughout this era, Pakistan never deployed any regular troops to its 2640 kilometers long border with Afghanistan.
Brewing of Real Trouble
The real trouble in relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan started when Sardar Daud Khan, a cousin and premier of King Zahir Shah in the 1950s championed Afghan claims on Pakistani territory, called the Pashtunistan Movement by historians. In order to appease Pakistan, the later King Zahir Shah had to sack Daud as his Prime Minister in 1963. But in 1973, Daud, through palace intrigue, dethroned Zahir Shah and captured power with the help of the Soviet Union. Daud tried to justify his coup domestically on the premise that it was necessary to vie decisively for Pashtunistan. In his first address to the nation, he said on July 17, 1973 that Pashtunistan was an “incontrovertible reality” and declared that “his country had no dispute with any other country except Pakistan.”
Consequently, Pakistan ended up in a strategic quagmire with equally hostile neighbors, India towards the East and Afghanistan towards the West. Pakistan shares a 2,912 kilometers long border (excluding the Line of Control) and 3,323 kilometers long total border with India and 2,640 kilometers long border with Afghanistan. Pakistan fears were genuine as only a couple of years prior to this statement, in 1971, India had helped Bengali separatist militants, Mukhti Bahini (Freedom Fighters), successfully create Bangladesh by seceding the province of East Pakistan from the Pakistani federation.
Daud was supported by the profoundly anti-Pakistan Soviet Union, which also had a hand in Pakistan’s break up in 1971 having signed the Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation with India. He wanted to train and arm Pakistani Pashtun and Balouch separatists on Afghan soil similar to the way the Mukhti Bahini was trained and armed by India on her soil. In response, Pakistan, under Premier Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto (1973-77), also began to support alternative contenders for power in Afghanistan. Bhutto ordered the formation of an ‘Afghan Cell’ in Pakistan’s Foreign Office in July 1973, which was primarily aimed at countering propaganda from Afghanistan and training and arming anti-Daud Afghan mullahs. When Daud was ruthlessly killed in April 1977 along with 18 members of his extended family by Soviet-backed opponents, an immediate threat to Pakistan’s security was neutralized.
When the erstwhile Soviet Union (1917-1991) militarily occupied Afghanistan in December 1979, Pakistan’s security was at stake. Islamabad faced a disastrous situation for three reasons. Firstly, it was a contiguous state to Afghanistan; secondly it was an ally of the United States in the Cold War whose focus had been the encirclement of Soviet Union and containment of Communism; and thirdly, Soviet expansionism was based particularly on its and its predecessor Czarist Russia’s longstanding yearning to reach the hot waters of the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean for which Pakistan had to be trampled upon.
At this juncture, the military ruler of Pakistan, General Zia-ul-Haq (1977-1988), decided to organize anti-Soviet Afghan resistance on his country’s soil. General Zia chose Afghan mullahs and religious parties to fight Soviet forces in Afghanistan. So the mullahs were transformed into the Afghan Mujahideen in the 1980s. They were militarily trained in thousands of madrassas with the U.S.’ and Saudi Arabia’ finances and weapons. They were also supported by young men from across the Muslim particularly Arab World in order to give the impression that it was an Islamic Jihad against an infidel occupying power, the USSR. It was primarily General Zia’s decision to organise anti-Soviet Afghan resistance as an ‘Islamic’ Holy War instead of an Afghan national resistance. In the 1990s, Pakistan was also instrumental in the rise of the Afghan Taliban in the middle of that decade, and the group’s rise to power in Afghanistan for the first time in 1996, and in the recent past, in 2021.
Crux of Islamabad’s Afghan Policy
The most important point to note is that Pakistan’s Afghan policy since the early 1970s was aimed at preventing Afghanistan from realizing her irredentist claims. This has been the crux of Pakistan policy in Afghanistan and can be explained in terms of political realism and the rational theory of international relations that largely underlie inter-state or international relations. Contrarily, many experts have wrongly perceived and explained Pakistan policy in Afghanistan as a strand of a bigger state policy to support global Jihad. Lending support to global Jihad might have been a personal agenda of certain key Pakistani rulers and officials and this may have influenced the Afghan policy to a certain extent and for a while. However, had promotion of Global Jihad been the state policy of Pakistan it would not have also been cooperating with the U.S. which spearheaded the Global War on Terror.
Estimation of Afghan Policy of Pakistan
In a nutshell, Pakistan’s policy in Afghanistan has been able so far to ensure Pakistan’s territorial integrity in the face of Afghan claims. However, Pakistan’s policy towards Afghanistan has largely failed to establish a friendly regime in Kabul. Both the Mujahideen and the Taliban assumed an anti-Pakistan posture once in power and refused to recognise the international border between the two countries. Since coming to power for the second time in August 2021, the Afghan Taliban have not only refused to recognise the international border but their spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid has termed border fencing by Pakistan as tantamount to ‘dividing a nation’ referring to the Pashtun ethnic group. In several incidents, Taliban militants uprooted barbed wire from the border fence and have been extending all-out support to the deadliest terrorist network for Pakistan, Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), providing it with hideouts and bases in Afghanistan, where they have regrouped and have been launching deadly attacks inside Pakistan almost every day for the last few months.
The Way Forward
We need to understand the crux of Pakistan’s policy in Afghanistan and its underlying reasons. Pakistan has played an important role in the long-term peace, stability and development of Afghanistan but it does not have the key, as is generally believed or as Pakistan often portrays, to peace in that country. Pakistan can only play its role positively in Afghanistan once it has relative guarantees that political stability and institutional development in Afghanistan would not ultimately result in Afghanistan posing a threat to the political stability and territorial integrity of Pakistan. Recognition of the Durand Line by Afghanistan is an irreducible minimum for Pakistan. Once Kabul recognises the border, Pakistan can decisively play its role in fostering a broad-based democratic government in Afghanistan. Until the border issue between the two states is resolved, stability and security in Afghanistan would be well-nigh impossible.
