ABOUT the most daunting sight I saw during a visit to Kabul in September last year was the charred and demolished remains of the elegant Pakistan embassy building in Kabul’s Karte Parwan district. A quaint mix of colonial grandeur and functional architecture, the building fell to Pakistan’s share in the division of real estate in the wake of partition.

The assault on the building was prompted by the fall of Herat to the Taliban in September 1995 for which Pakistan was blamed. That was the year when the Taliban, essentially an academic community until then, were first heard of for rescuing a trade convoy headed for Turkmenistan led by the then inteior minister, retired Maj-Gen Naseerullah Khan Babur.

Barely a year earlier, the building on Shahre Nau where the Pakistan embassy was then located was ransacked by a frenzied Afghan mob in retaliation against the killing of some Afghan miscreants who had hijacked a school bus in Peshawar, driving all the way to Islamabad and holding the young passengers to ransom. The hijackers were shot inside the Afghan embassy in Islamabad.

This month’s sacking of the Pakistan embassy (now located in the upscale district of King Akbar Wazir Khan, almost next door to the residence of the UN secretary-general’s special envoy to Afghanistan) was thus the third major episode in a series of demonstrations and assaults on the embassy — hardly a worthy testimonial to our Afghan policy. Through my week-long stay in Kabul last year, I could see for myself how isolated our embassy was from the mainstream diplomatic set.

Except for a long line of grim-faced and often abusive Afghan visa applicants outside the embassy, contact with the outside world appeared to be minimal. An overworked counsellor (head of the chancery) endorsed visas like a stamping machine.

Ambassador Rustam Shah Mohmand, a seasoned civil servant who happened to be away in Islamabad, returned to Kabul only a couple of days before my departure. Just the stuff ambassadors are generally made of, he was apparently somewhat handicapped for want of a clear policy directive from Islamabad. He did, however, seem to enjoy a good working relationship with President Hamid Karzai — whether more as a fellow Pathan and an old friend or as a foreign envoy remained open to conjecture.

Besides the indifferent state of friendly contacts with the Afghans, the embassy did not even subscribe to a single Kabul daily or periodical. And Kabul has quite a vibrant press, as free and unencumbered as it could be in a crisis-ridden country still struggling to free itself of the crushing politico-strategic, administrative and institutional debris left by the Taliban. The embassy’s access to local news on a daily/weekly basis was thus automatically restricted. One of the embassy staff sat scanning and clipping a number of Pakistani dailies in a corner.

What triggered the latest assault on our embassy was said to be Pakistan’s forays into the Mohmand Agency, straddling the craggy Pakistan-Afghan border, with demarcation pillars few and far between. The incursions, regardless of the tactical imperatives behind them, were an abrupt departure from the policy of non- intervention by the regular army in tribal territories. This policy was spelt out by the Quaid-i-Azam himself at a tribal darbar in April 1948 at the Governor’s House, Peshawar, reversing the so-called ‘forward policy’ of Lord Lytton, viceroy and governor-general of India (1870-1880). This was an act of great wisdom and foresight on the Quaid’s part.

Lytton’s forward-policy had led to the second Anglo-Afghan war (1878-79) and the fierce Afghan assault on the British mission in Kabul, leading to the assassination of the British envoy in Kabul, Major Sir Louis Cavanagri. The then viceroy and governor-general, Lord Lawrence (1863-1869), upon whom ‘devolved’ the direction of British policy, considered that “the objective of the government would be best obtained by abstaining from active interference in the internal affairs of Afghanistan, and by the friendly recognition of the de-facto rulers of that country, or of portions of it, without undertaking inconvenient

liabilities.” On this basis, Lord Lawrence thought that the British government would have the greatest chance of gaining the permanent friendship of the Afghan people.

The policy of non-intervention was substantially followed by Lord Mayo (1869-1872) and Lord Northbrook (1872-1878) until Lytton adopted his reckless ‘forward policy’, with disastrous consequences.

On September 3, 1879, Afghan fury over Lytton’s coercive interventionism policy peaked. The British mission was stormed and the assailants split Cavanagri’s head open with a blow and ransacked the premises.

The British withdrew from Afghanistan in 1921 after the third Anglo-Afghan war. On their side of the Durand Line, however, they retained Lytton’s ‘forward policy’ on the strength of their arms, including the actual deployment of the air arm in the mid-30s.

A continuation of Lytton’s legacy could be neither advisable nor feasible after independence, and that is why it was abandoned by Pakistan.

—The writer is a retired brigadier of the Pakistan Army.