WHAT intrigues one is how so momentous a decision as the admission of Afghanistan, essentially a Central Asian country, into an exclusively South Asian regional grouping was taken so casually. Apparently, no known serious debate within the organization or in the media was considered necessary.

Only Nepal’s King Gayanand Bir Bikram Shah threatened to veto Afghanistan’s admission unless China was also admitted into the grouping as an observer/dialogue member. Although subject to the ‘completion of certain formalities’ under the Saarc Charter the acceptance of Afghanistan as a full member is a fact.

Might it not have been only too appropriate and prudent to defer the decision on Afghanistan to a later date, say, until the next Saarc summit in July 2006 in New Delhi on the same pattern as the prospective granting of observer status to China and Japan.

In the seven-member grouping, Pakistan is the only country with shared borders with Afghanistan and a shared history of largely unshared mutual trust and goodwill. The Afghan response to Pakistan’s sustained friendly overtures had been traditionally less than friendly, and at times, even hostile.

The Northern Alliance government supplanting the Taliban in December 2001 had been, on the whole, hostile to Pakistan. But for President Hamid Karzai himself, its principal constituents like Abdullah Abdullah, Younus Qanooni, Ali Ahmad Jalali, to name just a few, would hardly ever fight shy of swearing vengeance against Pakistan for its support to the Taliban.

The then US special envoy to Kabul Zalme Khalilzad would readily join forces with the Panjsheris and the Tajiks in their vicious campaign against Pakistan for “cross border” Taliban terrorist flows. Though, by and large, discreet in his utterances in respect of Pakistan, President Karzai hardly ever contradicted or told off his cabinet colleagues and others against their anti-Pakistan fulminations.

Afghanistan inside Saarc may well act as the proverbial Trojan Horse for Pakistan. For the rest of the family Afghanistan would be like a bull in a china shop for its deeply-embedded divergent cultural, tribal and linguistic mores.

Pak-Afghan history reminds one of such inimical episodes as Kabul’s initial ‘no’ to Pakistan’s admission into the UN, its sponsorship of the Pushtunistan movement, engineering serious border clashes in the Bajaur area in 1961, and periodic questioning of the recognized international status of the Durand Line, etc. A closer, critical look at the existing state of relationship would reveal much the same disturbing vista of raging and emerging tensions.

It would be four years since December 2001 when the Northern Alliance, sworn enemy of Pakistan, entered Kabul in the shadow of American guns. It assumed the reins of a shattered state structure, under a Popalzai Pathan from Kandahar, Hamid Karzai. From an essentially interim American surrogate head of state, Karzai is now an elected president to push his legitimacy beyond doubt. His writ as the ruler of Afghanistan, however, draws its life blood from such administrative, military and diplomatic backing as he can garner from America and the Nato-led international Security Forces. Without these forces, Karzai’s own future and the stability of the Kabul regime become uncertain.

As it is, Afghanistan remains perilously unstable, despite the extensive deployment and active engagement of foreign military forces. Its southern flank with its epicentre in Kandahar and the eastern and south-eastern sectors with their pivotal centres in Jalalabad and Paktia remain the strongholds of the Taliban and the so-called Al Qaeda remnants.

While the quest for Osama bin Laden and his lieutenant, Aiman al Zawahiri, remains a wild goose chase, the volatile and unrelentingly aggressive Gulbudin Hekmatyar launches his raids from the south-east. In the north, Uzbek Abdul Rashid Dostum continues to rule the roost. To the west, Commander Ismail Khan runs his own government in Herat, independently of Kabul for all practical purposes. Karzai had been hardly two or three times to Kandahar, his home province, once narrowly escaping death.

In Kabul, while much is not being heard or said of late about a Pakistan-baiter like Abdullah Abdullah, Professor Burhanuddin Rabbani (once a Pakistan-supported Afghan president) and Mulla Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, also once a Pakistan-Saudi backed mujahideen leader turned anti-Pakistan, have coseyed up to Karzai to dilute whatever pro-Pakistan sentiment he might have had.

Narco-warlordism and poppy cultivation flourish in Afghanistan. Poppy cultivation is said to have increased by an incredibly whopping 1,300 per cent to “fill the coffers of the Taliban”.

Rampant warlordism, growing poppy cultivation and the resurgence of the Taliban combine to generate an environment of acute instability in Afghanistan. The ongoing militancy in our tribal area, mainly in North and South Waziristan, has been a direct fallout of the mounting instability in Afghanistan.

Until the American advent in Kabul after 9/11, the ensuing Torabora-like periodic bombings and the cross-border forays in hot pursuit of Osama, without much let or hindrance, our tribal areas had been on the whole a zone of peace and tranquillity. Since then they have been thrown into the vortex of a low-intensity guerrilla-like conflict. Though controlled, tribal unrest continues. Except for the US-backed Karzai regime, Pakistan is practically without many friendly elements in Afghanistan. Its entry into Saarc as a full member would be many times more to India’s advantage than to Pakistan’s.

—(The writer is a retired Brigadier.)