AFGANISTAN has been Pakistan’s uneasy neighbour for nearly 60 years. It was the only country that refused to recognise Pakistan as an independent state when the British left South Asia and handed over power to a Hindu majority India and a Muslim majority Pakistan.

The Afghans disapproved of the British act. They wanted London to redraw the boundary it had drawn between the areas it ruled and the areas that were left to be governed by Kabul. They did not want the Durand Line — the border between Afghanistan and British India drawn arbitrarily by the British in 1893 — to not become the permanent border in the post-colonial world. By withholding recognition from Pakistan, the Afghans believed that they could undo the injustice that was done to them by the British decades earlier.

Afghanistan believed that it was wrong for the British to split the Pashtun population into two halves while they governed India and it was even worse to perpetuate that mistake after they left India. The rulers in Kabul felt that the Pashtuns should be kept as one and not separated by an artificial boundary drawn by a colonial power to serve its imperial interests. Ideally, Kabul would have wanted the entire Pashtun community to live in Afghanistan. If that were not possible, it wanted to create a new political entity it called “Pashtunistan” that extended all the way to the right bank of the Indus River. If Pashtunistan was to end at the Indus, from where should it start? Should it include the Pashtun areas in Afghanistan as well?

If a political entity such as Pashtunistan were to be created, what should happen to other ethnic communities that lived in this area? What about the Pashtun areas in Balochistan, another ethnically mixed Pakistani province? Should they also be brought into Pashtunistan? What should be the status of the Hazaras who were members of the Shia community, or the Hindko who spoke a language different from Pashto, or the Punjabis who had lived for decades in the Pashtun area? Should there be another ethnic cleansing of the type that occurred after the partition of British India?

None of these questions were raised, let alone answered, by Kabul as it continued to campaign for the establishment of Pashtunistan. Afghanistan’s stance only served to sour relations with Pakistan for over three decades.

With this unhappy beginning, Afghanistan remained a difficult neighbour for Pakistan. It went on to cultivate close and friendly relations with India in the time-worn belief that ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’. India was happy to oblige the Afghans, once again operating according to the same principle. By working closely with Kabul, New Delhi sought to sandwich Pakistan between two difficult borders. To defend both, became Islamabad’s most important strategic concern.

Pakistan gained some relief from this constant anxiety in the 1980s when it joined the United States and Saudi Arabia to engage a group of Pashtuns to fight the Soviet troops who had invaded Afghanistan. A large number of these fighters, called the Mujahideen by their sponsors, came from the seminaries that taught the form of Islam which resonated little with the one that normal Pakistanis were comfortable with.

This form of Islam sanctioned violence against those who believed differently. It also, mistakenly and arrogantly, gave a low status to women and a high status to clerics who claimed a vaster knowledge of the Quran. However, once the Soviets had vacated Afghanistan in 1989, the Mujahideen groups could not reconcile their differences. Chaos ensued and a worried Islamabad cultivated another Pashtun group to bring order to the troubled country.

Called the Taliban, Pakistan helped this group to gain power in Afghanistan. The brief period during which the Taliban governed Afghanistan was the only time that Pakistan felt secure on its northern frontier. But this security was lost when the Al Qaeda, that had been offered a sanctuary by the Taliban in Afghanistan, decided to launch a jihad against the United States. Pakistan was forced by Washington to join the anti-Taliban coalition which quickly demolished the Islamic regime and established a new, pro-West and more secular political order in the country. The rest as they say is history.

This new period in the Afghanistan-Pakistan relationship could have brought comfort to the two countries. But for that to happen required some fundamental changes in the way policymakers on both sides of the border looked at their common problems. They also needed to recognise that some opportunities were available on the basis of which they could build a better future for their two countries.

That was not done. In letting their relations deteriorate to the point that the heads of the two governments cannot even have a civil dialogue in public, Kabul and Islamabad have created a situation that will benefit only those who have no interest in the social, economic and political development of the area the two countries share.

The rise of militant Islam is the most challenging problem for the two countries. The two need to work together to ensure that this development does not inflict long-term damage on their societies. It is shortsighted for the leaders in Pakistan to believe that they can use the proponents of Islamic extremism to serve their purpose and to look the other way as the remnants of the Taliban begin to reassert themselves in the southern districts of Afghanistan. Likewise, it is wrong for Kabul to maintain that the Taliban are gaining strength in many parts of their country because of the help and encouragement they believe the insurgents receive from Islamabad.

Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan is right in demanding that Pakistan should do more to help his country deal with the rise once again of Islamic fundamentalism that threatens Afghanistan’s quest for stability. But the help that he should be seeking from Islamabad should not just be the use of force to stop the movement of people across his border with Pakistan. Islamabad can call his bluff and strengthen the Durand Line in a way that goes against Kabul’s long-standing demand for not tearing apart the community of Pashtuns. This is precisely what Pakistan is now threatening to do.

In late December 2006, Islamabad announced that it planned to mine and fortify with a combination of a wall and a fence its 2,400 km border with Afghanistan. Pakistan was acting in the belief that such a move would satisfy those critics who think that the Taliban were reestablishing themselves in parts of Afghanistan because it had allowed them sanctuaries on its side of the border and had allowed them to penetrate Afghanistan. Kabul was not happy with the suggestion by Islamabad that it was going to construct a physical barrier along the border. The Afghans went back to the old stance — that the Pashtun population should not be split into two parts.

Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan is equally right in demanding that Kabul should deal first with the problems it has created for itself. Kabul has managed the country’s economy and has developed the political system in ways which have made Talibanism an attractive alternative for a large and growing segment of the population. Kabul, in dealing with its many problems, is looking at the short-term scenario; it is opting for an approach that cannot possibly be in its long-term interest.

An example of this is Kabul’s willingness to work with the warlords once again to bring security to some of the troubled provinces. Many warlords recruited for service in the evolving political system are using the cultivation of and trade in drugs to enrich themselves and their supporters.

There is also not much understanding of the nature of the Afghan problem among the governments that are helping President Karzai and his political associates to bring order to their troubled country and society. Pakistan is getting plenty of advice from the West, in particular from those who claim to have knowledge of the situation in Afghanistan. Much of the advice starts with the assumption that Islamabad is not lending a helping hand in stopping the resurgence of the Taliban. According to the reading of the situation by some of these experts, Islamabad is not doing all it should to prevent the return of Afghanistan to anarchy. It has adopted this approach for a variety of reasons that include the continuing attraction of the country’s intelligence services towards the goals of Islamic extremists and because of the continuing preoccupation with India and the perception of the threat that New Delhi poses to Pakistan’s security.

Some of these experts believe that Afghanistan’s problem can only be taken care of if pressure is put on Islamabad, the type of pressure that brought Pakistan to the American side right after 9/11. As President Musharraf revealed while launching his book, he was told that his country would be bombed back into the Stone Age if it did not give up its support of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and helped Washington to bring about a change of regime in Afghanistan.

In an article contributed to The Washington Post, Richard A. Clarke, who had served as national coordinator for terrorism in the National Security Council under President Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, the Afghan-Pakistan situation was one of the seven global crises that the Bush presidency had not paid much attention to because of its preoccupation with Iraq. The others include global warming, Russian revanchism, Latin America’s leftward lurch, various wars in Africa, arms control freeze and transnational crime.

Of these seven crises, he attached great significance to the Afghan-Pakistan dispute. “If there is a solution, it lies on the other side of the Khyber Pass where a sanctuary has emerged, a Taliban-like state within a state in western Pakistan. Dealing with that problem is more than Washington has been willing or able to handle, for it flows into the complex issue of who governs nuclear-armed Pakistan and who controls the nuclear arsenal.”

In other words, Washington would be inclined to put pressure on the government of President Pervez Musharraf but is reluctant to do that, fearful that it might weaken his position and unwittingly contribute to a takeover of the government by people who are sympathetic to Al Qaeda. Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal could thus fall into the hands of those who are the sworn enemies of the West.

“Thus far Washington has accepted Gen Pervez Musharraf’s half-hearted measures for dealing with the nuclear proliferation network of A.Q. Khan, addressing the terrorist involvement of Pakistani intelligence and controlling the Taliban/Al Qaeda bases in Washington. Getting Pakistan to do more would require a major sustained effort by senior US officials, including addressing the longstanding tensions with India. Because of Iraq, Washington’s national security gurus do not have the hours in their days to manage that — or the troops to secure Afghanistan,” he continues.

But for 2007 to produce peace along Pakistan’s long border with Afghanistan will take more than American pressure on Islamabad. It will require a complete rethinking in the way both Kabul and Islamabad have dealt with the restive Pashtun tribes on both sides of their common border. It will take economics to find an enduring solution to this long-festering problem. Exactly how economics can help will be the subject for next week.

THE 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein from power culminated in his execution on December 30, 2006 — a tragic event that has a lesson for other despotic rulers who use their power against their own people in a cruel way.

A significant majority of the Iraqi people who had suffered for decades from the excesses perpetrated by an oppressive dictator demanded the trial of Saddam Hussein for the atrocities committed by him during his tyrannical rule.

A number of human rights organisations, however, pleaded with the United States to ensure that Saddam Hussein’s trial was perceived by the Iraqis and the international community as independent and fair. Regrettably, however, the United States paid no heed to this sane advice and asked the Iraqi interim governing council to set up a special Iraqi tribunal for the trial.

For obvious reasons, the tribunal was seen as a front for the United States, and subsequent events relating to the trial revealed that it did not meet the demands of justice in accordance with the required international standards. No wonder that the international community is scathing about the tribunal’s performance and its impartiality. As a matter of fact, the trial of Saddam Hussein by a court that carried the stigma of being a US proxy helped boost a positive image of the ruthless dictator who had committed heinous crimes against humanity, by allowing him to emerge as a symbol of anti-US imperialism and a hero of pan-Arabism.

One of the universally accepted principles governing a trial involving human rights violations is that its mechanism is not established by a regime that owes its existence to a foreign power. Thus, the tribunal set up by Washington’s hand-picked Iraqi interim governing council for Saddam’s trial was unacceptable on legal and moral grounds. Moreover, under the Geneva Conventions, prisoners of war are to be tried at the end of the occupation and hostilities.

Seen in this light, Saddam’s trial, which was held in an Iraq still occupied by American-led forces, was highly questionable. It would have been fair if Saddam Hussein had been tried by the International Court of Justice as genocide, war crimes as well as other human rights violations fall under its jurisdiction.

The execution of Saddam Hussein has become an embarrassment to the United States as public opinion all over the world has been overwhelmingly against its flagrant disregard of international law and the UN Conventions. The trial has made of a mockery of justice. This should particularly be alarming to enlightened Americans who would have preferred to pursue a different course more in accordance with the universally recognised norms of justice and fair play and also conforming to the high principles of morality professed by the United States from time to time.

Regrettably, however, the Bush administration’s policies differed perceptibly from the ones that were followed by the United States in the past, particularly after the Second World War. During its tenure it showed absolutely no qualms over its interference in the internal affairs of many nations on a regular basis and did not hesitate to resort to direct military interventions if considered beneficial to American interests.

The most glaring example remains the US-led invasion of Iraq, undertaken without the approval of the UN Security Council. This falls within the definition of war crimes.

America’s policy on Iraq, camouflaged in the rhetoric of lofty ideals, has thus been motivated not by its concern for the interests of that country but by an ambition to gain control over its oil and other resources and expand its sphere of influence in the region.

However, after having failed to achieve these objectives, the United States is playing an insidious game in Iraq and is contemplating to divide it along sectarian and ethnic lines. It believes that it can push the country into political turmoil that would necessitate the prolongation of its stay inside Iraq thus enabling it to attain its strategic goals there.

Washington is clandestinely fanning sectarian and ethnic differences in Iraq. It has been noted that in their reaction to Saddam Hussein’s execution some segments in Iraq have exhibited sectarian and ethnic feelings. This cannot be overlooked and remedial measures should be taken to reverse this undesirable trend.

The people of Iraq must remain vigilant and show a greater sense of prudence and pragmatism. For obvious reasons, the people of Iraq should not abdicate their national interests to make way for the whims of the United States. They must continue to preserve the territorial integrity of their country at all cost and reinforce the ties that link its people together.

The importance of keeping Iraq united can hardly be over-emphasised. If the Iraqis fail to maintain the integrity of their nation they will face a crisis of unimaginable proportions with disastrous consequences.

The writer is a former ambassador.

IF there were an American Evelyn Waugh alive today, he could ask for no better subject matter than the recent history of Somalia. Readers of Waugh will remember “Black Mischief,” in which the Oxford-educated Emperor Seth of Azania tries and fails to reform his African realm with the assistance of the incorrigible lounge lizard, Basil Seal.

Among my favourite passages is one that concerns the response in London to the news of Seth’s historic victory over a rebel army:

“Any news in the paper tonight, dear?”

“No, dear, nothing of interest.”

Though Azania was clearly modelled more closely on Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) than its neighbour to the north, I imagine similar responses to the latest news from Somalia that the Supreme Council of Islamic Courts has been ousted from power by Ethiopian forces loyal to the transitional federal government.

As with all history, the same events can be narrated in at least two mutually contradictory ways. Here, first, is Somalia’s recent history from a neoconservative perspective:

Somalia’s troubles can be traced to its partition by the incompetent European imperial powers (especially the cheese-eating French), but the rot really set in during the late 1970s, when the detente-obsessed Carter administration failed to assist Gen. Mohamed Siad Barre in his war against communist Ethiopia.

After Siad’s overthrow, the country descended into civil war. As a failed state, it became a potential base for terrorist operations. In 1993, the Clinton administration sent US troops to Somalia. This was a disaster for four reasons.

First, the intervention was authorized by a United Nations Security Council resolution, thus compromising American freedom of action (by giving the French a say).

Second, President Clinton reduced the size of the US military presence when he should have increased it.

Third, unforeseen operational difficulties led to the loss of two US Black Hawk helicopters and 18 US military personnel, damaging American credibility in the region. (The number of Somalis killed is not known.)

Finally, instead of seeing the intervention through, Clinton cut and ran, even specifying in advance the departure date for US forces.

These blunders had negative consequences for US national security. Al Qaeda established a base in the south of the country. The 1998 attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were almost certainly planned there.

Last summer, a militant Islamist organization calling itself the Supreme Council of Islamic Courts seized power in Mogadishu. Similar to the Taliban in its militancy, the council imposed strict Sharia law. There were prohibitions on chewing khat, the local drug of choice, and even watching soccer games in public places. The overall head of the council was Sheik Hassan Dahir Aweys, a suspected Al Qaeda operative. As US Assistant Secretary of State Jendayi Frazer said in December, the council leaders were “extremists to the core.”

US policy has been to prevent Somalia from becoming a new front in the global war on terror, but without overt intervention, which could be politically problematic.

Accordingly, the United States provided logistical naval support to the recent Ethiopian invasion and has announced an aid package of $17 million to assist the new transitional federal government of Prime Minister Ali Mohammed Gedi.

As Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Thursday: “The Somali people “have a historic opportunity to begin to move beyond two decades of warlordism, extreme violence and humanitarian suffering.”

Now let me offer you the alternative reading of events.

Long before the arrival of European imperialism, Somalia was a country plagued by warfare. There were recurrent attempts by Ethiopia to subjugate the Somalis. There were also frequent feuds between the various Somali clans themselves, like the Hawiye clan, which has its base in Mogadishu. The new prime minister is in fact a Hawiye, but has forfeited much credibility by acting as an Ethiopian puppet. In the eyes of many Somalis, recent events are just the latest of many wars with Ethiopia. That is why the recent rout of the Islamists is unlikely to be the last act in the Somali tragedy.

The Islamists offered Somalia order; not a Western order, to be sure, but order nonetheless. Under their rule, the price of an AK-47 in the Mogadishu markets slumped to $15, a sure sign that the warlords were being forced to downsize their militias. Young men no longer roared through the streets in the Mad Max-style vehicles known locally as “technicals” — trucks mounted with antiaircraft guns. Some were returning to school and university. Others were getting jobs with private electricity companies and airlines. Internet cafes were beginning to displace militia training camps. Kalashnikovs were being traded in for mobile phones.

Now, with the Islamists gone, the most likely scenario is a return of the warlords. Worse, the Islamists may now revert to the tactic of suicide bombing to destabilise the new government. As has happened in Afghanistan, the overthrow of an Islamist government will be followed not by a new order but by the old disorder.

As I said, it would take a satirist of Evelyn Waugh’s genius to do justice to this story — to lay bare all the unintended consequences of yet another enforced regime change. At least in the Cold War, “our son of a bitch” — the local anti-communist strongman — could be counted on to impose a brutal kind of order. Now, in the war on terror, the United States would rather see a country torn apart by multiple sons-of-bitches than ruled under Sharia law.

But the more US foreign policy promotes anarchy instead of order, the stronger the Islamists’ appeal will be. And the darker the shade of mischief that will ensue. —Dawn/Los Angeles Times Service

THE new plan for Iraq that President Bush will announce this week will suffer from the same fallacy that has infected each of his previous war strategies — and also most of the counterproposals sprouting up in Washington. That is, the notion that American action can produce decisive results in Iraq in six to 12 months.

The administration’s original war plan — to the extent one existed — foresaw the creation of an Iraqi administration and the withdrawal of most US troops within six months of the invasion.

When that failed, the administration wagered that it could oversee the election of an interim Iraqi government, the writing of a constitution, that constitution’s ratification and the election of a permanent government in 12 months.

Insistence on that timetable produced the half-baked constitution that now hamstrings the “unity” government. A year ago the administration supposed that it could train enough Iraqi police and military forces in 2006 to draw down US troops to 100,000 or fewer. It came no closer than it did in 2005, when it had much the same plan.

Now Bush is likely to bet that the dispatch of additional American forces will somehow produce a breakthrough in Baghdad before 2008. That parallels the Iraq Study Group, which foresees a transition of the war to full Iraqi control and the withdrawal of all US combat forces by the first quarter of 2008, and Democratic plans for the beginning of a troop drawdown in four to six months.

In Washington’s bipartisan mindset, the next six months are always crucial in Iraq. Persistently, we believe that one big, intense effort will turn the country around — or make it possible for us to leave. Why? Perhaps because Bush has never been willing to ask the country to commit itself to a long struggle in Iraq, despite his view of it as “the central front” in a war on terrorism that will define the 21st century. Instead he proposes the war that the Army and the public can tolerate without too much strain. For their part, war opponents understandably have been looking for a way out since the mission began.

Iraq, however, doesn’t operate on Washington’s clock — something Iraqi leaders have repeatedly tried and failed to explain to the ambassadors and generals who demand benchmarks and timetables. And why should it? In historical context, the country is not much different from others that have emerged from decades of dictatorship and tried to sort out a new political status quo among multiple competing ethnic groups.

Yugoslavia began to break down in 1991; despite repeated western interventions, the bloodshed continued until the end of the decade. The wars over Congo’s future began in 1994 with the end of the Mobuto dictatorship and didn’t end until 2003. Lebanon’s civil war began in 1976 and ended in 1989.

As the behaviour of the Maliki government and its Sunni enemies has made painfully clear, Iraq is nearer the beginning than the end of its sorting out. —Dawn/Washington Post Service