HAD they had the wisdom years ago to do what they seem to have resolved finally to do now, Pakistan and Afghanistan would have been much better off in terms of their ability to crush a common enemy.

The fact that Isaf commander Gen John Campbell and Afghan army chief Sher Mohammad Karimi should have come together to meet army chief Gen Raheel Sharif shows the realisation, albeit late, that only a joint strategy and coordinated action undertaken with sincerity can produce results and eliminate the safe havens which enable the Taliban on both sides of the Durand Line to spread death and destruction.

Tuesday’s meeting between the three generals comes in the wake of several high-level sessions held to chart out a new course at a time the stakeholders consider ideal to undo the follies of the past.

Take a look: Peshawar attack: Afghanistan, Isaf promise action against Taliban group

The first of these was Afghan President Ashraf Ghani’s visit to Islamabad and his meetings with the Pakistani political and military leaderships; then we saw American Secretary of State John Kerry’s meeting with Gen Sharif in the US, and lately, the latter’s dash to Kabul in the wake of the massacre at the Army Public School in Peshawar.

The last visit was especially significant because Gen Sharif reportedly shared with Kabul incriminating evidence Pakistan had obtained about the involvement of the Afghanistan-based TTP leadership in the Dec 16 carnage.

An even more significant development was the Afghan National Army’s operation earlier this week against the Taliban militants in the Dangam district of the Kunar province bordering Pakistan.

By any standards this is a good beginning, which needs to be built upon. While the world had legitimate concerns regarding the presence of militant sanctuaries on Pakistani soil, Islamabad’s protestations that there were safe havens on the other side, too, seldom evoked a sympathetic response.

With Hamid Karzai gone, there are reasons to believe that President Ghani is sensitive to Pakistan’s concerns and realises that the common enemy cannot be neutralised without wholehearted cooperation at the political and military levels.

The latter breaks down into details that include operational matters and intelligence sharing. Afghanistan is in transition in more ways than one, so it would be naive to believe that there is going to be total harmony between Islamabad and Kabul on the shape of things to come. But elements that have the frightening potential to divide them are less pervasive than the multiplicity of common interests uniting them.

Published in Dawn, December 25th, 2014