A MAJOR bombing in Kabul with scores of casualties is an early warning that this year’s fighting season in Afghanistan may be the bloodiest and most devastating yet. With peace talks already stuttering as the Quadrilateral Coordination Group scrambles to smooth over growing disagreements between the Afghan and Pakistani sides, a full-blown crisis may be brewing.

Unhappily, none of the three major state actors, Afghanistan, Pakistan and the US, appear to have a clear sense of how to proceed.

The US seems to drift between disengagement and ad hoc diplomacy, such as when Secretary of State John Kerry visited Kabul recently to press the national unity government to show some unity and focus on governing.

Meanwhile, the Afghan government seems determined to prove that it can make a bad situation worse by endlessly feuding within.

As for Pakistan, despite nudging the Afghan Taliban to the negotiation table, there appears to be a strange complacency in official quarters about the possibility of Afghanistan imploding.

Perhaps the fourth side in the QCG, China, could be more assertive in using its influence. But Chinese foreign policy interventions are notoriously opaque and difficult to predict.

As ever, the focus may well come down to managing tensions in the near term. The Afghan government views attacks in Kabul as a red line of sorts and tends to ramp up the belligerence towards Pakistan whenever the Afghan capital is struck by the Taliban.

With the annual fighting season already fierce and widespread and political gridlock in Kabul likely to continue, Pakistan may become a convenient scapegoat.

Ill-advised as many of the Afghan government’s verbal attacks on Pakistan may be, perhaps there is a need for Pakistani policymakers to work harder to achieve the long-term peace and stability that all state actors claim they want.

The reluctance of the Taliban to talk to the Afghan government may be rooted in power struggles within the Taliban, but what is in the latter’s interest is not necessarily in Pakistan’s.

In doing all that it can to help Afghans build peace and stability, the state here must be careful to avoid bringing the war in Afghanistan to Pakistan.

Yet, there is surely a great deal of space between preventing the Taliban from declaring war on Pakistan and pushing the Taliban to talk to the Afghan government. What influence Pakistan has, it should use — carefully, but use it, it must.

Published in Dawn, April 20th, 2016