40
WASHINGTON: Pakistan's planned boycott of next week's Bonn conference deals an early blow to US efforts to have Afghanistan's powerful neighbours act as guarantors of the post-2014 peace, experts said Tuesday.
Analysts said Pakistan's decision to boycott the conference, signaled that Islamabad is backing away from the grand framework for future peace talks being promoted by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Washington views the December 5 conference in Bonn, Germany as a way for Afghanistan and its neighbours to work on ways to fill the void and build stability after US and Nato combat troops withdraw in 2014.
Expert Shuja Nawaz said the Bonn talks are to help set up a framework where Afghan neighbours like “Iran, Pakistan, China, Russia and India would jointly agree to not meddle and also agree to be the guarantors of the peace.”
The framework set up in Bonn, he said, would hopefully induce the Taliban and other militants to join elusive peace talks with the US-backed government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
Ten years after the US-led invasion, Karzai's reconciliation efforts were derailed by the September assassination of peace broker Burhanuddin Rabbani, and the Taliban are seen to pose an increasingly wide threat in Afghanistan.
Nawaz, a South Asia expert with the Atlantic Council think tank, said Pakistan's boycott of the talks again undercut those troubled efforts.
“This will be seen by many outside as Pakistan wanting to retain its ability to use some of these groups to further its interests in Afghanistan, which was the older Pakistani strategy in Afghanistan,” Nawaz said.
Pakistan had long seen the Taliban and related militant groups as a way of countering arch-rival India's own influence in Afghanistan.
Nawaz said the boycott “kind of veers off from the discussions held with Secretary Clinton,” who last month appeared to make progress in urging Pakistan to crack down on militants on its soil and promote peace talks.
Lisa Curtis, a South Asia expert at the Heritage Foundation, also argued that Pakistan's boycott of the Bonn conference would be a damaging blow to President Barack Obama's long-term strategy on Afghanistan.
“The Obama administration had hoped that the Bonn conference... would help catalyze reconciliation efforts in Afghanistan,” Curtis wrote.
The Nato attack and Pakistan's boycott of Bonn “have cast a pall over the Bonn process.”
“Most doubted that the Bonn conference itself would result in any serious breakthroughs with regard to Afghan reconciliation, and this week's events seem to make those prospects even dimmer,” she said.
Ashley Tellis, an expert with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told AFP that Pakistan's decision to boycott the Bonn conference was a setback for the broader enterprise of peacebuilding in Afghanistan.
“Whatever the international community agrees to at Bonn stands a better chance of success if Pakistan is seen as being party to those decisions,” he wrote in an email exchange.
“But Pakistan's absence at Bonn does not necessarily undermine the administration's efforts at political reconciliation with the Taliban: those initiatives are playing out in other, more secret channels,” he said.
Tellis said Clinton last month obtained assurances from Pakistan on its commitment to the notion that the Afghan conflict must end through peace talks and that the Taliban should be willing to negotiate.
These commitments, he said, buttressed the longer-term reconciliation plan, but it was not clear whether the Pakistanis had agreed to bring the Taliban or the Taliban-linked Haqqani network to the table at a particular date.
The Nato attack “sets back that entire initiative all the same because I think what the Pakistanis will now conclude... is that the United States and Afghan national security forces are treating them as the adversary rather” than as partners, he said.
Islamabad has harboured doubts that Washington sees it as an ally in the fight against militants, all the more so after a top US official in September accused Pakistani intelligence of being a “veritable arm” of the Haqqanis.
Most analysts doubt there will a rupture in US-Pakistani ties because both sides need each other: Washington counts on Islamabad for military supplies to landlocked Afghanistan and Pakistan needs US military and economic aid.
