Pakistan and Afghanistan Military Ties
April 17, 2013
The visit by an Afghan military delegation to Pakistan to hold consultations with its counterparts here “to reduce space for detractors”, may seem routine. However, after the strained ties between the two as a result of a cross-border shelling incident that the Afghans not only blamed on the Pakistani military, but the incident also led to the cancellation of a visit by an Afghan military team to Quetta for a joint training exercise, this represents a considerable advance by the Afghan military and the Afghan government. This indicates that the Afghan military is having second thoughts about its accusation. It also shows that the main sponsor of the Afghan army, the US, has realised that, with its own withdrawal due in 2014 and with future troop levels not yet certain, the survival of that force will depend on support from Pakistan. That support cannot come from India, even though both the government and a disproportionate number of senior officers hail from the pro-Indian Northern Alliance. The backing needed has to come from Pakistan, thus it was necessary for both the USA and Afghanistan to get outstanding issues out of the way, specially when the latest incident had been created by Afghanistan out of nothing, and was meant to throw the blame for its own failures on the Pakistan military in the eyes of the US forces.
However, it should also be noticed that the Afghan Army has only reconciled with the Pakistan Army because it wished to discuss a subject of interest to the USA: border coordination. Pakistan should know that so long as there are foreign forces in the region, there will be issues of this sort. Pakistan should not be ready to turn its cooperation on and off, just as there was when US gunship helicopters attacked the Pakistani border check post at Salala. The issue was partly resolved because the northern distribution network proved prohibitively expensive.
The best way of handling the situation is for Pakistan to concert measures with Iran and Turkey to bring peace to Afghanistan and to persuade occupying troops to leave the region on schedule. Unless the neighbours of Afghanistan are allowed to play their due role, Pakistan will find to its cost that improvements in relations with Afghanistan are not to be turned on or off like water in taps.
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