Tuesday, June 17, 2008

War of words benefits enemy

June 17, 2008

War of words benefits enemy


IT was with great relief that the people of this region welcomed the outcome of a visit that Afghan President Hamid Karzai paid to Pakistan a few months ago and the talks he held with his Pakistani counterpart Pervez Musharraf on bilateral tensions.
However, the relief stemming from signs that the two leaders understood each other's problems dealing with militancy and were ready to work with each other was short-lived. It might or might not have to do with the political upheavals in Pakistan, but today, we find Pak-Afghan tensions hitting a new peak, with Islamabad and Kabul warning each other over cross-border militancy.
Karzai warned on Sunday that Afghan security forces would be justified to attack Taliban insurgents in Pakistan, his supposed ally in the US-led "war on terror," and said such action would be legitimate self-defence.
The Afghan president was reacting to a Taliban attack on an Afghan jail, freeing some 900 prisoners, including 350 Taliban members. While he has in the post criticised the Pak government, it was the first time that Karzai threatened to send troops over the border to Pakistan.
Pakistan hit back on Monday, summoning the Afghan ambassador in Islamabad and vowing to defend its sovereignty. And both in Pakistan and Afghanistan, popular anger grew against each other, with hundreds of Afghan tribesmen rallying on their side of the frontier to voice their support for Karzai's tough stance.
Relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan have never been smooth, and the situation turned worse after the post-9/11 US military action that ousted the Taliban from power in Kabul and changed the political and military shape of the country with Pakistan's support.
Afghan and Western officials accuse Pakistan, which backed the Taliban until the 2001 US war on Afghanistan of failing to curb Al Qaeda and Taliban extremists based in its troubled tribal belt in the border area. They say they are also worried over recent negotiations between the Pakistani government and Taliban commanders.
The Pakistanis dismiss the charges and blame Afghanistan for failing to curb militancy on its side of the border. Islamabad also points out that it has more than 90,000 troops along the border, with 1,000 Pakistani soldiers having died fighting insurgents since 200
At the root of the conflict is the lack of mutual trust between Kabul and Afghanistan. On the Pak side of things, the new government finds it imperative to work out some form of a deal with some of the "moderate" militant elements as it seeks to consolidate its security grip on the country. That explains the dialogue between the Islamabad government and Pakistani Taliban warlord Baitullah Mehsud, who was named by Karzai as one of the sources of cross-border trouble for Kabul.
Kabul and Islamabad seem to overlook that the beneficiary of their war of words are militants on either side of the border. Any effective action against militants, whether Afghan Taliban or Pak Taliban or any other, depends on security co-operation by the two governments. Threatening each other would only take the two in a negative direction with little hope of success in tackling the common problem of militancy that both sides face.