Pakistan’s back in the Great Game
lence, especially suicide attacks on civilians in crowded places leading to hundreds of causalities. The aim of damaging the credibility of the Afghan government by showing up its inability to protect its citizens was achieved very substantially. This has allowed Pakistan to emerge as the key interlocutor on behalf of the Taliban even as it continued to deny that it had anything to do with them. Exhaustion and distraction meant that the US and other western countries were happy to buy this fiction if it allowed them to quietly exit Afghanistan.
President Ghani’s failure to build a cohesive and inclusive government, or to establish working relations with parliament, whose term has incidentally expired, has meant that the Afghan government is internally hobbled and unable to deliver on good governance. The agreement that set up the National Unity Government with Abdullah in 2014 required that within two years the constitution would be amended to provide for a prime minister, has not happened. The largely non-Pashtun Jamiat from whose ranks Abdullah, foreign minister Rabbani and many more joined the government, has started speaking up as an opposition party. They led a big anti-government demonstration two days after the May 31 terrorist attacks leading to police firing with six dead including the son of the deputy speaker of the upper house of parliament. The next day, at his funeral, attended by Abdullah, Rabbani and others, three bombs went off killing nine persons. Jamiat leaders like Governor Atta of Balkh blamed persons within the government for the complicity in the May 31 bomb blast. And for the same reason, Rabbani boycotted his own government’s Kabul Peace Process presided over by President Ghani.
Trump’s effectively ceding leadership to China on many fronts has meant that Pakistan is emboldened enough to try and push the Afghan government hard enough for them to acknowledge that Pakistan would have de facto control over Afghan affairs, something it tried to do after 1989 Russian withdrawal. At present, the momentum seems to be favouring them as neither is the Afghan government united nor are the security forces in a condition to take the initiative back from the Taliban. If these trends are not reversed, Afghanistan could see increased violence that could potentially spill over its borders.