The Longest August (58 page)

The assault started at six thirty
am
, when a car bomb exploded outside the target. The powerful blast razed the building. Then a suicide bomber detonated his vest of explosives outside the crumbling structure. Among the survivors was Dr. Subodh Sanjivpaul. He locked himself in his bathroom for three hours. “When I was coming out, I found two or three dead bodies,” he said at the military hospital in Kabul. “When firing was going on the first car bomb exploded and the roof fell on my head.”
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Karzai went out of his way to condemn the terror attack and thank India for the assistance it was offering his republic.

Yet at the same time, Karzai tried to lure Taliban leaders to the negotiating table, an enterprise that had Islamabad's enthusiastic backing. On the eve of his meeting with General Kayani and the ISI director-general Lieutenant General Ahmed Shuja Pasha on June 28 in Kabul, Karzai sacked his NSD chief, Amrullah Saleh. Like his predecessor Serwari, he was an unashamedly pro-India Tajik and was viewed by the Taliban and the ISI as their most vocal antagonist.
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Kayani and Shuja reportedly urged Karzai to give the Taliban a place in a future political settlement. Delhi immediately conveyed its unease at a possible Taliban power-sharing deal, which among other things would block civilian aid and investment by India.
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Given the zero-sum relationship between the major South Asian nations regarding Afghanistan, a diplomatic setback for Delhi was an automatic gain for Islamabad, which wanted to see the peace process advance in Afghanistan but only under its tutelage. The latest development also highlighted the fact that when it came to reconciling the Kabul government with Taliban insurgents, India had no role to play except to raise objections.

The high officials in Delhi were also irritated when in the ongoing negotiations between Afghanistan and Pakistan to update their 1965
Transit Trade Agreement, India's interests were overlooked. Islamabad agreed to Kabul's request to allow Afghan trucks to proceed to the Indian border at Wagah as well as to the ports of Karachi and Gwadar. This was incorporated in the Memorandum of Understanding that Pakistan and Afghanistan signed in July 2010. In marked contrast, Islamabad summarily rejected Delhi's proposal to let Indian trucks drive through its territory to deliver goods in Afghanistan. Pakistan was Afghanistan's leading export partner and second most important import partner after the United States. Intent on maintaining its current commercial hegemony over Afghanistan, it wanted to rule out India as a competitor.

Afghanistan's transit trade through Pakistan was also a lucrative source of revenue for the Karachi port, through which most of Afghanistan's external trade passed, and for Pakistani road transport companies, many of which were owned by the army. Furthermore, Pakistani officials feared that if they allowed direct Afghan-India commerce through their country, the Afghans might start using the Mumbai port for part of their foreign trade, thereby curtailing Pakistan's revenue.

In November 2010, Afghanistan and Pakistan formed a joint chamber of commerce to expand trade. Official commerce between Afghanistan and Pakistan commerce had been rising steadily, from $830 million in 2006 to $2.5 billion in 2012. The informal trade, including smuggling, in that year amounted to $2 billion.
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Denied the use of Pakistani territory for its commerce with Afghanistan, the Indians resorted to making greater use of Iran as a route to trade with Afghanistan. As a result of the 2003 Indo-Afghan Preferential Trade Agreement, which reduced customs duty on a range of goods, bilateral trade increased to $600 million in 2011.
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In the political arena, to Delhi's relief, rapprochement between Karzai and Kayani fell apart after about a year for reasons beyond their control. The Obama administration had been increasingly using drone attacks to carry out targeted killings of jihadist militants in Pakistan. On May 2, 2011, US troops, acting unilaterally, killed Osama bin Laden in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad. Though Washington had allocated $20 billion in aid to Pakistan since 9/11,
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it could not rely on its government to cooperate in strict secrecy in the capture or assassination of the Al Qaida chief.

The Pentagon's operation enraged the Afghan Taliban as well as the four-year-old Pakistani Taliban. The latter vowed to avenge bin Laden's murder by escalating violence in the Afghan-Pakistan tribal belt and eastern Afghanistan. Also, before withdrawing from bordering provinces of
Afghanistan to let local forces deal with security, US-led NATO commanders encouraged Afghan soldiers to attack Pakistani border posts. As a result, cross-border shelling increased sharply.

On June 26, Karzai claimed that Pakistan had fired 470 rockets into two eastern Afghan provinces, evacuated by NATO troops, over the past three weeks, killing thirty-six people. He held Islamabad responsible for this bombardment even if regular Pakistani soldiers were not involved.
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The Pakistan military's artillery backing for the Afghan Taliban's operations illustrated partly a lack of civilian control over the armed forces in Islamabad and partly Pakistan's continued double-dealing with the United States regarding the Afghan Taliban.

As a consequence, the Afghan-Pakistan border region remained unstable. On September 25 Kabul claimed that more than 340 rockets had been fired over four days from Pakistan. Two weeks later Pakistan's security forces claimed that they had killed thirty Afghan militants when a group of two hundred insurgents from Afghanistan crossed the border into Pakistan.
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Following the September 20, 2011, suicide bombing in Kabul, which killed former Afghan president Burhanuddin Rabbani, the Tajik head of the High Peace Council (HPC), the Karzai government accused the ISI of involvement. In its view, Islamabad resorted to this tactic when it realized that it was being excluded by the HPC while pursuing peacemaking with the Taliban. By so doing, Pakistan underscored its control over the reconciliation process and its assertion of a key role in any talks on ending violence as well as its ability to sabotage the peace negotiations when it was sidelined.

Kabul's Strategic Partnership with Delhi

On October 4, 2011, Karzai and Indian prime minister Singh signed the Agreement on Strategic Partnership between India and the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. It was the first pact of its kind that Kabul signed after its treaty with the Soviet Union in 1979. Significantly, this document referred to the 1950 Treaty of Friendship between the two countries and stated that it was “not directed against any other State or group of States.” Under its “Political and Security Cooperation” provision, India agreed to “assist, as mutually determined, in the training, equipping and capacity building programs for Afghan National Security Forces.” The bulk of the
agreement covered cooperation in trade and economic development. The strategic partnership was to be supervised by a Partnership Council, cochaired by the foreign ministers of the two countries.
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At the joint press conference Singh said that violence in Afghanistan was undermining security in South Asia and that India would “stand by Afghanistan” when foreign troops withdrew from the country by December 2014. He pointedly made no reference to Delhi's commitment to increase its training of Afghan security forces, including the police.
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The next day Karzai explained that the accord simply made official the years of close ties between India and Afghanistan's post-Taliban government, with Delhi providing a significant amount of civilian aid to Kabul since 2002.

Pakistan responded in a convoluted fashion. Stressing that this was “no time for point scoring, playing politics or grandstanding,” its Foreign Ministry spokeswoman added, “At this defining stage when challenges have multiplied, as have the opportunities, it is our expectation that everyone, especially those in position of authority in Afghanistan, will demonstrate requisite maturity and responsibility.” By contrast, Talat Masood, a retired Pakistani general and a frequent commentator on national security, was direct. Alluding to Pakistan's long-held perception that “it is being encircled by India from both the eastern and western borders,” he said that “the agreement will heighten Pakistan's insecurities.” The influential
Dawn
newspaper expressed concern that the pact could lead to “ill-advised efforts to ramp up Pakistani involvement in Afghanistan.”
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Islamabad's fear was enhanced when the Coulsdon-based
IHS Jane's Defence Weekly
published the details of India's promised military assistance provided by its Delhi correspondent Rahul Bedi on November 29. The plan was to fly twenty to thirty thousand Afghan recruits over the next three years for training in regimental centers in the north and east of India. The most promising troops would receive further training at the army's Counter Insurgency Jungle Warfare School in the northeastern state of Mizoram. The Afghan trainees would be equipped with assault rifles and other small arms, with the possibility of transferring rocket launchers, light artillery, and retrofitted Soviet T-55 tanks to them later.
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The figure of twenty to thirty thousand Afghan trainees turned out to be wildly inflated. During Karzai's visit to India in December 2013, the two governments announced that India would raise the number of ANSF trainees each year to one thousand, with the focus of the training being on counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operations.
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Around the same time, the Karzai government decided to allocate three of the four iron ore blocks, containing 1.8 billion tons of iron, in central Afghanistan to the Afghan Iron and Steel Consortium of Indian companies, led by the state-owned Steel Authority of India Limited. The deal required an investment of $10.3 billion, the largest in the war-torn country so far.
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But two years later, unable to raise capital on favorable terms and facing increased security risks, the consortium considered slashing its initial outlay to $1.5 billion.
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To balance his pro-India bias, Karzai suggested a Strategic Partnership Agreement (SPA) with Pakistan during the Afghanistan-Pakistan-Britain summit chaired by British prime minister David Cameron on September 27, 2012, on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly session in New York. This was warmly welcomed by President Zardari. On his return to Kabul, however, Karzai came up with a precondition. Pakistan, he said, must stop “the export of terrorism, suicide bombers, interference and all the other things which result in killing and disturbing the Afghan people's tranquility and [is] destabilizing Afghanistan.”
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This unexpected move by Karzai slowed progress toward an SPA between the two neighbors.

All the same, in November, Afghanistan's HPC leaked its document “Afghan Peace Process Roadmap to 2015” to Pakistan's high officials. It envisaged direct talks between the Kabul government and the Taliban in early 2013, with a Saudi city as the preferred venue, and a truce soon thereafter, followed by arrangements for the insurgents to be reintegrated and their leaders given a share of power. It seemed more a wish list than a realistic plan.

However, what stood out was its acknowledgment of the centrality of Pakistan in the peace process, a point the Karzai government had been reluctant to concede so far. This was enough to alarm India. Its national security advisor, Shiv Shankar Menon, referred to the red lines agreed on by the London Conference on Afghanistan in January 2010, which required the Taliban to cut all links with Al Qaida and other terrorist organizations and respect the values and ideals enshrined in Afghanistan's constitution, including women's rights.
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In any case, despite repeated promises to conclude the envisaged SPA by a certain date, nothing definite materialized because of the trust deficit between the neighbors. Nor was there any discernible progress in the peace process with the insurgents. Given the exit date of December 2014 for foreign forces, Taliban leaders saw no need to negotiate with Karzai,
whom they routinely described as a puppet of America. Lack of progress in these areas suited Delhi.

Karzai the Juggler

As NATO forces' withdrawal date approached, Karzai urged Delhi to step up its assistance to bolster security within the framework of the 2011 Indo-Afghan SPA. During his visit to India from May 20 to 22, 2013, his twelfth since assuming office, he submitted his wish list to boost the security and counterterrorism capability of Afghanistan. It included a supply of attack helicopters, rocket launchers, light and heavy artillery, retrofitted Soviet T-55 tanks, and transport aircraft.

The Indian government needed to mull over Karzai's request, taking into account the electoral victory of Nawaz Sharif's party in Pakistan. Sharif's return to power in Islamabad augured well for an improvement in Indo-Pakistan relations, with a positive impact on the Afghan situation. Equipping Kabul with heavy weaponry was likely to be seen as provocative by Islamabad. Therefore the Singh government prevaricated, claiming that it needed the Kremlin's permission before transferring its Soviet-era arms to Afghanistan. There was also concern in Delhi that the successor to Karzai after the 2014 presidential election would be less pro-India than Karzai.

Back-channel efforts to bring the Karzai government and the Taliban leadership to the negotiating table in Doha collapsed in June 2013, when the Taliban called its newly opened office in the Qatari capital the Embassy of the Emirate of Afghanistan, flaunting the Taliban flag. Karzai was livid.

As before, Karzai walked a tightrope, intent on showing that Afghanistan's relations with India were not at the expense of Pakistan's. During his one-day trip to Islamabad on August 25 to confer with Nawaz Sharif, his session went so well that he extended his stay by a day. Sharif added $115 million to Pakistan's aid to Kabul, pushing the total to $500 million. At a joint press conference Karzai said that he wanted the Pakistani government to play a mediating role with the Taliban, with whom it had “a high degree of influence.” In return, Sharif repeated Pakistan's mantra that the Afghan peace and reconciliation process must be “Afghan-owned and Afghan-led.”
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