In Afghanistan, Pakistan has outmanoeuvred India

In the months before the brutal assassination of Ahmad Shah Massoud, the commander of the India-backed Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, two days before the Al Qaida’s attacks on New York’s Twin Towers in September 2001, the Afghan resistance leader had an unusual visitor: A CIA operative based in Pakistan had finally been granted a face-to-face meeting.

Massoud’s inner circle, deeply uncomfortable over the US spy being given access to their hideout, were even more taken aback by what he had to say on why Washington chose to partner with Pakistan and had cold-shouldered Massoud, the charismatic Tajik leader who had doggedly fought the Soviets, built an army of resistance that cut across Afghanistan’s ethnic divide, and kept the Taliban at bay.

One of the many young fighters in the room that day, who 21 years later remains deeply suspicious of the CIA’s role in Massoud’s assassination, remembers how affronted they all were at the CIA officer’s open support for Pakistan’s continued role in Afghanistan through its hated Taliban proxy.

As he told me recently: “We were shocked. Firstly, that Massoud would talk to the Americans, who had given us nothing. And secondly, when the CIA operative said, ‘you know there’s a reason that the West chose to back Pakistan over you. They speak our language – not just English – but they can present their argument, lay out their long-term strategy, which Washington buys into. You don’t.”

Massoud, he said, simply shrugged it off.

But some 20 years later, with the US handing Afghanistan back to Pakistan on a platter on August 15, 2021, the CIA operative’s words seemed prescient; as true then as it is now.

Donald Trump’s administration may have called Pakistan out for its “lies and deceit” when it scrapped decades-old security and defence ties. But now, with even the Financial Action Task Force poised to take Islamabad off the grey list for terror financing and money laundering, Pakistan seems to have once again made the better argument, President Joe Biden’s “most dangerous nation” comment notwithstanding. Its case being promoted by Zalmay Khalilzad, the Afghan-born US Special Envoy, who shares the Taliban’s Pashtun ancestry and whose February 2020 Doha peace deal with the Quetta Shura was primarily an agreement with the Pakistani army and intelligence to ensure an incident-free withdrawal of US forces.

Rawalpindi has used geography and geopolitics and its perceived influence over the Taliban to its advantage to reclaim its most-favoured ally status. Delhi, arm-twisted into withdrawing support to even the remnants of the Northern Alliance (now led by Ahmed Shah Massoud’s son Ahmed Massoud), seems to have few cards left to play.

Massoud Sr’s forces, it must be recalled, had chased the Soviets out of Afghanistan in 1992 through the Soviet-built Salang Pass. And when the Taliban took Kabul barely four years later in 1996, it was Massoud’s gritty coalition of anti-Taliban forces -- which included not just Tajiks, but Uzbeks, Hazaras and the majority Pashtuns led by the one-legged commander Abdul Haq (who had been picked to lead the government if the Taliban had not eliminated him) -- who put up a united front that bested the Kandahar-based militia and their Pakistani handlers in Rawalpindi.

Today, in an eerie repeat of history, a National Resistance Front (NRF) put together by Massoud Jr is the only force pushing back against the Taliban. Except this time, its remit is limited to the Panjshir and Andarab valleys, its ranks made up of former members of the Afghan National Army and residents of Panjshir. The 25,000-man force has no international support, no funding, no arms supply.

The Taliban, by contrast, has access to $7.1 billion worth of military equipment, helicopters and supplies left behind by the US. Armed with a much clearer military strategy this time around, led by the Pakistani armed forces that swept in with the Taliban, they made sure that supply lines from neighbouring Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, once the Northern Alliance’s lifeline, were cut, ensuring that the ragtag group of resistance forces could not re-arm.

Chilling videos of a group of 40 young men, including the NRF chief commander Saleh Mohammed, captured after they ran out of ammunition, their arms tied behind their backs, facing Taliban firing squads have been doing the rounds. The NRF are taking some comfort from the fact that two senior Taliban commanders -- Qari Anas, the Taliban’s intelligence chief, and former Guantanamo Bay detainee and recently appointed War Commander Mullah Abdul Qayyum Zakir -- met the same fate in May and September respectively, as have 85 Talibs.

Massoud Jr has appealed to the international community to stop the genocide of his people, but his plea has fallen on deaf ears. Even more shocking is the shifting of loyalties by former Tajik resistance leaders like the former Governor of Balkh, Ata Mohammed Noor, former Afghan Vice President and Speaker Yunus Qanooni, and the once-feared Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum. That is a bigger blow. Some reports indicate, though, that one of Dostum’s sons has stepped in to bolster the NRF.

But it is the curious role played by Dr Abdullah Abdullah, who as head of the National Reconciliation Council, and dubbed the ‘peacemaker’, dealt extensively with the Quetta Shura and is now being actively wooed by the West, that is raising many eyebrows. Long seen as being close to New Delhi, his visit to Islamabad in 2020, talking to Pakistani agencies, was the first sign that the former Vice President was not averse to switching sides.

The fact that he stayed on in Kabul when Taliban forces captured the capital last August – as did former President Hamid Karzai -- unlike President Ashraf Ghani and his entire cabinet, who fled, was the next big signal. That Abdullah conferred closely with the British Ambassador to Afghanistan – Washington’s proxy -- who recently hosted a meeting between him and the Taliban (and some say, the Pakistani military), at the embassy, before he made a second visit to the Indian capital in late September, ostensibly to spend time with his family, set off fresh speculation that the Taliban – and the West – may want him to be the face of the Afghan government.

A section of the Taliban has been persuaded that this is the only way to win international recognition, and free funds frozen by the US. Whether this has the backing of the rest of the disparate group of mullahs is unclear. The Taliban Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada, a creature of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, is pitted against Kandahar-based Mullah Yacoob and Mullah Baradar, the son and deputy of Taliban founder Mullah Omar. Meanwhile, the Sirajuddin Haqqani-led faction, with strong links to Al Qaida and the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Taliban and its ambitions to create an Islamic state that includes parts of Baluchistan, Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Indian Kashmir, poses a direct challenge to the writ of the Pakistan Army.

That the Taliban continues to use drugs to fund its movement, as seen by the huge drugs caches that are fetching up off the coast of Gujarat -- the last seizure, as recently as October 8, was of a Pakistani boat with Rs 350 crore worth heroin on board – and that there is an uptick in terror in Jammu and Kashmir show that little has changed.

This is why External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar’s verbal barrage against America’s virtual restoration of Pakistan as its key non-NATO ally -- as amply demonstrated when Washington forked out $450 million to Pakistan for a lifetime upgrade of its F-16 armoury, making its Air Force interoperable with NATO and US forces operating from the Jacobabad airbase -- begs the question: How could India not have seen it coming?

India has watched the United States – and increasingly now, the UK – re-establish ever closer ties with Pakistan, giving it the status of virtual watchdog over Afghanistan and its new rulers, the Taliban. America’s specious argument that it was to help Pakistan, the fount-head of terror, in its ‘counter-terrorism’ effort, did bring forth Jaishankar’s biting comment, “You’re not fooling anyone.”

But did Delhi not fool itself?

During the EAM’s visit to the US, red carpet or not, American officialdom refused to back down from its public insistence that relations with Pakistan were separate from its partnership with Delhi.

The buzz is that this is a fallout of Delhi’s continued oil purchases from Russia, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s face-saving message to Russian President Vladimir Putin on this being “not an era of war” notwithstanding. But the real story lies in the shifting power centres that has seen the vacuum left by the US exit from Afghanistan being filled by Rawalpindi, where a new pro-US army chief is set to be installed. Offering up Al Qaida chief Ayman Al Zawahiri won Pakistan Army Chief Gen Qamar Jawed Bajwa American confidence. It is expected to be bolstered with another Al Qaida ‘offering’ soon. For Rawalpindi, it seems, as demonstrated by Gen. Bajwa’s recent tour of Washington, where he was feted and dined on his purported farewell tour after he had rebuilt Pakistan’s ties with the US, there’s no going back.

Ahmed Shah Massoud must be turning in his grave.

(Neena Gopal is a senior journalist and former Foreign Editor of Gulf News who has reported from various hotspots in South Asia and the Middle East, including Afghanistan)