Strategic Depth
December 28, 2009
Pakistan’ security establishment has long been obsessed asserting its hegemony over Afghanistan. In the first instance this was a response to a militant secular Pakhtun nationalist movement that was the dominant political force in what became the North West Frontier province (NWFP) of Pakistan in 1947.Islamabad has always suspected Pakhtun-dominated Afghanistan of exploiting Pakhtun national list sentiments as means of destabilizing Pakistan.
Pakistan’s interests in Afghanistan have also been a functionof its India centric foreign policy. Pakistan generals have been worried that the country could be in trouble if Afghans and Indians collaborate against it and have accordingly attempted to secure strategic depth vis-bis India by simulating a Pakistan-Afghanistan border much further west than the internationally accepted one. In part the policy of strategic depth has been successful because of the fact that FATA and contiguous territory on the Afghan side of the border are virtually unknown to the rest of the world, a reality almost unchanged from the colonial period.
strategic depth-world magnified
In any case, It is crucial to bear in mind that Islamabad’s cultivation of “holy warriors” or what have now become unknown the world over as “Jihadis” preceded the start of the Afghan war in 1978.Naturally, the policy was given a major boost when Washington became directly involved and provided direct support to the Mujahedeen, or as Ronald Reagan preferred to call them “the moral equivalents of our founding fathers”.
After the Geneva accord of 1988, Washington jumped ship, but was clearly aware that Islamabad’s holy war assembly line remained intact. It is now badly kept secret that in the civil war-like situation that prevailed in Afghanistan through the early 1990s, Washington, at the very least, turned a blind eye to Islamabad’s cultivation of what became the Taliban. When the latter managed to establish effective control over the majority of Afghanistan’s territory in 1996, the Clinton administration even hosted representative of the new rulers of the country.
Only when the white house public relations officials found it increasingly difficult to explain the tilt towards the Taliban did relations start to sour. Eventually Washington started claim that the Taliban movement was colluding with the almost mythical Osama bin Laden and the first air assaults against Afghanistan’s new rulers were launched by Clinton in 1998.Yet throughout this period, and even until after the September 11 attacks, Pakistan openly supported the Taliban regime, remaining one of two Governments in the world (along with Saudi Arabia) to maintain diplomatic relations with it.
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