Читать книгу Cables from Kabul: The Inside Story of the West’s Afghanistan Campaign - Sherard Cowper-Coles - Страница 20

As I had already discovered, one subject always came up in every conversation with President Karzai: Pakistan. Like many of his fellow countrymen, Karzai was convinced that the source of many or most of his country’s troubles was Pakistan in general, and the Inter Services Intelligence directorate (ISI) in particular. He believed that Pakistan had never accepted the removal of the Taliban – Pakistan’s proxies – from power, and was striving by every means it could to restore the status quo ante. Karzai saw a Pakistani hand almost everywhere and in almost everything.

Worse than this, he believed that Britain was in league with Pakistan. Time and again he accused me of being too sympathetic to Pakistan, and of working for a government that was colluding secretly with Pakistan to control Afghanistan. He was convinced that SIS had especially close ties to Pakistan and operated in Afghanistan on Pakistan’s behalf. The President’s initially good relationship with General David Richards had been damaged when, towards the end of his nine-month tour as ISAF commander in 2006–7, Richards had travelled to Pakistan and returned seemingly more sympathetic to Pakistani views than Karzai had found acceptable. For President Karzai, Pakistan was a binary issue: either one was with Afghanistan, and against Pakistan, or vice versa: the middle was excluded.

Thus, in my first few meetings with President Karzai, he always steered the conversation round to Pakistan. His eyes narrowing, his voice lowering, he would ask me detailed questions about Pakistani politics – a subject which, thankfully, I understood even less then than I do today. As with many other visitors, I was being subjected to a thinly disguised viva voce examination on my soundness. Karzai’s particular bête noire was President Musharraf. He had bad memories of the way President Bush had brought him and Musharraf together for what had apparently been a frosty trilateral dinner at the White House in September 2006. He never had much rapport with the Pakistani military. I suspect too that an element in his distaste for many Pakistani officers of the old school was his own rather ascetic Islamism (he neither smokes nor drinks, and his wife keeps purdah).

Sometimes President Karzai would become emotional about Pakistan, and about the need to reunite the Pashtuns/Pathans on both sides of the Durand Line. The Line was named after the senior official in the Foreign Department of the Government of India, a diplomat called Sir Mortimer Durand, who in 1893 had overseen the demarcation of what was supposed to be the border between Afghanistan and British India. The Line ran along the high peaks of the ranges separating the Indus Valley from the Afghan lands to the west. In doing so, it had cut in two the Pashtun tribal confederations in those mountains. Afghanistan has never recognised the Line as its eastern border.

Once, getting very excited, President Karzai told me that, if Musharraf did not accede to some particular demand (I forget what), he, Karzai, would personally head a Pashtun march on the Attock bridge across the Indus (the jumping-off point for many invasions in the other direction) and lead an attack into the Punjab itself. In this he was reverting, albeit briefly, to the Pashtunistan irredentism which Mohammed Daoud had adopted as prime minister and then president of Afghanistan. Like all his predecessors, Karzai believed that for him officially to recognise the border would amount to committing political suicide with his Pashtun base.

Despite this, I believed then, and believe now, that any serious effort to stabilise Afghanistan has to include a perspective or process leading to recognition of the Durand Line as Afghanistan’s eastern border. As with the recognition of the inner Irish border, the aim should be to establish the Durand Line as the international frontier de jure just at the point when it had become de facto irrelevant, thanks to the creation of what I liked to call an economic Pashtunistan. There were, or should have been, parallels with post-war reconciliation between France and Germany, and with the Schuman Plan for binding their two economies together.

With all that history in mind, I thought that there should be a massive international effort to connect the Pashtun tribal areas in the mountains on both sides of the Durand Line with each other and with the outside world, and to develop them economically, socially and politically. Infrastructure should be established to support and acknowledge the reality that the border was already an open one. The tribespeople of, say, the Afghan province of Khost were in most ways closer to their brethren in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas than they were to their fellow countrymen in the urbanised areas of the Kabul River valley. As with Britain and Ireland, a Common Travel Area might be created, supported by a system of identity cards. Rather than trying to seal the border – which I had always thought was a quite impossible aim – we should be trying to keep it open, but in a controlled and benign fashion. That would enable both sides more easily to detect and deter the more nefarious cross-border traffic, in fighters and weapons and drugs.

Quite early on, stressing that I had no instructions from London on this point, I floated ideas on these lines with President Karzai. He looked suspicious but interested. I reminded him that Britain had negotiated for some three decades with an Irish Republic, Article One of whose constitution (amended only in 1999) had laid claim to British sovereign territory (‘The national territory consists of the whole island of Ireland …’). But that had not stopped us talking, in a mature fashion, about common-sense ways of addressing the double majority/minority problem. I was sure that, with goodwill, US and UN support and plenty of time, a similar approach was the only way of addressing the problems of the Pashtun areas. Months later I was delighted to discover that Bill Wood’s predecessor in Afghanistan, US Ambassador Ron Neumann, and the American Institute for Afghan Studies (in a report published in November 2007) had separately reached similar conclusions. Karzai did not bite: his Government had neither the political strength nor, at that stage, the strategic vision to do so. Neither did the Americans, who listened politely but had other fish to fry.