And now, war of the consulates?
A blast at the Pakistani consulate in Herat, Afghanistan, could trigger a war of the consulates between India and Pakistan. Explosives mounted on a bicycle blew up in front of the consulate, injuring some passers-by on Thursday. The Afghan ambassador was summoned to the Foreign Office in Islamabad and treated to a strong note of protest, asking the Kabul government to ensure security of Pakistans consulates in Jalalabad, Herat, Mazar-e Sharif and Kandahar.
The incident will certainly be connected to the earlier much bigger suicide-bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul in which over 40 people were killed. So intense was the New Delhi response to the incident that the Line of Control (LoC) in Kashmir has become active after four years as the two armies hurl rockets at each other. In 1995, under the Rabbani government, the Pakistan embassy was attacked and damaged; in 1996, when the Taliban took Kabul, the Indian embassy had already pulled out and gone, fearing reprisals. And now Pakistan, while asking for protection to its consulates, fears a war of the consulates.
The TV channels in Pakistan are incorrectly pointing to 13 new Indian consulates in Afghanistan. Government officials and ministers are accusing India of acting against Pakistans interests in Afghanistan and carrying out acts of terrorism inside Pakistan through its paid agents. In 2006, Pakistan claimed to have evidence that the Indian consulates in Afghanistan were instrumental in funding the rebels fighting the security forces in Balochistan. As if in response, the Indian-administered Kashmir has erupted again after a botched attempt by New Delhi to award Muslim land in the Valley to an organisation devoted to a Hindu shrine.
This has been followed by a series of small explosions in Karachi, Pakistan, and Karnataka and Gujarat in India, killing many in the latter BJP-ruled state. If there is any perverse logic in these events, the blast outside the Pakistan consulate in Herat may be followed by blasts outside the Indian consulates. Given this situation, anyone who wants Pakistan and India to fly at each others throat simply has to bribe a terrorist. And there is no dearth of people and organisations who would like to further muddy the waters in South Asia in order to advance their anarchist agenda.
Three diametrically opposed versions of reality are being fed to the people of Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. The Afghans believe they could have won the war against the Talban and Al Qaeda if Pakistan had not sheltered them and allowed them to attack across the Durand Line. Pakistanis think that unrest inside its Tribal Areas is linked to the misrule in Kabul and alienation of the Afghan people from a weak US-Karzai government. The Indians believe that Pakistan is interfering in Afghanistan, as it did in the 1990s, to eventually set up terrorist camps for the Kashmiri mujahideen there.
But the truth is no one has a sure foothold in Afghanistan. It is futile for either India or Pakistan to vie for control over a country that will take a long time in deciding what it wants to do. Pakistan relies on its ethnic nexus with the Pashtuns but the fact is that Afghan nationalism is based on an anti-Durand Line Pashtun emotion and that emotion remains anti-Pakistan. Pakistan is also seen as an enemy by non-Pashtun nationalities that live in the north of Afghanistan simply because Pakistan has backed the Pashtuns in the civil war that took place in Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal from there in 1989. The Indian activity in Afghanistan is merely a flanking move in a strategy of deterring Pakistan from interfering in Kashmir.
The world is waking up to the reality of a metamorphosis of the epochal Indo-Pak wars into a war of the consulates in Afghanistan. The only solution lies in backing off from a futile conflict which will do no one any good but will damage the certain but yet unquantifiable economic and social benefits deriving from a normalisation of relations between India and Pakistan. At the 30th SAARC council of ministers meeting at Colombo, Pakistans foreign minister Mr Shah Mehmood Qureshi and his Indian counterpart Mr Pranab Mukherjee have agreed that the prime ministers of India and Pakistan would come out with a comprehensive statement on the future of the Indo-Pak bilateral relations.
What the two prime ministers need is an overview from space. Pakistan cannot control Afghanistan, nor can it avoid being influenced by developments inside it. India can never get a permanent foothold there unless it moves close to Pakistan through bilateral trade and a trade corridor to Central Asia. If the two get over their nightmares of the past they can transform the map of South Asia and Central Asia and make peace possible. *
Daily Times - Leading News Resource of Pakistan
