With the Taliban gone, Pakistan is out in the cold
Imtiaz Gul says the government Islamabad recognised is no more while the group that now controls Kabul is its bete-noire
It was diplomatic hypocrisy at its worst. Mulla Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban ambassador, once the darling of Pakistan foreign office, stepped out of the ministry building all alone, waiting for his car to pull up. Not a single person from the protocol department bothered to see him. It amounted to a very rude treatment of the soft-spoken Zaeef, who in his capacity as the ambassador, really kept the Taliban viewpoint alive — even facing CNN’s Larry King Live.
Zaeef had in fact tried on his own through Leily Helms, a relative of the former king Zahir Shah now settled in the United States, to get in touch with Washington to negotiate a face-saving settlement on the bin Laden issue. Helms, married to a relative of a former CIA chief, had been lobbying for the Taliban and was instrumental even in persuading the militia to send the media to Kandahar at the height of the U.S. bombing campaign.
Aziz Khan, the additional secretary and former Pakistan ambassador to Afghanistan, had summoned Zaeef to inform him that the Afghan consulates in Peshawar and Quetta were being shut down. The one in Karachi had already ceased to function early November. A visibly dejected Zaeef listened to the order and drove off. It was another step by Pakistan towards withdrawing recognition of the Taliban government.
Pakistan’s troubles with the Taliban began in 1998 after Mulla Omar snubbed Prince Turki-Al-Faisal of Saudi Arabia on the issue of Osama bin Laden. Turki had to return empty-handed from Kandahar. But Islamabad kept trying to engage the Taliban, even after the US decided to wage a war against the militia. During the bombings, too, Islamabad refused to close down the Taliban embassy, arguing that it was the only window on both sides of the divide and should remain open. However, since the Taliban rout, Islamabad has slowly moved away from the Taliban, though the question of who it would recognise now remains open. This is why during his regular press briefings the official spokesperson, Aziz Khan, has refused to be drawn into answering the question of when Pakistan will officially ask the Taliban embassy to close down.
Meanwhile, the Peshawar consulate has been shut down. Islamabad’s reason is linked to the ground situation. “The control of the border checkpoint near Peshawar is in the hands of the group that has taken over Jalalabad and the permit or visa issued by the consulate would not be acceptable to that group,” TFT was told.
The situation is dicey for Pakistan. Islamabad is unable to control the events at the border checkpoints of Torkham or Chaman. At both places, respectively, agents of Haji Qadeer, the man restored to the seat of governor in Jalalabad, and Hamid Karzai, the shrewd former deputy foreign minister vying for another important slot after surviving the Taliban fury early this month, have been issuing visas and charging facilitation fee to take journalists into Jalalabad.
Tragedy struck one such group of journalists when they were ambushed en route to Kabul by armed robbers who captured and killed four journalists after depriving them of their belongings. The group had been issued travel permits by Haji Qadeer’s agents at Torkham.
The brutal killings of the journalists is the first reminder of the law and order situation that has arisen since the fall of the Taliban. For almost five years, not a single traveler on any of the Afghan highways had been robbed or killed in broad daylight. Those who did try to take to robbery would either end up on the gallows or found themselves before a firing squad. The West found the Taliban laws draconian, but those laws did much to make life safe in Afghanistan.
The situation now is reminiscent of the dreaded Zardar Khan, a stray warlord of Gulbudin Hikmetyar’s Hezbe Islami, who had seized the Sarobi check post in 1992 and put his men along the highway for looting and plundering travellers. Almost every traveler on the way to or from Kabul had to surrender a part of his belongings — money, food or clothing — at the Sarobi post. Those who resisted were put before Zardar’s man-dog, a bear of a man who would bite people who refused to pay the “toll tax”.
“Be soft and careful today,” Zardar whispered into the man-dog’s ear as we moved out of his bunker, probably forgetting that I understood Pashto. That was 1993. It was partly because of these circumstances that the Taliban attracted scores of well-meaning combatants and other volunteers, including technocrats, ready to help establish a truly Islamic government against heavy odds.
One such technocrat was Sultan Bashiruddin Mehmood, a retired scientist from the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC). Bashir devoted his post-retirement life to the cause of reconstruction and rehabilitation of Afghanistan. The man, who for many weeks is practically in the joint custody of FBI and ISI, has been accused of helping the Taliban and Al-Qaeda of developing nuclear weapons.
Bashir’s arrest coincided with articles in the US about the safety of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. Once again, Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal came centre-stage. “Absolutely rubbish,” says a very senior official associated with the nuclear production and safety programme when TFT asked him about these reports.
“There is no truth in these reports and Pakistan never contemplated storing its weapons in Taliban areas during the Kargil crisis of 1999,” he says. The planted suspicions in the foreign media ranged from active cooperation with the Taliban and bin Laden to possible pilferages of enriched fissile material.
“Pakistan army knows what these weapons mean. It is outrageous to suggest that it ever thought of taking these weapons to a place as wild as Afghanistan,” the official said, adding: “Pakistan has enough places to keep these weapons hidden and secure.”
Officials associated with the country’s nuclear programme say every single gram of fissile material is accounted for. Every consignment is registered at a dozen points once it leaves the premises. And all the weapons are simply handed over to the army, which knows how to handle them as far as their safety is concerned. |
