Heart of Asia: Ashraf Ghani echoed Afghanistan's anger at Pakistan, not Modi’s

The recently concluded Heart of Asia conference is making more news for the united criticism by visiting Afghan president Ashraf Ghani and Prime Minister Narendra Modi against Pakistan for fuelling terrorism on both sides of its border, and the cold shoulder with which Pakistan's foreign affairs adviser Sartaj Aziz was received.

A clearly miffed Aziz later hit out at India for what he termed as “India’s attempt to drive a wedge between Pakistan and Afghanistan,” during a press conference in Islamabad after returning from Amritsar, the venue of the sixth round of the ministerial conference of Istanbul Process, otherwise known as Heart of Asia conference.

He also criticised Ghani for "siding with India". “One can understand their (India’s) anxiety, and we also understand that Ashraf Ghani making a statement on a soil which is hostile to Pakistan. Obviously he was trying to follow their preferences, what they would like to hear," he said, according to Tolo News.

However, Aziz - and Pakistan - do not want to acknowledge that Ghani was echoing the sentiments of common Afghans more than the Indian PM, that is also the result of his frustration with the double game that Islamabad and Rawalpindi are playing. 

In 2013, on way to the New Delhi airport, a visiting Afghan friend who had come to attend the wedding of an Indian who had worked in Kabul briefly, jokingly said: “Our government is poor and weak so we are unable to do it, but why do you Indians act so cowardly? Why don’t you attack Pakistan and end your headache and ours too in one go?”

We both laughed as I exclaimed, “So much anger!” That young man was then actively involved with a nationalist Afghan (read Pashtun) youth group and is currently working in the government, and I hence choose to not name him. 

But that is the general sentiment that most Afghans share about Pakistan as I later found out during my maiden trip to the war-torn but very vibrant country during the 2014 presidential elections.

One evening, I, along with a fellow Indian traveller Aquib and few Afghan friends, who were also our hosts, went to have soup at a roadside stall in Kabul’s suburb Karte Naw (New Karte). The old vendor had lived for over a decade in Peshawar’s suburb and had even married a Pakistani Pashtun.

As the conversations began, he quipped: “The people of Pakistan are not bad, they are very good people, we lived as refugees there. I even married there. But the Pakistani government has really been mean to us and has destabilised our country.”

Blasts have become more frequent in Afghanistan in recent years and almost every terror attack, except the few recent ones associated with ISIS, have some Pakistani connection, or at least that’s how common Afghans see it. As an Indian walking in Kabul, I was often suspected to be a Pakistani because of my whitish skin and was asked to show my passport by security officers from the airport to the streets of Shahr-e-Nau.

In fact, only last year, as I was sitting with another group of young men from Kandahar who had come to cheer their team in the ICC T20 World Cup in New Delhi, sipping coffee at CCD, a live cricket match of Pakistan with some team I don’t remember (but not Afghanistan) was going on.

Watching each falling wicket of the Pakistani batsmen on television, they cheered. Seeing me laughing, one of them said in heavy Afghan-accented Urdu while gesturing with his hand, “Reyaz bhai, yeh log yeh bada bada ball phekta hai humlog ke upar.” (Brother Reyaz, they throw these big balls (implying bombs) on us.”

It is true that in the last couple of years, Pakistan has undertaken joint military action against various militant groups, codenamed Operation Zarb-e-Azb, and it is also true that Pakistan too is suffering from the Frankenstein monsters it helped create. That, however, does not absolve Pakistan of the blunders it committed and the double game it continues to play with "good Taliban" and "bad Taliban" and other such extremist groups.

No doubt, it helps the Afghanistan government also to squarely blame Pakistan for every security lapse to hide its own shortcomings, but Pakistan has much more to answer for and take responsibility for before blaming Ghani. In fact, as soon as he assumed office, Ghani had tried to convince Pakistan acknowledging the fact that without Islamabad on board, peace in Afghanistan would remain a distant dream.

He repeatedly said Afghanistan does not want to fight anyone’s proxy war any more, adding that an “undeclared war” has been thrust upon it. However, a series of terrorist attacks by different Taliban factions continued; and a report by the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) in July this year noted the record number of civilian casualties since counting began in 2009.

In many ways, it was his frustration with Pakistan that made him cosy up to India again as the latter reiterated its commitment to invest towards stabilising Afghanistan. Ghani and Modi have no doubt brought back the bonhomie that former president Hamid Karzai and former PM Manmohan Singh shared, despite the cold start in the first year of both assuming offices. The former Afghan president had famously called India, Afghanistan’s "best friend”.

The same sentiments resonated when the erudite former academician and author of Fixing Failed States referred to the recent $500 million that Pakistan has pledged for the rehabilitation, adding, “This fund, Mr Aziz, could be very well used for containing extremism, because without peace any amount of assistance will not meet the needs of our people,” although he added that he does not want a “blame game”. 

Also read: How Afghanistan and Taliban have turned against Pakistan