Surgery Not Needed?


Written by Chris Cork • Cover Stories • May 2010

Conjoined twins are a medical nightmare. Whether they are joined at head, hip, or abdomen the complexities of separating them and then, once separated, of keeping both alive through the recovery process are often insurmountable and one of the twins dies. Sometimes they share organs, with the heart for both resident in one chest cavity for instance, in which case the prognosis is poor and life, if it is to continue, will have do so with the two bodies forever joined. Transposing the human allegory to the transnational reality of Pakistan and Afghanistan we see any number of similarities and many of the same dangers. The two separate countries with a border engineered by a long-gone colonial power have trouble living together and yet cannot be parted.

If we see ethnicity as a metaphor for an organ then the Pashtuns of south and east Afghanistan are an organ that extends into Pakistan and takes up most of the Northwest Frontier Province. Extending the allegory, one ‘twin' is relatively robust, the other very weak and requiring a higher level of life support.

Pakistan is heavily dependant upon international aid for its survival but it at least has a semi-functional economy, an outline of a parliament and the organs of state are ticking over though not necessarily very effectively. It has a large army that needs an urgent update, railways, docks and seaports and a transport infrastructure. There is massive internal unrest that is sectarian, ethnic and interprovincial all of which is only just contained from degenerating into widespread internal warfare. It teeters forever on the brink of failure - but then it has almost from its foundation.

By contrast the weaker twin has an economy based on the sale of illegal drugs to the rest of the world, no railways beyond a few insignificant miles, a national government that extends not much beyond Kabul, a full-scale international war involving foreign troops, a transport infrastructure that is only open because the foreign military forces keep it that way, no seaports, little industry, a parliament that is there courtesy of a massively rigged election and a President whose popularity is as low at home as it is abroad - which if nothing else is something that it shares with Pakistan. It has yet to establish a national army or police force and currently the loyalty of both to the government is questionable at best. Their other shared feature is a long and permeable border, a line on the map drawn mostly by a certain Mr. Durand in the course of the Great Game and the subject of ongoing dispute ever since it was scratched on the map.
An unforgiving and inescapable geography has meant that both countries have been pawns in the games of bigger beasts for centuries. As it was then so it is today; and the ‘Af-Pak' strategy that first saw the light of day soon after the election of President Obama and the appointment of Richard Holbrooke as a Special Representative is no more than the latest iteration of a game that it seems neither country can win individually, nor can they win either for themselves or their manipulators in an uncomfortable twinning that does more to highlight their separate weaknesses than play to the inherent strengths of either.

As the game is played out it tends to be seen as a superpower ambit, but those being played with have their own games running concurrently. Afghanistan is almost as interesting to India as it is to America and the allied powers, if for no other reason than it provides an advantage over Pakistan in that it can outflank it both physically and diplomatically. The Indians had consulates established in Afghanistan within weeks of the fall of the Taliban and are today a major donor to the Afghan government. Since 2001 India has provided about $750 million to Afghanistan in humanitarian and economic aid, which makes it the largest regional provider of financial support. The Indian army is building a major road in Nimroz province, air links and power plants are under construction, and India has invested heavily in the key health and education sectors as well as training civil servants, diplomats and the police force. There are proposals on the table for the development of infrastructure for electricity oil and natural gas - quite a list for a country which shares no border with Afghanistan.

China also puts money in the Afghan pot - it pledged $75 million in 2009 over the coming five years to ‘strengthen infrastructure and promote trade' and in March 2010 the two countries signed a joint trade agreement. China - which also has a tiny border with Pakistan in the Pamirs - has its eye on the development of Afghanistan's mineral deposits, and in 2007 a Chinese company won the tender to develop one of the world's largest copper mines in Afghanistan. The state-owned China Metallurgical Group has promised to invest nearly $3 billion in developing the mine at Aynak in Logar province which is going to bring long term jobs and a measure of prosperity to the region and perhaps even more importantly create a revenue stream that is not drug-fuelled.

China also has a strong interest in developing its relationship with Pakistan, and has invested in the massive work to upgrade the Karakoram highway to make it an all-weather road linking the key city and trading hub of Kashgar with the roads and railways that lead down to the port cities of Gawadar and Karachi. China is exploring the possibility of a rail link between Kashgar and Gawadar, which if accomplished would give it a blue-water port outlet that would service its interests in the Indian Ocean as well as its considerable investments in the African continent.

India, China, Pakistan and Afghanistan all ‘live' in the region. America does not, any more than the British did a century ago or do today. The presence of the coalition forces in Afghanistan is transitory, and as fighting forces they will have disappeared within five years, ten at most. Viewed in the continuum of history the Af-Pak strategy is little more than a blip and with America turning inwards and its power beginning to ebb in the region, it will be for the residents to do their housekeeping rather than employ contract cleaners.

Pakistan and Afghanistan have not enjoyed the best of relationships in recent years despite the expressions of fraternal love expressed by their presidents - neither of whom is a long term fixture. The insurgency in Pakistan that has its epicenter in the borderlands with Afghanistan is exacerbated by the porosity of the border and the continued drone strikes against the Taliban that have done so much to antagonize public opinion against the Americans. There is a festering issue of Pashtun nationalism that has cross-border implications and even if the Americans and others withdrew completely there is no guarantee of peace in the region because there is always another war to fight.

Historically, Pakistan has supported weak central Afghan governments which has played well to its ‘strategic depth' strategy and a kind of managed instability. Pakistan continues to support Taliban groups inside Afghanistan but there are signs that this may change if democracy really does take hold and the power of the military machine is curbed. The Af-Pak twins are going to be forever joined like it or not. The American Af-Pak strategy in the long term is going to be little more than a regional footnote, and the future is going to be about how India and China manage their relationships with the troublesome twins.