 Pakistani leaders should not be seen as focusing exclusively on Hamid Karzai and should make their support for the people of Afghanistan more visible and emphatic.
Sophistry and illusion is what Mr. Karzai peddles on his visits abroad. Politics for him is the art of dissimulation. It is not that he lies; he just does not tell the truth. His description of India as a "close, good friend" in contrast to Pakistan, which he described as a "brother," nay "conjoined, inseparable twins," may have endeared him to his Pakistani audience. But it did not explain why the two brothers opt for fratricide rather than brotherly love when it comes to settling their differences.
Or, perhaps for a change, Mr. Karzai did mean what he said when he described Pakistan and Afghanistan as twins; because separating "conjoined, inseparable twins," so that both may have an independent existence, is a very difficult medical procedure leading, more often than not, to the demise of one twin or the other. And that of Pakistan, as presently constituted, has been an old Afghan demand and is what Mr. Karzai in the dim recesses of his mind must dearly want.
Of late Mr. Karzai has been eager to distance himself from America. His cabinet appointments and those to the Election Commission, in defiance of American opinion, reinforce such a perception. So too the welcome he afforded Ahmadenijad in Kabul on the Iranian President's visit to the country. And the platform he provided the Iranian president to pummel the Americans, even as Robert Gates was telling his forces in Marjah why they should risk their lives to keep Mr. Karzai ensconced in Kabul. All this must have irked Washington. As does Mr. Karzai's outspoken willingness to talk to Mullah Omar, who has a multimillion bounty on his head.
But much of Mr. Karzai's utterances are posturing. And indeed, to many at the press conference in Islamabad, his responses sounded as if he believed that half of his audience were fools and the other half hypocrites. Nevertheless, his remarks throw into relief the very contrasting approaches of Karzai and the Americans to the question of engaging with their adversaries.
To Karzai, and many in our part of the world, merely because Mullah Omar has committed or condoned unspeakable crimes does not render him beyond the pale. For the West to go on prattling about what is or is not acceptable when peace and reconciliation is the goal, appears hypocritical. As Albert Camus asked, "How many crimes has (the West) committed merely because it could not endure being wrong."
Perhaps what scares the Americans more is Karzai's "reconciliation and reintegration" initiative. They fear that in his enthusiasm to reconcile with the Taliban he may end up appeasing Al Qaeda and giving the two second wind in Afghanistan. But Washington need not worry. Karzai desperately wants to keep his job; nor does he want to forfeit his life. The fact is that Obama and Karzai are stuck with each other. It's far too late for either to disown or forsake the other.
What was surprising during the visit was the importance our government attached to a leader who is, after all, an American satrap. Turning out the entire cabinet to receive him at the airport, along with the chairman of the Senate, seemed excessive. Why bother about Mr. Karzai whose power does not extend beyond the porch of his presidential palace in Kabul when Pakistan has ready access to his masters? Or, was this because Mr. Zardari is enamored of Mr. Karzai, who like him, is an accidental president and both have the same mentor. Or, merely that Mr. Zardari, wanting to appear hospitable, overdid it? The answer is none of the above.
From the very inception of his presidency, Mr. Zardari has made it a point to show special regard for Mr. Karzai. By inviting Karzai, the only foreign leader to share his joy on the occasion of his oath-taking, he sent a powerful message to Karzai and his own establishment that he had not only discarded Musharraf's distaste of Karzai but also, more importantly, that he meant to ensure that the establishment's very manifest suspicions of the Karzai regime would no longer influence Pakistan's Afghan policy. This was probably part of the deal that allowed Benazir Bhutto to return, and Mr. Zardari wants to live up to it.
Had Mr. Zardari not been under such an obligation, new to the job or over-confident about his ability to bring about change, and less prone to act first and think later, he would have known better. Mr. Zardari seems to have developed a fetish to become wise after the event.
He will soon discover that our establishment shares not a mite of Mr. Zardari's enthusiasm for the Northern Alliance coalition that Mr. Karzai leads. And when it becomes known that the awarding of contracts to Indian firms for the construction of strategic highways bordering Pakistan are exclusively due to Mr. Karzai's personal intervention, and contrary to the advice of his own counsellors about riling Pakistan further, their suspicions will grow and harden.
To make matters worse, there exists in Pakistan the profound and widespread conviction that India has been targeting Pakistan from Afghanistan with the express or implied concurrence of Mr. Karzai. And, frankly, it was difficult to believe, as Mr. Karzai claimed, that he is ignorant of India's antics. When Mr. Karzai, as he once said, can keep abreast of the going rate charged by the handlers of suicide bombers through his intelligence chief, he must surely have tapped the same source for an inkling of what India is up to in Balochistan.
Shorn of verbiage and nuance, the driving force of Indian and Pakistani foreign policy has been the maxim "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." Mr. Karzai, who holds an Indian degree in political science, did not need help to arrive at the conclusion that his very pronounced Indian tilt would drive Pakistan towards his adversaries, including the Afghan Taliban. It is another matter that India, ah! perfidious India, abandoned Mr. Karzai and supported his rival Abdullah Abdullah in the Afghan presidential polls. But, then, that is India's wont.
As the present operation driven by the U.S. surge splutters on and months elapse before the next one targeting Kandahar gets under way, it seems best for Pakistan to maintain a correct rather than an effusively close relationship with the Karzai regime. If we are to have any leverage with the Afghan Pakhtun, as we claim and at times boast we do, how does showing our considerable affection for the Karzai-led Tajik-dominated regime help? Moreover, it is impossible to envisage the participation of the Taliban in a Karzai-led setup, which is presumably why, as rumor has it, we are contemplating a future coalition being headed by Mustafa Shah, the son of the late King Zahir Shah. For us, Mr. Karzai has no future, only a doubtful past. And, if truth be told, Afghanistan needs his services as much as Italy needs the mafia.
At the cost of appearing repetitive, one should stress that the present is the opportune time for Pakistan to forge friendly relations with all the players of the Afghan domestic scene, rather than to identify with one or the other. We, no doubt, made a decisive contribution to the outcome of the anti-Soviet jihad. But we lost the peace and, in the process, as we now discover, spawned the rise of a phenomenon that, if victorious, would be as destructive (politically, morally and ideologically to our way of life and to progressive Islam) as the Mongol hordes that swept into Mesopotamia in the early 13th Century were to Islam and Arab civilization.
Rather than focus exclusively on Karzai we should support people and processes that can unite Afghanistan. "How is it possible," the late King Zahir Shah once asked me in Italy, "that a country like Pakistan with a sophisticated state structure supports a one-eyed, uneducated and barbarous mullah?" And, were he alive today, he may well ask, "How can you support an Afghan quisling in preference to the legitimacy that my lineage offers?" One had an answer of sorts then, but would have no answer today. 
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