Any unexpected change of foreign minister in countries that are generally in the headlines evokes a great deal of interest in world capitals and fuels all kinds of speculation. So it was when in his latest cabinet reshuffle the Afghan president Hamid Karzai removed his Tajik-Pushtun foreign minister, Abdullah Abdullah, who had held that post since the days of the Northern Alliance government in exile and was perhaps the best-known international face of the Alliance. The 45-year old doctor by profession, who speaks fluent English and French, turned down request from Karzai to take up another cabinet portfolio.
Rangeen Dadfar Spanta, Karzai’s foreign adviser, has replaced him and an unnamed Afghan official, quoted in first reports from Kabul, attributed the reason for change, without elaborating, to Karzai’s desire to improve relations with ‘other countries’. It remains to be seen if relations with ‘other countries’ (which sounds like euphemism for Pakistan as Afghanistan’s relations with ‘other countries’ are remarkably free of tension) will improve with the change of guard at the foreign ministry. But a real yardstick will be to see which way relations between Kabul and Islamabad proceed after Spanta’s induction.
The Pakistani foreign ministry has said that the change in Kabul was an ‘internal affair’ of the Afghan government. But comments in the Pak media are interesting. While some denied (guilty conscious?) that Pakistan had any role in the removal of Abdullah, others said Abdullah got the boot because of pressure from the US. A Pakistani paper also said that the change in Kabul would not make any difference to Afghanistan’s policy towards Pakistan because Spanta was also a hard-line critic of Pakistan. One report reminded its readers that Karzai’s took a tough stand against Pakistan on the issue of terrorist camps on the advice of Spanta.
Despite all the support he gets from the US it is sometimes forgotten that Karzai was initially a supporter of the Taliban till the assassination of his father in Pakistan, reportedly at the behest of the Taliban. During much of the Taliban rule, Karzai was in the Pakistani city of Peshawar. He was never a part of the Northern Alliance which had held on to a tiny portion of Afghanistan during the Taliban rule. Karzai may not necessarily be anti-Northern Alliance and he is certainly a bitter foe of the Taliban. But consider this fact. In his two previous major cabinet changes, Karzai had removed Gen Fahim and Yusuf Qanuni, both prominent Northern Alliance figures and both, like Abdullah, advocates of strong ties with India. This is a coincidence that South Block must have noted carefully.
While the real story behind the removal of Abdullah might be known only after some time, certain developments leading up to his exit need to be recalled. He was ‘untrustworthy’ in so far Pakistan is concerned. Islamabad sees his Northern Alliance as a pro-India outfit. And after the fall of Taliban about four years ago, Pakistan, thanks to its ‘usefulness’ to the US, successfully persuaded Washington against installing an Alliance man as the first president of Afghanistan. Bad luck, it could not stop Abdullah from being the foreign minister, a position from where he did not hesitate to speak out against Pakistan’s dubious role in the so-called war on terror.
That Abdullah had earned the wrath of the Bush administration some three months back is undeniable. He had remarked that Iran – the pariah state in the eyes of Washington - was in no way doing anything to destabilise the region. This ‘indiscretion’ forced Karzai to fail to turn up at Tehran, as scheduled in January.
Abdullah could have also paid the price for telling American audience, literally hours before his removal that the Big Three of Terror International, Osama bin Laden, his deputy Ayman Al-Zawahari and Mullah Omar, the (forgotten?) Taliban leader, were hiding in the tribal areas of Pakistan. After all, even the Americans are never so direct in their accusations, though they know full well that these Three cannot be anywhere else but Pakistan. President Musharraf was furious at Abdullah’s statement and said that such allegations were being levelled by ‘some agents’ to ‘malign’ his country. Musharraf could well have been more explicit and, as is the wont of most Pakistanis, named Abdullah an ‘agent’ of the Indian intelligence agency, RAW.
During the course of his US visit, which curiously ended with his exit from the foreign ministry, Abdullah had told his audiences that Pakistan was running terrorist training camps across the border. Suicide squads and terrorists returned to the safety of Pakistan after attacking targets inside Afghanistan, he said. If unchecked, he warned, this could lead to instability in the region. It is there for all to see that in recent months, the Taliban forces have been mounting almost daily attacks inside Afghanistan. The scourge of suicide bombers has also reached Afghanistan.
It is not that what Abdullah said about Pakistan’s role in aiding terrorists was something that nobody else in a position of authority in Kabul had said before. Afghan provincial leaders in areas close to the Durand Line have been making this allegation quite loudly; there is also palpable anger against Pakistan among the people. When Karzai visited Islamabad in February he not only complained about the terror camps in Pakistan but also gave to Gen Musharraf a list, with addresses, of fugitive Taliban members living in safe havens across Pakistan.
The US refuses to openly acknowledge the Afghan complaints of Pakistan’s duplicity in fighting terror for its own strategic reasons. It needs cooperation of both Afghanistan and Pakistan in the ‘war’ on terror. US officials and military commanders want the world to believe that much of the violence in Afghanistan is related to the illegal drug trade.
Afghanistan accounts for 90 per cent of world’s heroin production and the impoverished people in the interior find it profitable to cultivate poppy. Afghanistan may be guilty of not doing enough to dissuade people from poppy cultivation. The reason could be that those who give up growing poppy have to be provided an alternative means of sustenance. But Abdullah’s departure is unlikely to be connected to poppy cultivation. It must surely be politics—internal as well as external. It does not look like an ordinary cabinet reshuffle.
Courtesy : Syndicate Features
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