US Is Finally Getting Its Ducks in a Row in Afghanistan-Pakistan

The US leadership must demand not just the pushing of the Haqqani Network and the Taliban cadres over to the Afghan side, but also for Pakistan to handover their leadership.

US President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson confer during a working lunch with African leaders during the U.N. General Assembly in New York, U.S., September 20, 2017. Credit: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque
US President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson confer during a working lunch with African leaders during the U.N. General Assembly in New York, U.S., September 20, 2017. Credit: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque
Several months into office, US President Donald Trump finally announced the country’s new strategy for the Afghanistan-Pakistan region this August. The events of the past couple of weeks indicate what the contours of this strategy would look like and how Taliban and its chief patron Pakistan, intend to handle the mounting US pressure. There has been a barrage of drone strikes in the area straddling the Durand Line with Pakistan’s Kurram tribal agency to the east and the three Afghan provinces – Paktia, Paktika, Khowst, which together constitute the Loya Paktia (Greater Paktia) region – in the west. The Taliban has carried out a series of deadly attacks against both civil and military targets inside Afghanistan, killing hundreds. Pakistan, on its part, has gone from sheer bravado against the US, to ending up getting a US-Canadian couple that had been held by the Haqqani Network (HQN) released.

US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson made his maiden trip to Afghanistan and spoke to US commanders and the Afghan leadership duo – President Ashraf Ghani and Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah – at the Bagram airbase near Kabul. Tillerson, who is expected to visit Pakistan on October 24, 2017, stated, “Pakistan needs to, I think, take a clear-eyed view of the situation that they are confronted with in terms of the number of terrorist organisations that find safe-haven inside of Pakistan”. It is anticipated that while acknowledging Pakistan’s help in the recent hostage release, Tillerson will drive home the same points that he has made in the US and in Afghanistan.

What would make or break the new US strategy is how persistent it is in not just demanding verifiable evidence that Pakistan is dismantling the HQN, especially in the Kurram agency, but is willing to handover its ringleader Sirajuddin Haqqani. As a rule of thumb, declining to handover such terror lynchpins, on one pretext or the other, usually indicates that Pakistan is unwilling to close that chapter, as has been the case with Jamat-ud-Dawa’s Hafiz Saeed and Jaish-e-Mohammed’s (JeM) Maulana Masood Azher.

The HQN presence in Kurram agency did not come about overnight. Pakistan has been actively relocating them out of their primary base in the adjacent North Waziristan agency to the adjoining Orakzai and Kurram agencies for almost eight years now. The Kurram agency’s geo-strategic location with its area dubbed the Parrot’s Beak jutting into Afghanistan, had made it prime real estate for the Haqqanis and their handlers. The HQN has been operating out of North Waziristan since the mid-1970s and more so during the current Afghan conflict. The Pakistani planners, however, realised around 2009-2010 that they would eventually have to show to the Americans that they are acting against the Haqqanis in North Waziristan. In preparation for this, both the Haqqanis and their Pakistani patrons sought alternative sanctuaries to which the network would be relocated.

The traditional rift between the Shia Pashtun tribesmen of the Upper Kurram with their Sunni compatriots from Southern Kurram provided an opening for the Taliban – both Afghan and Pakistani variety – around the spring of 2007 to get a toehold in the Lower Kurram ostensibly to back the Sunni tribesmen. The Taliban, including the Haqqanis, sought a thoroughfare through the Shia areas to Afghanistan to carry out insurgent activities. The Shia tribesmen organised a valiant armed resistance to both local and foreign jihadists and beat them back in several battles. The jihadists blockaded the Shia tribesmen of the Upper Kurram by cutting off their main route to Peshawar, i.e., the Thall-Parachinar Road. The Shias negotiated a long, arduous Khost-Gardez-Kabul-Jalalabad route via Afghanistan to reach Peshawar, while the Pakistan army sat on its hands. Additionally, the Shia tribesmen utilised small civilian aircraft flights from Peshawar to Parachinar to get supplies, including medicines. They were thus able to sustain the Taliban onslaught for a good three years and deny the passage to the jihadists. The Pakistan army, through its paramilitary Frontier Corps, blockaded the Afghan routes, while the civil aviation authorities shut down the flights out of Peshawar, bringing the Shia resistance to its knees.

It was in this backdrop that the brothers of HQN’s founder Jalaluddin Haqqani, Ibrahim and Khalil Haqqani who live in the Rawalpindi-Islamabad region, were brought in by Pakistani authorities to arbitrate a settlement between the Shias of Upper Kurram on one hand and the Sunnis of the lower Kurram and Taliban on the other. Pakistan’s then federal interior minister Rehman Malik participated in some of these negotiations, which culminated in an accord in February 2011, lifting the blockade of the Upper Kurram agency. What was not written in the accord was that the Haqqanis got to extract their pound of flesh, i.e., an uninterrupted access, through the Shia areas, to the Durand Line and into Afghanistan. They already had been facilitated to establish safe havens in the Lower Kurram agency. While they were not allowed to settle around major Shia population centers, the towns and villages near the Durand Line were teeming with the Haqqanis’ cadres. In fact, the recent eviction of the medical charity Medicines Sans Frontiers’ (MSF) from Lower Kurram, where they had worked for nearly a decade, suggests that Pakistan is increasingly apprehensive of another US sting operation like the one that deployed vaccination teams to track Osama bin Laden. This is not to suggest that the MSF would ever undertake such a proposition. However, it is also known that they had faced opposition when they attempted to expand their work to central and Upper Kurram.