New Delhi: Pakistan ambassador to the US Asad Majeed Khan took a cue from the past when he hinted this week that Islamabad might redeploy troops posted on the Afghan border to the “Kashmir frontier” amid fresh tensions with India over Article 370.
The statement was meant to be a not-so-veiled threat to the US: The removal of Pakistani troops from the Afghan border might adversely affect the ongoing peace talks between the Afghan Taliban and the US, reportedly facilitated by Islamabad.
The aim is to get the US to intercede for Pakistan on the Kashmir issue, which India insists is a bilateral dispute that doesn’t warrant outside intervention.
Pakistan had also employed the same tactic in 2001, when a post-9/11 US had just started its war on Afghanistan to weed out al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden and his Taliban backers and India had launched Operation Parakram, a massive military mobilisation along the Pakistan border in the wake of the Parliament attack.
What did Pakistan’s US ambassador say?
Speaking to The New York Times, Pakistan’s US ambassador Khan said India’s abrogation of Article 370 “could not have come at a worse time for us” — as Pakistan has increased its deployments along the Afghan border amid peace talks between the Taliban and the US, and the latter’s plans to remove its troops from Afghanistan.
“We have our hands full,” Khan said. “If the situation escalates on the eastern border, we will have to undertake redeployments.”
It was hard to miss his implicit threat to the US administration. Khan seemed to suggest that if the US did not intervene in the India-Pakistan row over the Kashmir issue, Pakistan would be forced to redeploy troops away from the Afghan border, where they help keep terrorists in check.
If violence escalates in Afghanistan, where the Taliban has been responsible for a series of attacks, the US will find it harder to withdraw its troops — a cause dear to the American voter.
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An old Pakistani tactic
Pakistani officials had tried to pull a similar trick in 2001, when South Asia began to be fundamentally reshaped by a couple of events: The attack on the World Trade Centre by al-Qaeda and the strike on the Indian Parliament by terrorists from the Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba.
Following the attack on Parliament in December 2001, the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government launched Operation Parakram, mobilising forces along the Pakistani border. Meanwhile, Islamabad was assisting the US in its war against the Afghan Taliban.
During the early stages of Operation Parakram, officials from the Pakistani Military Intelligence told The New York Times that if Washington couldn’t convince India to withdraw its military build-up, they would be forced to redeploy troops from the Afghanistan border to the Indian one. In effect, Pakistani officials were threatening to undermine the US war on terrorism.
“The military intelligence officers added what amounted to a warning to the United States. Unless Washington can persuade India to reverse its buildup quickly, they said, Pakistan will be forced to augment its own reinforcements on the border by recalling troops from its western border with Afghanistan, where they are hunting for Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda terrorists,” noted The New York Times report.
Operation Parakram was subsequently called off in October 2002, with international pressure said to be one of the factors.
No one is surprised
Against this backdrop, envoy Khan’s remarks didn’t evoke much surprise among observers.
“We’ve seen this show before — ‘Back us in Kashmir or we’ll cause even more chaos in Afghanistan.’ It’s called blackmail and the US is terrible at this game,” tweeted Jeff M. Smith, a research fellow at US thinktank Heritage Foundation.
Meanwhile, former Afghanistan president Hamid Karzai chided the Pakistan establishment for seeking to destabilise Afghanistan.
Comments in Pakistan linking peace in Afghanistan to their objectives in Kashmir are indicative of Pakistan viewing Afghanistan as strategic depth. I call on Pakistan govt to stop using extremist violence as instrument of policy in the region. We hope the new measures by govt…
— Hamid Karzai (@KarzaiH) August 8, 2019
…of India will lead to the betterment and prosperity of people in Jammu and Kashmir as the citizens of India.
— Hamid Karzai (@KarzaiH) August 8, 2019
Also read: Pakistani social media handles claim build-up at LoC, Indian Army says nothing alarming
Time for Indian troops to set up military bases in Afghanistan and assure US President a safe exit. Let’s stretch Pakistani military resources to the maximum and shift its attention to the West.