Waving The Red Flag

Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai finds himself in a most difficult situation. The raging bull that is Pakistan is none too pleased. For what it had feared would result, has come to pass, with Afghanistan and India tying a loop of friendship and accommodation with one another. India has sacrificed quite a good deal in attempting to establish good working relations with Afghanistan, helping the country with its fledgling civil infrastructure, investing $2-billion in the process.

Pakistan, loathing India and fearing its influence, is inflamed with rage over the new agreement. Of course Pakistan has been assiduously and determinedly working against the interests of peace and security in Afghanistan for far too long. And it is still determined to cause as much grief and unrest and outright unspeakable violence in its horribly misguided sense of hegemonic thrust it exerts on behalf of achieving some measure of control of Afghanistan.

It will be India, not Pakistan that will be invited to help Afghanistan develop and extract its vast mineral deposits. India has been a friend to the country, while Pakistan has been as viciously destructive toward Afghanistan as it has traditionally been toward India. Pakistan is the source of the Afghan Taliban's resurgence capability, in its free haven within Pakistan and its ties with the Pakistan military and the Inter-Service Intelligence Agency.

"Delhi and Kabul are realistic enough to know that there can be no lasting peace in Afghanistan without a measure of Pakistan's support", underlined the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi. New Delhi is extending its efforts for the very fundamental reason that it is eager to prevent a return of the Islamist Taliban regime. Yet the danger of infuriating Pakistan to the degree where it becomes even more dangerous to India's interests looms large.

The agreement signs a commitment by India to train and equip Afghan security forces, offer scholarships for Afghan students, and to facilitate bilateral trade. Afghanistan needs all the help it can get, from any source, and India has proved itself to be a trustworthy partner for the future, unlike Pakistan. It was Pakistan, after all, who engineered the assassination of former president Burhanuddin Rabbani, Afghanistan's peace envoy attempting to negotiate with the Taliban.

Pakistan, in fact, finds itself in a very unpleasant place. Its relations with the U.S. have deteriorated to the horizon of no return; complicit and enabling of violent strikes against the U.S. presence in Afghanistan. Harbouring al-Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban, protecting the Haqqani network, funding terrorism while claiming to be assisting the U.S. in its eradication.