A very serious allegation has been levelled by President Karzai that the suicide attack on Afghan intelligence chief Asadullah Khalid was planned in Quetta. In response, the Pakistan foreign office has responded by advising him to refrain from open allegations and instead hand over the evidence to Pakistani authorities so that investigations can be initiated.
President Karzai, however, had the good sense to say that he would discuss the matter in the upcoming meeting with Pakistani officials in Ankara next week. Afghanistan is an invariable mess to say the least; the foreign forces too have found it after a decade of invasion that the country is a wilderness beyond their power to clean up. It goes without saying that all kinds and brands of militancy and terrorism can be found there and hence the possibility of any one of them finding the right time to settle score with the intelligence chief is not farfetched. A pertinent point has been missed it seems. It cannot be overlooked that the Afghan security chief had powerful enemies within the Afghan Taliban who are notorious for taking revenge. To further dramatize the narrative President Karzai stated that the attack was carried out ‘professionally’ but if he is to be believed the same is true of so many mass-casualty explosions rocking Pakistan. Did Islamabad go to such an extreme in levelling accusations? President Karzai is trying to deflect the attention away from this reality by badmouthing Pakistan. One can recall the terrible haste with which the Afghan government accused Pakistan of launching the attack on the Indian embassy in 2008. The tendency is that we are the ones responsible for everything that goes wrong in Afghanistan. More and more questions about Karzai’s political legitimacy at home are being raised, which explains why he could be so erratic.
As the vortex in the war-torn Afghanistan is about to subside, albeit for the time being greater responsibility falls on both the countries to work together for mutual security. Such recriminations are useless. The foreign forces are going away but it is we who have to turn this region into a place worth living. Both the countries would have to learn to co-exist, flush out the terrorists and show to the world that they are a peaceful people. Accusatory gestures lead to trust deficit that could only breed hostility. It must be avoided if dangerous militant networks still operating freely are to be caught.