Abdul Rab Rasul Sayyaf. “The JI certainly has connections with the Afghan Mujahideen leaders who may have gradually been marginalized in the past decade but are still having a stake in in the insecurity and instability of Afghanistan,” Ghaznavi told The News. “Also, these Jihadi leaders have a proven capacity to escalate the situation for longer than estimated”. He said that the JI could play a facilaltor role in the peace talks to give Afghan government peace and the Jihadi groups a share in the government.
Sartaj Khan, a Karachi-based political analyst who worked extensively on insurgencies in Pakistan and Afghanistan, believe that Haq’s visit to Kabul is not more than a gesture that to increase pressure on Taliban groups for talks.
“The JI had played a key role in Afghan Jihad in 1970s and 1980s till the establishment of Afghan regime in Kabul in 1996. The Pakistani Deobandi religious parties, especially the Jamiat-e-Ulema Islam (JUI) replaced the JI as Afghan Taliban replaced all Jihadi groups, including Hekmatyar’ s group involved in internal bloody war in Kabul,” Khan told The News. “Though JI extended its moral support to Taliban and oppose the war in Afghanistan, it keep its distance from those waging war against the US-led Coalition in Afghanistan”. He opined that the JI has little or no role in the past twenty years in Afghanistan.
The JI’s interest in Afghanistan started in 1970s with the fall of the Zahir Shah monarchy in 1974 to the Daud Khan regime and Communist Noor Muhammad Tarakai’s coup in 1977. “Just as Daud supported Pashtun nationalists in Pakistan, Pakistan began to train and encourage Islamist resistance to Daud’s secular government. The JI was key in the development of links with Afghan Islamist movements, such as Hekmatyar’s Hizb-i Islami,” writes Vali Nasr, a prominent scholar, in his paper titled “International Relations of an Islamist Movement: The Case of the JI of Pakistan”. The governments of Bhutto and Ziaul Haq had also invited the JI’s then leadership, especially Qazi Hussain Ahmed, to help them in formulate the country’s Afghan policy, Nasr writes.
It is pertinent to mention that leaders of Pakistani Pashtun parties, especially Awami National Party, Qaumi Watan Party and Pakhtunkhwa Milli Awami Party, have regularly visited Kabul and met Afghan leadership, especially former president Hamid Karzai and current president Ghani. Maulana Fazlur Rehman, head of the JUI-F, also visited Kabul in 2013 on the invitation of then president Karzai, for the first time since the late 1990s.
According to the JUI-F leaders, Rehman visited last time in late 1990s to Kabul during Taliban rule and also met with Mullah Muhammad Omar, supremo of Afghan Taliban.