Glimpses of new Afghanistan

Growing up in the 1980s in Pakistan, my generation became acquainted with Afghanistan in the context of the war against the Soviet Union. In those early years of the war, with the looming spectre of the theatre of conflict widening at any moment to engulf Pakistan, we thus began our first interaction with the culture and people of Afghanistan – in a negative way.
As Soviet tanks and artillery units rolled across Afghanistan in increasing desperation, outwitted at every turn by the wily mujahideen and their American and Pakistani sponsors, simultaneously the silent casualties of that war, millions of displaced men, women and children poured into Pakistan, forced to find a home away from home. Those were the buzz words and images then that defined our western neighbour for us: mujahideen, bullets, stinger missiles, war, death and a refugee problem.
As time passed we developed an ease of interaction with our Afghani guests. Grudgingly, perhaps, at first but gradually we learned to accept them as a part of the Pakistani community, despite the ongoing lament in official quarters of the huge costs of maintaining refugees, and of there being no short-term or long-term solution to their displacement in sight. We were fascinated with, and developed a penchant for, their cuisine; we were enchanted by their beauty; we were ingratiated by their warm smiling faces; we were in awe of their capacity for hard work, their industriousness and resilience; and we were appalled by their poverty.
NGOs, both local and international, developed programmes to cater specifically to the plight of Afghan refugees, both in urban centres and in the borderlands of the two countries, where the largest refugee camps existed. During the currency of the war there were also private, small-scale initiatives by concerned individuals in Islamabad and Peshawar, and across the country, to provide aid and assistance to Afghan refugees and to enable them to settle down in whatever way they

could in the cities they had chosen to migrate to.
A decade after the end of the Afghan war, I also had the opportunity of working as a part of a team on one such programme that focused on the provision of non-food relief items to Afghan refugee camps in Chaman, Quetta. Yet the images of a sea of Afghan families squatting for hours at night in Peshawar Mor in Islamabad, waiting for their daily ration of bread and lentils, or the desperation and defeat chiselled into the faces of the multitude of refugees in the camps in Chaman as a result of their decades-long displacement, coupled with the destruction of their homes and the loss of their loved ones, were testament to the sheer hopelessness and the horrifying magnitude of the problem. Those images remain etched in my memory to this day.
Even as the Afghan war ended, a panorama of such images continued to constitute for us the reality of Afghanistan: a war-ravaged, dust bowl of a country, populated by, on the one hand, bearded gun-toting warriors who helped John Rambo defeat the Russians or, on the other, their meek, tragically impoverished brethren seeking to make Pakistan their home. After the end of the war, Afghanistan ceased to captivate our attention. For the mass of people in Pakistan, it became the irrelevant western neighbour no one was ever likely to visit.
During the course of a two-day conference, which I had the pleasure of attending, a track 2 dialogue – organised over the weekend by the Regional Peace Institute in collaboration with the Afghan Institute of Strategic Studies and with the support of the Hans Seidel Foundation of Germany – that sought to discover objective means to promote trade, commerce, cultural and security cooperation between the two countries, the mythology of that perception was shattered. We were, instead, introduced to a new Afghanistan: its representative delegates – the intellectuals, media persons, parliamentarians, entrepreneurs, all of them educated, modern, politically and historically aware – revealed to my surprise a new Afghanistan, capable of and resolute in its endeavour to achieve a dignified position as a modern nation-state, together with the other nation-states in the region and in the world.
In a candid dialogue during those two days we learned also of the challenges that the prospect of lasting peace and cooperation between the two countries is beset with. There is the festering wound of mistrust that the decades-long Afghan conflicts have nurtured. For young educated Afghans to return to their beloved homeland after years of displacement, to experience the physical destruction of war, to comprehend the enormous loss of innocent lives, to grapple with the psychological trauma of decline that their country has suffered, is perhaps unimaginable for us. It is no small wonder then that in making sense of the chaos that has been exacted on their homeland Afghans, young and old, may regard us now as the chief instrument of their misfortunes.
But a silver lining was also tangibly discernible in the informal dialogue, one that underlined the hope and the desire for cooperation replacing conflict, as the blueprint for a peaceful and harmonious future. We were given a heart-rending account by the youngest woman parliamentarian of Afghanistan, of how, in the wake of the recent floods in Pakistan, when Pakistani refugees made their way into Afghanistan to find shelter, the Afghan inhabitants of those border towns went out with boxes in their streets to collect money and food to alleviate the plight of their Pakistani brethren, a campaign that was supported by members of the Afghan government. Of the shock and sorrow experienced in Afghanistan on the news of Malala’s shooting and the relief when she was rescued by the Pakistan Army. We were informed that tangible efforts are being made by the Afghan Chamber of Commerce to facilitate ease of access for Pakistani’s seeking to do business in Afghanistan and of the cognizance of the importance of trade and commerce with Pakistan on the Afghan side.
Our Afghan counterparts were reminded that today they also deal with a new Pakistan. Our commitment to root out terror is not only evident from the concrete measures taken by our armed forces, backed squarely by our political establishment, but also resonates in the fatigued and sorrowful hearts and minds of all Pakistanis who have, personally or impersonally, endured the human costs of increasing levels of terrorism in this country in the past fifteen years. All this, together with our unstinting desire to cooperate with our western neighbour to root out and counter terror were effectively reiterated by Sartaj Aziz in his keynote address. Important also were the eloquent observations of Tareq Fatemi, who warned of the danger of seeking formulae of rapprochement inspired on European models, the enduring peace in those nations having been achieved after all, at the end of no less than 100 years of unnecessary armed conflict.
And one cannot but recognise that the tragedy of the Afghan war was, after all, not just the outcome of decisions taken by willing actors on both the Pakistani and Afghan sides, but also the result of the imperial designs of a paranoid western world which felt besieged by the growing might of communism; the outcome of that state of siege mentality was the use of countries such as Pakistan and Afghanistan as pawns in a geo-strategic chess game that eventually achieved the fall of the Soviet Union. Such imperial designs may have morphed to assume a different shape and colour today, but both countries would do themselves a favour to remain alert to them.
On the final day of the dialogue – which emphasised the need to build dynamic cultural linkages alongside the promotion of trade and commerce as an important parallel process to the ongoing security engagement between both countries – we were offered an image of what a final solution to lasting peace in the region may look like: the chief guests presiding over the final days proceedings included the special advisor to the prime minister on foreign policy and, flanking him on either side, the Afghan ambassador to Pakistan and the high commissioner of India.
It may be premature to hope for a meaningful trilateral engagement between the three countries. But if regional stability and prosperity are to be guaranteed, courageous steps in this direction will have to be taken. Short of that, the ghosts of conflicts past may continue to haunt us for generations to come.
The writer is a freelance columnist.
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