All these plans of dividing Afghanistan and Pakistan notwithstanding, historical, social, economic, political and even security factors indicate that formation of Greater Afghanistan is inevitable.

However, what the Afghans view as greater Afghanistan is not very dissimilar to the vision of a great Pakistan to most Pakistanis.

Interestingly, all the forces aimed at causing disintegration are releasing forces that would hasten moves towards unification of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Pakistan’s policy since its inception has been focused on maintaining a situation that could help it avoid controversy over the Durand Line. It has been trying to force a fusion of communities along this line and a separation from those on the other side of the line. It has been sensitive to their being identified as Pakhtun as if by merely calling their province Pakhtunistan or Pakhtunkhwa it would secede.

Even though there are more Pakhtun in Pakistan than in Afghanistan and Pakistani Pakhtuns are better educated and more affluent, Pakistan has always been nervous about its Pakhtun population. It has allowed itself to be continually blackmailed by ethnic zealots, not only in the NWFP but also in Sindh and Balochistan.

The question arises, why is Afghanistan not wary of Pakistan claiming Pakhtun majority area to be included in Pakistan. There are reasons for it.

One, Pakistan calls itself an Islamic Republic but does not conduct itself like one. Two, tribal bonds are brotherly and feudal bonds are exploitery; feudal Punjab and Sindh are wary of tribal Frontier and Balochistan. Three, India did succeed in sowing suspicion and discord between East and West Pakistan and used it to invade and separate East Pakistan. But what is the answer?

Would Pakistan and Afghanistan forever remain condemned to instability and seeking security by dependence on outside forces that have not hesitated to occupy their countries and devastate their peoples? Is it not better to unite and form whatever the majority like to call it - Greater Afghanistan or Great Pakistan?

For its security, Pakistan has depended throughout its existence on major power wielders. This dependence is getting so perilous that Pakistan has to sacrifice its raison d’être and Islamic identity to maintain itself in favor with them and even court its nemesis.

Cooperation with the US during the anti-Soviet war was justified in the name of Islam and the US kept on feeding Pakistan because it was fighting its war.

In the post 9/11 environments, Pakistan has to fight the US wars for domination and colonization if it has to remain in Washington’s good books. It has to get approval from Washington as to what kind of Islam it can follow. Pakistan has to live under perpetual dictatorship under the pretext of “assurance against possible Talibanisation of the governance system”?[8][8]

According to the same report the U.S. will accept “limited Islamization” in Pakistan. It is the US that would approve the teachings of Islam that it deems to be ‘Islamic’ and reject those it sees to be ‘un-Islamic’. It would be something to laugh about if it was not true. But it is! And it is not funny!

It means Pakistan’s security and survival is conditional upon the pleasure of Washington. If it could please it, it will live; otherwise, there is no guarantee of its existence.

Internally, except the opportunist politicians, people from almost all segments of the society are against the US sponsored rule, which keeps the state unstable and its leaders on probation. Pakistan’s deepening involvement in the hoax US war on terrorism against its own citizens further alienates its government from the public. Externally, the arms gap with India is widening. Furthermore, India’s alliance with Israel makes the situation even worse for Pakistan.

As early as October 1995, Sandy Gordon predicted that in the 21st century,

India is poised to emerge... as a far more important and influential power in the Indian Ocean region, and even globally, than it was in the latter part of the 20th. Some of the constraining factors in India’s rise to power, particularly domestic and regional South Asian instability, are still present and will continue to snap at India’s heels for some years to come. But the end of the Cold War has also enabled India to jettison some of the more burdensome foreign and economic policies that had constrained it in the past.... [whereas] Pakistan, which has long been India’s only serious competitor in South Asia, has lost out seriously as a result of the end of the Cold War. While India suffers from internal instability, Pakistan’s problems are potentially far more serious.’”[9][9]  

The incidents of 9/11 in particular have changed the view that Gordon may be overstating India’s ability to take advantage of the potential benefits to it of the Cold War’s end. Today, Pakistan’s diplomatic position both on the Afghan and Kashmir front is very weak in the sense that no one is ready to listen to its point of view. Just as the world is silent over Israel’s nuclear and chemical programs and issuing warnings and deadlines to Iran, Pakistan pleas for addressing the ever-worsening human rights situation in Kashmir are falling on deaf ear. On top of it, enormous problems of rural poverty, disease, environmental degradation, and overpopulation remain largely un-addressed.

As a reward for Musharraf’s services, Washington’s decision to unclog the aid pipeline to Pakistan, however, scarcely begins to address Pakistan’s security dilemma. After all, Pakistan is still not considered fit for F-b and other major military sales. Furthermore, beyond Islamabad’ s present close relations with Washington, lies the greater security problem for Pakistan: the gradual drying up of any promising alliance prospects to serve Pakistan’s requirement for great-power insurance against joint Indo-Israeli military might. Dream of an “Islamic bloc” solidly aligned behind Pakistan has failed utterly to materialize; and there are signs of etiolation as well in the fidelity to Pakistan even of China.

China’s record from the Gulf War I to war on Serbia, Afghanistan and then Iraq shows that if the going gets really rough, it will not care much for the consistency of support from Pakistan over the past forty years. In recent years, Beijing has retreated to a conspicuously neutral position on Kashmir, unquestionably an important litmus test of friendship from Islamabad’s point of view, and China’s steadily expanding rapprochement with India, as Sandy Gordon has observed, “has provided India with a significant peace dividend in the context of its competition with Pakistan.”[10][10]

On the Afghan front, Pakistan has completely lost the trust of the public in the NWFP and Balochistan, not to speak of the tribal areas. The geopolitical situation in Afghanistan on the other hand is, by any standard, extremely unstable. US and its allies have a very large stake in the stability of Karzai’s puppet regime. Pakistan, at least as much as any of the other external contenders, considers Afghanistan’s stability and its leaders’ pro-Pakistan orientation to be matters of the most vital state interest. However, other than using its armed forces on the directions from Washington, Pakistan is totally marginalized at the moment.

The viable option for addressing Pakistan’s vulnerable political geography and its military-demographic-economic weakness relative to India lies in Pakistan’s union with Afghanistan. Irrespective of the present situation in which both Pakistan and Afghanistan are fully or partially occupied by the US, Pakistan and Afghanistan may apply the central argument of Huntington’s thesis, the “kin-country rallying” for mobilizing of interstate support systems or alliances on religious or civilizational grounds, on the first available opportunity.

In this regard, Pakistan’s past (the secession of Muslim East Bengal) and its present (in regard to Afghanistan, for instance) clearly suggest that merely relying on a trans-state Islamic bond has very definite limits. Every state has its own policies and every state finds itself at odds not only with numerous groups within, but also with other states with which it is allied. Therefore, a symbolic Pak-Afghan Union would not work. It has to be a merger of these states into one greater Afghanistan within its former frontiers that include all the territory presently within Pakistan borders.

An obvious example that paves the way for the confederation with Afghanistan is February 2, 2002 editorial of The Friday Times, where it writes:

“the super-generals... may have been thinking of some such strategic notion when he [Musharraf] recently said that Pakistan had to be friends with the Taliban because they were comprised of ethnic Pakhtuns who formed the main ethnic community of our own NWFP that borders Afghanistan. This leads us to postulate the super-generals’ strategic thinking that a strong Pakhtun state in Afghanistan would suit Pakistan immeasurably more than a weak Pakhtun or non-Pakhtun state. Is that right? No, it isn’t... .a weak non-Pakhtun dominated state in Afghanistan has never posed any threat to Pakistan because it has neither had any ideological bearings or religious extra-national ambitions nor any ethnic or sub-nationalist stirrings. On the other hand, whenever there has been a strong Pakhtun dominated state in Afghanistan, its government has been compelled by the logic of its own composition to pander to ethnic nationalism by supporting Pakhtun separatism (refusal to accept the Durand Line) or try and export religious fundamentalism (Talibanism) to the NWFP and Balochistan... This would suggest that a strong Taliban state in Afghanistan, which combines the worst elements of ethnic Pakhtun nationalism and religious exclusivism, would eventually pose a threat to the territorial integrity and political solidarity of multi-ethnic, multi-sectarian, democratic Pakistan.”

Such bigoted views are completely at odds with the reality on the ground and founding concepts of Pakistan. There is no need to shed light on the obvious anti- Pakistan feelings in the hearts of Persian speaking Afghans. Attitude and policies of pro-Indian Northern Alliance and its leaders are good examples for those who understand.

With regard to Pakhtuns and NWFP, it is worth quoting what Ch. Rahmat Ali - the man who formulated the name and concept of Pakistan, said about ‘NWFP’ and the Pakhtoon people in his book “Pakistan: The Fatherland of Pak Nation” 1940:

North West Frontier Province - is semantically non-descript and socially wrongful. It is non-descript because it merely indicates their geographical situation as a province of old ‘British India’ [which no longer exists]. It is wrongful because it suppresses the social entity of these people. In fact, it suppresses that entity so completely that when composing the name ‘Pakistan’ for our homelands, I had to call the North West Frontier Province the Afghan Province.

Essentially what Rahmat All is saying is that the NWFP is a gross distortion because it is the British term for the North Western region of the Indian empire that no longer exists. Also, NWFP is not a Frontier as far as the indigenous population, the Pakhtuns, are concerned. Rahmat All wrote, “It must be remembered that the Pathans are a great, gifted, and Pan-Islamic people. This is borne out by history which records that they were the first to accept Islam and lay the foundations of its twelve- century rule in India; that they were the last to stop the fight against the British and the first to resume that fight on the Afghan and Baloch frontiers; and that they are the people one of whom, the writer, however unworthy, was blessed by Allah to create the Ideal of Pakistan itself and start the fight for the realization of that Ideal - the Ideal which so inspired all Muslims as to make them join the fight and establish this Fatherland which is the home and heritage of all Paks”.

Finally, in his book, Ch. Rahmat Ali advocates a family re-union of our Asian and Indian homelands i.e. Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia.

The views expressed by people associated with domestic secular-liberal movement and people advocating South Asian regional cooperation are indirectly paving the way for this reunion.

The UN sanctions on Afghanistan, western attitude towards the Taliban and Pakistan, and now the seemingly indefinite occupation of Afghanistan, are advertised as measures to prevent the disintegration of Pakistan and Afghanistan even though that is their objective. But it may lead to their Union and create enthusiasm for further federation with the neighboring and ancestral Muslim homelands of Central Asia, Iran, etc.

Commenting on the issue of pan-Islamic federation, Robert G Wirsing writes:

“This idea has gestated in Pakistani minds that both its vulnerable political geography and its military-demographic-economic weakness relative to India could be compensated for, at least to an extent, by expanding and deepening its ties to the many coreligionist States of the Islamic world... [However] the pan-Islamic option, for all its bluster and for all its promise, is for most practical purposes (and certainly for Pakistan's basic security requirements) a fiction.”[11][11]  

It might appear that under the present circumstances, Pakistan is coming up short of reliable Islamic allies. However, the attitude of the ‘liberal’ elite in Pakistan, and policies and actions of the western nations suggest that the same forces are indirectly leading to developing a mindset among Pakistanis and Afghans that they are the same people facing common problems and sharing a common destiny that reinforces the trans-state Islamic bonds between them. Besides the undeniable civilizational, political and security need for Pakistan’s reunion with Afghanistan, there is plenty of evidence that the rallying of Muslims to pan-Islamic causes has become a matter of some significance in the South Asian environment, particularly in a situation where the western powers are bent upon prematurely turning India into super power of the 2l century.

According to a report by Jyoti Malhotra, the British are now talking of a partnership of equals’ between Britain and India in the new century.[12][12]

To directly challenge the Indian and western efforts, Pakistan would be well advised to move towards substantive initiatives such as the notion of a Community of Power to be evolved between Iran and Pakistan to begin with and gradually fanning out into Afghanistan and other Muslim states to form the eastern flank to the heart of Islam as it had been, before it was broken up through the Mongol invasions beginning in 1221; then through infighting by the Afghans, Moghuls and Safavids; and finally by the colonial legacy of the McMahon, Durand and Goldsmith Borders.

Greater Afghanistan would play a pivotal role in the whole set up. (End)


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