India, Pakistan overshadow Afghan meet
Though not surprising but, nevertheless, somewhat disappointing, the senior officials meeting of the Heart of Asia Istanbul Process, a large multilateral platform to discuss Afghan security and reconstruction, was overshadowed by issues relating to the India-Pakistan bilateral. This was despite the fact that the Afghanistan remains at a critical stage with the Taliban making a strong comeback and Afghan security forces fighting to hold their ground. Only last week, the Taliban attacked the headquarters of a security agency in the heart of a heavily fortified Kabul that killed 64 people and wounded almost 350. It was one of the biggest attacks by the terror group in an urban centre since 2001. And that's not all. The attack was followed up by another one in the evening, targeting a local broadcaster that killed another seven people. These attacks come at a time when the Taliban's new chief is considered to be consolidating this support base, and indicate that Government forces may have failed to take advantage of inter-Taliban rivalries that erupted after Mullah Omar's death was announced in 2015, three years after he actually died in a Pakistani hospital. At the same time, the quadrilateral peace process that Pakistan was supposed to have brokered to bring the Taliban to the negotiating table with the Afghan Government has also failed to take off. left with few options, President Ashraf Ghani is now taking a stronger line both against the Taliban and its patrons in Pakistan.
The situation is in flux and the Delhi meet was important to take stock and plan ahead. However, almost all the attention was on the talks between Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar and his Pakistani counterpart Aizaz Ahmed Chaudhry, who were meeting during yet another bumpy phase in the bilateral. A fortnight ago, the Pakistani High Commissioner in New Delhi had announced that the Comprehensive Bilateral Dialogue between the two countries had been suspended. This had caused much confusion, and also some embarrassment for the Government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi which has arguably gone out of its way to improve ties with Pakistan in good faith especially by permitting Pakistani investigators to visit the Pathankot air base so that they would help bring the perpetrators of the January 2016 terror attack to justice. Yet, Pakistan responded not just by trashing Indian claims of Pakistani complicity but denying Indian officials the reciprocal visit and ostensibly junking the dialogue process. Hence, when Pakistan announced that its Foreign Secretary would head the delegation for the Heart of Asia conference, it was an important development. Notably, it was at the ministerial meeting of the Heart of Asia conference in Pakistan in December 2015 that the External Affairs Minister had announced the new bilateral dialogue (which, however, hit the Pathankot roadblock a month later). That said, the Foreign Secretary-level meeting itself were fairly mundane.