The United States has acknowledged Pakistan’s resolve to enforce security along the Afghan border with a comprehensive regime, as the American special envoy for the region also said Islamabad was supportive of a post-2014 US-led international effort to stabilize Afghanistan. James Dobbins, Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, told a Congressional hearing that with the exception of Iran, regional countries including Pakistan, had all argued with Afghan President Hamid Karzai that he ought to sign the Bilateral Security Agreement in the interest of regional stability.
He noted, “There has been a marked improvement over the last two or three months in Pakistan-Afghanistan relations.”
“Pakistan is proposing a much more substantial cooperative border regime —- essentially a regime along that line, which would better regulate the some 60,000 people, who go back and forth every day across that line,” Ambassador Dobbins said.
“The Pakistanis seem serious about moving toward a more substantial regime, more checkpoints, more biometric data, to make sure you know who’s moving back and forth.”
He recognized that the US and international forces’ ability to directly impact security on Pakistan-Afghanistan border was “going to be somewhat diminished as our own forces go down.”
“But part of the residual force we’re talking about is a small counterterrorism which would operate almost exclusively partnered with Afghan forces and would be directed very much at the insecurity and militancy that grows up in the border region,” he added, APP reported.
The Obama administration’s envoy told lawmakers that improvement in Pakistan-Afghanistan relations and continued international assistance for Afghanistan would greatly help Islamabad stabilize its region along the Afghan border.
“With a continued American and NATO military commitment with continued substantial assistance to Afghanistan and—on the one hand, and on the other hand, continued improvement in the Pakistan-Afghan relationship—and there has been a marked improvement over the last two or three months—then I think it will become somewhat easier for Pakistan to begin to stabilize its own border regions.”
In a scenario where U.S. and NATO pull out all troops from Afghanistan and international support for Kabul diminishes all regional countries will start hedging games by backing different Afghan factions, he reckoned, fearing that the “border regions of Afghanistan would begin to be even more of a safe haven for anti-Pakistani terrorists than they already are. And of course, the regions of Pakistan become an even greater safe haven for terrorists and extremists.”
The Bilateral Security Agreement, currently awaiting Afghan president’s signatures, would “provide the Afghans an assurance that the international commitment is going to be sustained beyond 2014, and be able to conduct an election campaign and the selection of a new president within a security blanket, if you will, that the future is not going to return to the 1990s but is going to be continuity of the progress that they’ve made over the last decade.”
Dobbins said the US and its allies “don’t want to see an outflow of refugees (from Afghanistan). Millions have come back over the last decade. And we don’t want to see that flow reversed. We have worked carefully with the new Pakistan government to try to promote better relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan.”
The US-Afghanistan Bilateral Security Agreement, he said, would be the keystone of a much wider international commitment involving over 70 countries ready to provide economic and security assistance to Afghanistan beyond 2015.
He said with the exception of Iran, leaders of regional countries, including Pakistan, China, Russia and India, back the conclusion of the agreement.
“Now, as you know, several of these leaders are no fans of an American military presence in Central Asia, but they all seem to recognize that without continued international military and economic support, Afghanistan risks falling back into civil war with the attendant rise in extremist groups, outflow of refugees and disruptions in commerce that would threaten the region as a whole.”
“Given this coincidence of Afghan public and regional governmental opinion, I see little chance that the BSA will not be eventually concluded. Awaiting the arrival of the next Afghan president to do so, however, will impose large and unnecessary costs on the Afghan people. Already, the anxiety caused by President Karzai’s refusal to heed the advice of the loya jirga is having such an effect.”
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