HIS declaration that India did not have any military personnel in Afghanistan notwithstanding, President Hamid Karzai failed to remove Pakistan’s strong sense of outrage, based on substantive evidence, that Indian agencies were masterminding hostile acts against it from the Afghan soil, in collusion with local official elements. At a press briefing at the end of a two-day visit to Islamabad on Thursday, Mr Karzai also vainly tried to hold out the assurance that Kabul would not allow any country to wage a proxy war against another. In fact, if we look back at the terrorist incidents that have occurred in Afghanistan and in which Indian nationals lost their lives, we find his top mandarins pointing a finger at Pakistan, but there has been meaningful silence about India’s hand where Pakistanis were killed. The reference to ‘proxy war’ could, therefore, have been directed more against Islamabad than New Delhi.
While one would not like to doubt Mr Karzai’s assertion that the Indians had only four consulates in Afghanistan, his reference to the presence of “hundreds of (Indian) contractors”, a word that brings to mind the murderous role of Blackwater and its ilk, tended to give credence to the view that these contractors, free from the diplomatic obligations of consulates, were busy promoting terrorist activities against Pakistan. The repeated capture of caches of Indian arms from the hideouts of militants in the bordering areas of Afghanistan and other evidence would substantiate the charge. Mr Karzai is thus not justified in maintaining that Islamabad does not have any proof to back up the accusation against New Delhi. He was equally unhelpful in assuaging Pakistan’s worries about the growing Indian influence in Afghanistan, when he cited the right of a sovereign state to decide on such matters.

The joint declaration summing up the outcome of the visit, during which the Afghan President met his Pakistani counterpart, the Prime Minister and the military chief, hardly contains anything of substance; only vague banalities consisting of traditional expressions of brotherhood and friendship, commitments from both sides to strengthen the existing relations and plans, which from the very details, are destined to remain on paper. The will and circumstances to realise them are lacking. With both countries deeply suspicious of each other, how the idea of greater people-to-people contact would be put into effect, beats imagination. And, strangely also, they intend raising the volume of bilateral trade to $15 billion by 2015 while both of them are deeply mired in war and economic chaos. Both Kabul and Islamabad would have to do a lot of sincere thinking and effort before such cooperative and harmonious relations could emerge between them.