Pakistan is resigned to a candidate with strong ties to India winning Afghanistan's election while it looks ahead to when it can use its influence with the Taleban to regain sway in the war-torn country. Nuclear-armed India and Pakistan have fought three wars since 1947 and have been engaged in what analysts see as virtually a proxy war in their competition for influence in Afghanistan. Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his chief rival, former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah, have both claimed victory in last week's vote. Preliminary official results are due on Sept. 3. If neither candidate wins more than 50 percent they will contest a second round run-off vote in October. Pakistan says it has no favorite and wants stability in its western neighbor although analysts said it would prefer to see a victory for Karzai, who polls before the vote showed was likely to emerge the eventual victor. “There is a degree of disappointment with him, in particular over the way he has provided Afghanistan as a playing field for India,” Rasul Bakhsh Rais, a professor at the Lahore University of Management Sciences said of Karzai. “But Abdullah would be a much greater evil for Pakistan.” Both Karzai and Abdullah are seen as close to India though Karzai is a known quantity and from Afghanistan's biggest ethnic group, the Pashtuns, many of whom also live in Pakistan. Karzai is also not seen as being anti-Pakistan while Abdullah is identified with Tajiks, Afghanistan's second biggest ethnic group whose leaders have been powerful since 2001 and who have long been seen as close to India and hostile towards Pakistan. “In terms of Pakistan's geo-strategic outlook, everything is India-specific,” said Kamran Bokhari, senior South Asia analyst at the global intelligence company Stratfor. “From the Pakistani point of view, it cannot allow Afghanistan to be a place where India has interests.” Relations between Afghanistan and India have blossomed since the overthrow of the Taleban in 2001 and India is one of Afghanistan's biggest aid donors. But India is not involved in Afghanistan militarily and Pakistan is determined to exclude India from any negotiations that might take place to end the Afghan war, Bokhari said. Waiting for talks Pakistan had long regarded Afghanistan as a fall-back option in case of war with India and it has a long record of involvement. In the 1980s, Pakistan, with US and Saudi Arabian support, backed Islamist guerrillas battling Soviet occupiers. Pakistan later nurtured the Taleban, which emerged in the early 1990s in the chaos that followed the Soviet withdrawal. Pakistan maintained that support until the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States by the Taleban's Al-Qaeda allies, when it officially severed links with the Taleban and saw its influence over events in Afghanistan largely evaporate. With the United States and its allies and the Afghan government talking about dialogue with the Taleban, analysts say Pakistan is looking to the longer term when it can regain influence in Afghanistan by using its leverage with the Taleban. “I don't think this election is being seen as a game-changer,” said Bokhari. “Ultimately, the Pakistanis are waiting to be told by Washington: ‘Please bring to bear your Taleban resources so we can somehow begin a process of a negotiated settlement'.” Veteran Pakistani journalist and expert on Afghanistan, Rahimullah Yusufzai, said Indian influence in Afghanistan was a reality that Pakistan could do little about. “Pakistan can't help it. India has spent so much money in Afghanistan, it has bought so much influence,” Yusufzai said. “What Pakistan can do is hope that, if there's a deal with the Taleban and they can get a share of power, through them Pakistan could influence events in Afghanistan.” Pakistan also sees the withdrawal of Western troops from Afghanistan as key to ending its own militant problem which it regards as a spill-over of Afghan turmoil. Given the belief that sooner or later, the Afghan government and its Western backers will have to talk to the Taleban, Pakistan was unlikely to take concerted action against Afghan Taleban operating out of border enclaves, Bokhari said. “From the point of view of Islamabad why touch them?” Bokhari said. “There are going to be negotiations, one just has to sit tight and watch the dynamic play out.” At the same time, successful attacks since April on Al-Qaeda-linked homegrown Taleban, whose leader was widely believed to have been killed this month in a US missile strike, has taken US pressure off Islamabad, he said.
