Karzai's appointment setback for Pak

New Delhi, December 6, 2001.
The appointment of Mr Hamid Karzai as head of Afghanistan’s interim government is a setback for Pakistan (and Iran) despite his links with the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

Mr Karzai owns three houses in Pakistan — one each in Peshawar, Lahore and Quetta — and has been in touch with the ISI for about two decades. In fact, it was under a strong recommendation of the ISI that he became Deputy Foreign Minister in Afghanistan in 1990-92, well-placed sources said here today.

But his honeymoon with the ISI ended in July, 1999, when his father, Mr Abdul Ahad Karzai, chief of the powerful Popalzai tribe in Kandahar, was assassinated by the Taliban. Mr Karzai naturally believed that the ISI, which had been the mentor of the Taliban, double-crossed his father.

However, the ISI is believed to have reopened its channel with Mr Karzai in the past couple of months courtesy the USA with which he has fantastic rapport. His five brothers and a sister are US greencard holders, though he himself is not.

Sources said Pakistan was feeling itself checkmated in the diplomatic game played in Bonn for the past one week where Mr Karzai was chosen to head the post-Taliban interim administration in Afghanistan because Islamabad had put all its eggs in one basket — former Afghanistan President Burhanuddin Rabbani.

The Pakistani gameplan, sources pointed out, was to salvage some bit of stakes in Afghanistan by getting Mr Rabbani chosen as head of the interim government. Mr Rabbani is a hardcore activist of the Jamaat-e-Islami and that is why the Pakistani strategists found him to be their best man in the current situation.

It is public knowledge that Mr Rabbani had met a Pakistani delegation in Dubai about a fortnight back for closed-door talks on the post-Taliban arrangement in Afghanistan. What very few people know is that the Pakistani delegation was crammed with ISI agents.

Mr Rabbani, incidentally, has had a close relationship with the ISI and is familiar with their working. ISI agents were his "handlers" during the early 1980s when he fought against the Soviets.