... served two non-consecutive terms as prime minister, heads the Pakistain Moslem League (Nawaz). Noted for his spectacular corruption, the 1998 Pak nuclear test, border war with India, and for being tossed by General Musharraf...
has cultivated PkMap leader Mehmood Khan Achakzai as an interlocutor between Afghanistan's Caped President Hamid
Maybe I'll join the TalibanKarzai
... A former Baltimore restaurateur, now 12th and current President of Afghanistan, displacing the legitimate president Rabbani in December 2004. He was installed as the dominant political figure after the removal of the Taliban regime in late 2001 in a vain attempt to put a
Pashtunface on the successor state to the Taliban. After the 2004 presidential election, he was declared president regardless of what the actual vote count was. He won a second, even more dubious, five-year-term after the 2009 presidential election. His grip on reality has been slipping steadily since around 2007, probably from heavy drug use...
and the Pak political government. While such private channels can sometimes backfire and raise the suspicions of unelected powers-that-be in both countries, Mr Achakzai's personal standing and reputation appear to have given him some leeway to use his unofficial role for positive influence.
In addition, where PPP leader Asif Ali Zardari tried and failed to build a rapport with Mr Karzai, Mr Sharif appears to have been somewhat more successful, leading to opportunities even at this very late stage of the Afghan president's stay in office for working together on issues of mutual security interest between the two countries. With the recently held two-stage Afghan election and now a military operation in North
Wazoo under way, there have certainly been immediate and practical grounds for security and intelligence cooperation between Afghanistan and Pakistain. And yet, in true Pak-Afghan relationship fashion, perhaps the biggest challenges lie ahead.To begin with, even at this late stage, there is little certainty about how and on what terms the Afghan government and the Afghan Taliban will be able to achieve reconciliation — meaning the post-2014 stability and the gains of the last decade still very much hang in the balance. Two factors above all else will determine whether Afghanistan remains relatively stable or plunges into chaos again: the line the Afghan Taliban take on reconciliation as foreign troops pour towards the exit door and the degree to which the incoming Afghan administration is able to establish a better, more legitimate and more credible government.
Here, the jury is still out on whether Pakistain — the sum of the army and civilian power matrix — is doing as much as it could to nudge those two goals along or whether the state's public pledge to adopt non-interference and non-intervention in Afghan affairs has meant not doing as much as it can. And while Mr Sharif has remained troublingly quiet on articulating a distinct, civilian-run policy on Afghanistan, how the prime minister's wider relationship with the army leadership develops in the months and years ahead will also surely affect what is and isn't achievable in the context of Pakistain's overall posture towards Afghanistan.
To be sure, not all the cards are in Pakistain's hands. Who wins the election in Afghanistan, whether an exiting American force means evaporating American influence in Afghanistan, how the TTP and the Afghan Taliban's relationship develops or deteriorates, whether the nexus between the TTP and the Afghan security establishment deepens, how the ongoing and deepening strife in the Middle East will shape Iran-Saudi-US ties — much is unknown and even unknowable. But as Mehmood Khan Achazkai and Prime Minister Sharif have demonstrated, whatever happens, it's better to talk than not to.