Can GCC countries mediate between Afghanistan and Pakistan?

Can GCC countries mediate between Afghanistan and Pakistan?Pakistan’s bilateral ties with Afghanistan have always been colored by a degree of complexity. A refusal to acknowledge the Durand Line as the official border between the two countries by successive Afghan governments has kept the bilateral relationship troublesome.

This Pak-Afghan discord has courted its fair share of mediators. The first mediation attempts started in the 1950s as tensions escalated after Afghanistan’s refusal to acknowledge the Durand Line as the official border with Pakistan and Kabul’s peddling of the Pashtunistan discourse. 

A group of Muslim states including Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Egypt and Türkiye entered the fray to diffuse the situation. From the Saudi side, mediation efforts were led by Prince Abdul Rehman Al-Saud, the brother of the Kingdom’s founder King Abdul Aziz. The senior Saudi royal visited Karachi and afterwards went to Kabul. Similarly, Türkiye’s then Prime Minister Adnan Menderes engaged with the Afghan leadership in a bid to mediate between the two states.

Only a few regional actors have the desired leverage vis-à-vis the Taliban regime. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are two regional actors that do possess such leverage.

- Umar Karim

These mediation efforts diffused the tense political standoff but didn’t fundamentally alter the environment of mutual distrust and uneasiness.

The bilateral tensions between the two nations reached a new scale with the Saur Revolution in Afghanistan of 1978 which brought into power a Communist regime and eventually led to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. This Soviet-installed regime remained hostile vis-à-vis Pakistan while maintaining close ties with India. Pakistan naturally backed the Afghan armed resistance against the communist regime. However, the eventual victory of these militant factions and the withdrawal of the Soviet Union didn’t stabilize the country and only led to a civil war between the different militant groups. 

Although this ended with the triumph of the Afghan Taliban, a regime fully supported by Pakistan, the Taliban government refused to acknowledge the Durand Line as an official border and its officials complained about Pakistan’s exploitative trade regime and its treatment of Afghan refugees. However, the regime’s relative political isolation globally kept the bilateral relationship cordial. The American invasion of Afghanistan and the installation of a republican regime ended this political dependence on Pakistan and revived all the contentious themes between the two states. 

As tensions escalated again, Türkiye emerged as a key mediator between the two sides. The initiation of the Afghanistan-Pakistan-Türkiye trilateral process in 2007 was meant to facilitate high-level political dialogue, security cooperation and development partnership between the two countries. This initiative did provide a platform for bilateral dialogue, however it never resolved the differences between the two sides.

The Taliban’s return to power in 2021 was expected to positively impact Afghanistan’s relationship with Pakistan. However, the bilateral relationship has gradually deteriorated as the new Afghan rulers have failed to act against Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) militants based in Afghanistan. The Taliban government remains politically isolated in the world owing to its conservative policies particularly the banning of women’s education and work. In this backdrop, only a few regional actors have the desired leverage vis-à-vis the Taliban regime. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are two regional actors that do possess such leverage.

Saudi Arabia remains the religious center of the Islamic world and several senior Taliban government figures have visited Saudi Arabia to perform Hajj and Umrah while also engaging with Saudi government functionaries. This gives Saudi Arabia some leverage vis-à-vis the Taliban regime. The question is, does Riyadh wish to play the role of mediator between Afghanistan and Pakistan?

The UAE does appear to be involved within Afghanistan and has established a working relationship with the senior leadership. Since the UAE hosts a large Afghan expat population that have been sending vitally important remittances back home, maintaining a cordial and working relationship with the Emirates has remained a foreign policy priority of the Taliban regime. This was visible as the new Afghan authorities inked a deal with an Emirati firm to run several Afghan airports.

Since the UAE already holds extremely close ties with Pakistan’s civil and military leadership and has a track record of mediation between India and Pakistan, it remains the ideal actor to play mediator between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Even if such a proposed Emirati mediation falls short of achieving a comprehensive rapprochement between the two sides, it still can provide the both with a trusted communication channel facilitating the bilateral engagement in crisis periods.

- Umar Karim is a doctoral researcher at the University of Birmingham. His research focuses on the evolution of Saudi Arabia’s strategic outlook, the Saudi-Iran tussle, conflict in Syria, and the geopolitics of Turkey, Iran and Pakistan. X: @UmarKarim89