American officials say one concrete sign of Pakistan's new policy is its move late last year to free Afghan Taliban prisoners that Kabul's High Peace Council had asked to be released. U.S. representatives also stress that the Pakistani foreign minister has visited Kabul often and met with Afghanistan's Northern Alliance, which is composed mostly of Tajik, Uzbek, and Hazara political leaders who are close to India and fought the Pakistan-supported Taliban during the 1990s.
Pakistanis are also now cooperating more with Afghan and U.S. military officials on border security, one senior Defense Department official said in an interview. Pakistani leaders have "publicly and privately expressed support for the Doha political process," in which the Afghan Taliban would be allowed to open an office in Qatar in order to meet with Afghan and foreign officials, with the aim of negotiating a conclusion to the war, the defense official said. The United States has been pushing for this development for a couple of years.
"The number one factor" driving Pakistan's shift in policy, according to the senior defense official, is the "growth of domestic radicalization, militancy, and terrorism" in Pakistan. According to the Pak Institute for Peace Studies, an independent think tank, nearly 40,000 civilians have been killed or injured since 2006 in violence stemming from terrorism, ethnic and sectarian strife, and the separatist insurgency in Baluchistan, as well as criminal activity.
"Pakistan's biggest fear is that if the [Afghan] Taliban come back into power through violence, through force, they will create trouble all around them, including in Pakistan," the official said. "They will not only provide safe haven to militants that are in Pakistan... but more ideological stimulus to these groups." This line of thinking had been simmering for a number of years but "has now crystallized in Pakistan across the civilian and military leadership, over the course of basically 2012."
Stephen Cohen, a South Asia expert at the Brookings Institution, says that although Pakistan has relied on the Afghan Taliban to advance its interests in Afghanistan for the past two decades, Pakistan's military leaders are now "uncertain about their [Afghan] proxies and whether they will turn against them, and whether the proxies have alliances with the people they are fighting in Pakistan, the Pakistan Taliban. Ideologically, there is no difference between them." Cohen says Pakistani officials "are nervous about their support for the [Afghan] Taliban bouncing back and hurting them in terms of their war against the Pakistani Taliban, which is now a full-scale war."
Pakistan's new army doctrine, which has not been publicly released, now recognizes that the military must also focus on the internal threat to the country's stability, according to Shuja Nawaz, who directs the South Asia Center at the Atlantic Council. For the first time, the doctrine tries to introduce to the senior ranks the notion that Pakistan is facing "multifaceted" threats and should be "no longer simply India-centric," he said.
"Our efforts must be directed towards stabilizing the internal front," said Kayani last August in a speech on the nation's independence day. "Today, extremism and terrorism present a grave challenge."
The U.S. military drawdown in Afghanistan is another factor propelling Islamabad's new approach, according to the first U.S. official, who deals with Pakistan. The Pakistanis are concerned that the Afghan National Security Forces will not be able to provide stability "at least in some provinces," this official said. "And I believe the Pakistani leadership, when they say that they don't, they categorically do not want the Taliban to come back to power."
Some former U.S. officials are skeptical, though.
"What they are doing is marginal," said one former senior defense official, who noted that while there may be some improvement in the Afghan-Pakistan relationship, "There are way too many things in play before you can say this is a concerted shift."
"There is no historical precedent" for Pakistan to change its entire approach toward Afghanistan, says Seth Jones, who advised U.S. special forces in Afghanistan in 2010 and 2011. Now a political scientist at RAND, Jones notes that Pakistan has backed militant organizations in Afghanistan since at least the 1980s, aiming to ensure a friendly country on its western flank.
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