Pakistan keeps close eye on vote in its Afghan backyard

April 05, 2014 01:06

Posters of turbaned Afghan presidential candidates are rolling off the presses in Pakistan, which will be keeping close watch on the election in its strategic backyard.

Helped by cheaper labour and a favourable exchange rate, printers in the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar, less than 60 kilometres from the border, have been busy making Afghan election banners.

"We have been swamped with work for the past two weeks because of the Afghan elections. One candidate has asked me to print 200,000 posters," said printer Mohammad Sajid. Business links with Afghanistan have grown in recent years and analysts say Pakistan wants a stable northwestern neighbour, shifting from the interference of the past.

Pakistan wants to exert its influence on the Taliban to join a broader peace process, observers say, rather than topple Afghanistan's democratically elected government and create a new power vacuum with a violent spillover effect.

Fear of encirclement by India led generations of Pakistani military thinkers to view Afghanistan as a zone of potential risk -- and thus legitimate space for covert intervention.

This doctrine of "strategic depth" saw Pakistan seek to support groups in Afghanistan it regarded as favourable to its ends, first the mujahideen fighting the Soviet occupation of the 1980s and then the Taliban during their 1996-2001 rule in Kabul.

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