So, Pakistan has agreed to act as a facilitator for negotiations with the Taliban in Afghanistan. But that may or may not be a good thing.

The New York Times reports that the Pakistani security apparatus has given up the pretense of not having access to the Taliban and has agreed to approach them on behalf of the United States. That may or may not help the long-suffering Afghans.

Yes, the U.S. presence in Afghanistan is creating huge problems. (For just one example, see Anand Gopal’s excellent piece on the abuses the United States is committing in hidden detention centers throughout that country.) I am also well aware of the dysfunctional and misogynist nature of the Karzai government.

But at the same time, I am troubled by the incomparably awful record of the Taliban while in power and hope that the negotiations can avoid giving the Taliban any real say-so over policymaking that could return the Afghan people to that horrible era.

Let’s just take one sphere, but a very fundamental one: women’s education. “Over 2.2 million girls are now in school," UNICEF chief of education for Afghanistan Fazlul Haque said last year, “and we expect a 20 percent increase in primary school enrollment for girls by 2013.” And a main reason why there aren’t even more girls in school is the behavior of the Taliban. “In 2008 alone, there were 283 violent attacks on schools, resulting in ninety-two dead and 169 injured,” reports UNICEF.

Of course, under the Taliban the total enrollment of girls in schools countrywide was a big huge zero due to official policy strictly forbidding female education.

Or let’s take the Taliban’s vicious anti-minority campaigns, most notably against the Hazaras. This ethnic group had resisted their takeover, and to further condemn them in the eyes of the Taliban, they were Shiite, a dangerous heresy according to the Wahhabi doctrine that the Taliban followed with a vengeance. As many as 8,000 Hazara men, women and children were butchered when the Taliban captured the city of Mazar-e-Sharif in August 1998.

It is these sorts of actions of the Taliban that really worry me. Can they be persuaded to join in the political process without steering the government in an even more fundamentalist and misogynist direction? And is it feasible to separate the more moderate Taliban (supposedly propelled by Pashtun nationalism) from the really hardcore, Al Qaeda-loving types? I wish I had the answers.

The Afghanistan mess (including the Pakistani creation of the Taliban) is an offshoot of the India-Pakistan one-upmanship that has plagued South Asia since the two countries emerged out of the British Empire in 1947.

“The message [to the United States was] that the Pakistani Army still regarded India as its primary enemy and was stretched too thin to open a new front,” reports the New York Times. “The reluctance to take on the Haqqanis [a Taliban-allied insurgent group] preserves them as both a prize to be delivered at the negotiating table and a potential asset for Pakistan in postwar Afghanistan, said Syed Rifaat Hussain, professor of international relations at Islamabad University, who is close to the Pakistani Army.”

And India also sees events in Afghanistan through the same prism.

“It was circa 1997-98 that Delhi probably began sliding into a strategic mistake by regarding Afghanistan as a theatre of India-Pakistan rivalry,” writes ex-Indian diplomat M. K. Bhadrakumar in The Hindu newspaper. “Yet India got so entangled in the Hindu Kush that Pentagon spokesman last week openly demanded ‘transparency’ regarding Delhi’s intentions.”

Let’s hope that the people of Afghanistan don’t have to go through more agony due to this fratricidal competition.

Amitabh Pal is the Managing Editor of The Progressive magazine. To subscribe for just $14.97 a year, just click here.