The centrality of Pakistan — which the United States has so far tacitly accepted — in any talks between the Hamid Karzai government and the Pakistan-based Taliban leadership to prepare the regional politics for a post-US Afghanistan, is a thing of the past after Abbottabad.
Thus, in effect, the parleys in recent months involving the Pakistan civilian as well as military leadership and the Afghan president have been rendered as good as valueless.
An upshot of this is that repeated Pakistani pleas to regional and international actors to get India to scale down if not wind up its presence in Afghanistan — which Islamabad sought to reinforce with its own crude method of signalling the bombing of the Indian mission in Kabul — cannot now fall on sympathetic ears.
But this cannot materialise unless the Indian leadership seeks to make the point with the Afghans and others, and not just in private. That India is part of the stability solution in Afghanistan, and not a part of the problem like Pakistan, is required to be underscored.
After the news of Osama bin Laden’s killing was announced, Mr Karzai, and Afghan specialists and commentators, have asked whether the Taliban senior functionaries and operatives living in Pakistan cannot also be exposed, using precision methods of offence.
The top guns of the so-called Quetta Shura — said to number about 30 and including Mullah Omar, the Taliban chief — have all been kept away from prying eyes in Pakistani cities such as Quetta and Karachi, courtesy the Pakistani security establishment, as was the case with Osama.
But they are prisoners, not honoured guests, and are moved from place to place at the will of their Pakistani minders.
This is what they are understood to have underscored in some of their unofficial contacts with elements of the Afghan government and leadership.
Afghan and Indian sources with knowledge of these accounts suggest that the Pakistanis are loathe to let the Taliban do their own talking with the Afghan government. Since the Taliban are, in effect, captives of the Pakistan establishment, any public comments attributable to them are necessarily those of the Pakistanis.
A reversal of this state of affairs is, therefore, a precondition for the restructuring of a new Af-Pak politics. The priority is to get the Taliban leaders out of the clutches of Pakistan’s ISI and its military establishment.