[This has long been an open secret. “When history is written, it will be stated that the ISI defeated the Soviet Union in Afghanistan with the help of America,” Hamid Gul, a former ISI chief, said on television in 2014. “Then there will be another sentence. The ISI, with the help of America, defeated America.”]
Khan himself made a curious remark
at an event Monday in Islamabad. Commenting on the cultural dangers inherent
in English-language education for Pakistani society — and the “mental slavery”
it supposedly imposes — he seemed to point to the fundamentalist Taliban as an
exemplar of a kind of empowering authenticity. Afghans, Khan said, “had broken
the shackles of slavery.
For now, Khan’s government has refrained
from recognizing the new Taliban overlords as the legitimate government in
Kabul. The prime minister, who has been a vocal opponent of the American “war
on terror” in the region and blames it for stoking a parallel Pakistani Taliban insurgency, stressed the
“importance of all sides working to secure an inclusive political solution,” according to local news reports Tuesday. He and his allies
cast Pakistan as a victim of cycles of regional unrest and conflict,
exacerbated by the interventions of foreign powers like the United States. “We
under no circumstances are prepared to see protracted instability that in the
past has caused spillover into Pakistan,” national security adviser Moeed
Yusuf said in an interview this month. “Pakistan has suffered all
of these 40 years.”
Such rhetoric would probably stick
in the craw of the Afghan leaders of the defeated Western-backed government.
For years, they bemoaned the support afforded to the Afghan Taliban by
Pakistan, particularly by the country’s military establishment and its
affiliated intelligence apparatus, known as the Inter-Services Intelligence, or
ISI. In January 2020, during a World Economic Forum roundtable with journalists, including Today’s
WorldView, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani scoffed at Pakistani claims that the
Afghan Taliban was no longer operating from safe havens in Pakistan. “One can
also say that the Earth does not revolve around the sun,” he said.
The Taliban’s long-running
insurgency and its rapid takeover of Afghanistan are inextricably linked to
Pakistan. For the better part of half a century, Pakistan cultivated
militant elements in Afghanistan as part of its own regional pursuit of “strategic depth.”
The factions that coalesced into the Taliban maintained extensive logistical
and tactical ties with Pakistani agencies, while many of their fighters came
from a world of ethnic and tribal affiliations that spanned both sides of the
rugged border. These same networks probably enabled al-Qaeda terrorist founder
Osama bin Laden to find sanctuary in a leafy compound not far from Pakistan’s
leading military academy until U.S. Navy Seals killed him in a raid a decade
ago.
For its allies in the Pakistani
establishment, the Taliban’s appeal was both political and tactical, even as
Pakistan served as a major U.S. ally during and after the 2001 invasion of
Afghanistan. “Some sympathized with the Islamists’ extreme ideology, while
others deemed it an indispensable asset to counter India,” noted the Financial Times. “Taliban leaders have lived and
done business in Pakistan, and wounded fighters have been treated in its
hospitals. The Haqqani Network, an affiliate of the Taliban, has a ‘close
relationship’ with the ISI, according to a recent report from the US Institute
of Peace.”
This has long been an open secret.
“When history is written, it will be stated that the ISI defeated the Soviet
Union in Afghanistan with the help of America,” Hamid Gul, a former ISI
chief, said on television in 2014. “Then there will be
another sentence. The ISI, with the help of America, defeated America.”
Now, from former E.U. leaders to Afghans on social media, there
are calls for tougher international action on Pakistan.
“Without Pakistan’s intelligence and military establishment’s unstinting
support for the Taliban, the group would be a nuisance rather than an effective
fighting force,” wrote academic C. Christine Fair in Foreign Policy
this week. “The United States has steadfastly refused to do the one thing it
could have done long ago: targeted sanctions against those in Pakistan’s deep
state who sponsor Islamist militants.”
On the contrary, the United States
leaned on Khan’s government to facilitate talks with the Taliban. Under Trump
administration pressure, Pakistan released Abdul Ghani Baradar — the political figure
likely to be at the head of a future Taliban-led government — from prison in
2018 so he could participate in peace negotiations held in Doha, the Qatari
capital. In a June op-ed in The Washington Post, Khan argued that he
and his government did the “real diplomatic heavy lifting” to bring the Afghan
Taliban to the negotiating table and urged Ghani’s government to “show more
flexibility” in the talks.
Critics argue that the talks served as a smokescreen for the Taliban’s steady
advance through Afghanistan, and that the ultraconservative faction never had
any interest in preserving the constitutional republic that the United States
sought to solidify in Kabul. This has implications for Pakistan, too.
“The Taliban’s military takeover of
Kabul violates the peace agreement signed by the Afghan Taliban and the United
States in Doha last year, so that agreement is essentially dead,” wrote
Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir in a
Washington Post op-ed. “Now we face a state of yawning uncertainty — one
that affects Pakistan, perhaps, more deeply than any other regional power.”
At home, wrote political scientist Fahd Humayun, Pakistan could face
a new influx of Afghan refugees, on top of the approximately 3 million it has
hosted since the waning days of the Cold War. The Taliban takeover does not dim
the threat of anti-Islamabad militancy, and it could also encourage Islamist
extremist movements and ethnic Pashtun separatists operating within Pakistan.
Meanwhile, Western frustrations with the Pakistani connection to the Afghan
Taliban may only intensify in coming weeks.
“These developments will take
Pakistan further away from becoming ‘a normal country,’ perpetuating
dysfunction at home and locking it into a foreign policy defined by hostility
toward India and dependence on China,” wrote Hussain Haqqani, a former Pakistani ambassador now
based in Washington. “The United States is unlikely to soon forgive Pakistan
for its decades-long enabling of the Taliban.”
Read more:
The world’s ‘moral obligation’ to Afghan refugees
Afghanistan’s
rapid collapse is part of a long, slow U.S. defeat
Brazil’s
Bolsonaro follows the Trump playbook
