Pakistan is Not an Ally and Never Was
This article was published at The Telegraph.
When the Taliban swept into the capital of Afghanistan on Sunday, little of the coverage focused on Pakistan and yet that was where this victory was made. This is a pattern that has persisted throughout the war.
The former Pakistani ambassador to the United States, Husain Haqqani, titled one of his books “Magnificent Delusions” and in it he explains the misunderstandings that went into relations with Pakistan right back to the beginning. The Pakistani government reached out to the West for assistance using the language of the Cold War in the 1950s, and the assistance provided by the West in terms of counter-insurgency—intended for use against Communism—was used to help strengthen a capacity Pakistan had already displayed during partition: the use of insurgent or terrorist forces against India.
It was within the context of Pakistan’s “forever war” with India, an ideological commitment for the army and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) that controlled the country, that Pakistan began its jihad against Afghanistan no later than 1974. The military establishment in Pakistan viewed any Indian involvement in Afghanistan as “encirclement”. (Over the last twenty years, one of Pakistan’s primary complaints about NATO has been that it allows India to open up consulates around Afghanistan, which are believed to be used for all kinds of nefarious purposes.)
To the military and the ISI, then, the only solution was an Afghanistan under Pakistani control, and the instruments they know how to use are Islamist militants. After the coup in Afghanistan in 1973, many Islamists were driven from Afghanistan into Pakistan. These exiled Islamists grouped around Burhanuddin Rabbani’s Jamiat-e Islami and a major split saw another group formed by one of his deputies, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. After the Soviets invaded and occupied Afghanistan in 1979, Hekmatyar became ISI’s favourite Mujahideen commander, lavished with the most money and weapons.
The timeline here is important because Pakistan will often claim that the West instigated the anti-Soviet jihad in 1979 and then left Pakistan to deal with the aftermath in 1990. The truth is, Pakistan drew the West into supporting its jihad policy in Afghanistan, which was a project whose relationship to the Afghan resistance against the Soviet occupation was somewhat incidental.
In the early 1990s, after the Mujahideen commanders fell into a terrible civil war and Hekmatyar proved disappointingly unable to seize and hold Kabul, the ISI dropped him and recombined elements of the Mujahideen with the students (talibs) in the madrassas in the border area to create the Taliban. With massive, often direct Pakistani military involvement and the tight guidance of the ISI—through embedded “advisers” and with ISI officers posing as diplomats at the Afghan consulates—the Taliban conquered most of the country in the late 1990s.
After 9/11, the ISI chief, Lt. Gen. Mahmud Ahmed, flew to Afghanistan to directly order the Taliban not to surrender Usama bin Laden to the West and to tell them everything he knew of the NATO military plans. As Georgetown University’s Christine Fair recently pointed out, the Pakistanis “were supposed to be playing the ‘anvil’ to America’s ‘hammer’” during the invasion of Afghanistan, catching the Taliban and Al-Qaeda forces as they fled, but a conveniently timed terrorist attack against the Indian parliament by one of Pakistan’s proxies led to an escalation that “forced” Pakistan to withdraw forces from the Afghan border to the Indian border. Bin Laden was able to escape, and take up residence in a fortified compound within sight of Pakistan’s main military academy, their Sandhurst.
The ISI’s support for the Taliban remained undaunted in the years after 2001. The Taliban’s leadership is called the “Quetta Shura”, Quetta being a city in Pakistan where the jihadists have lived quite openly and unmolested. Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar died in Pakistan, as, notoriously, did the Al-Qaeda leader, killed in a raid in 2011 that the U.S. had to keep secret from Pakistan in case its leaders tipped off Bin Laden. Speaking to British and American military veterans, they are clear that the Pakistani hand behind the enemy they faced in Pakistan was common knowledge.
Pakistan was hardly subtle this week about its sense of triumph. Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan greeted the fall of Kabul to the Taliban as a great act of liberation: Afghans had thrown off the “shackles of slavery”, he said.
All of this raises the question: If the Taliban is an instrument of the Pakistani (deep) state, responsible for killing thousands of Western soldiers and tens of thousands of Afghan civilians, why is Pakistan treated as an ally? The answer is that the West feared Pakistan, on which the Coalition relied for ground lines of supply in Afghanistan, would become even less helpful, and more broadly that to pressurise Pakistan would lead to a collapse in which Pakistan’s (illegally-acquired) nuclear weapons got into the hands of terrorists.
In effect, Pakistan used its weakness as strength with which to threaten the West—and to extort us, receiving tens of billions of dollars since 2002 in the name of a War on Terror its military-intelligence establishment was committed to undermining. A coercive approach earlier on against Pakistan might have enabled a different outcome in Afghanistan; we will never know because we did not try. The least that can be done now, in the aftermath, is to treat Pakistan as the rogue regime it truly is, starting by sanctioning the officials involved in cultivating and commanding the terrorist assets, and adding Pakistan to the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) blacklist and the list of state sponsors of terrorism.