Closest Ally Why Pakistan Supports The Taliban

Everyone is talking about a Pakistani “victory” in Afghanistan due to the resurgence of the Taliban, the Pakistani ally. However, the return of the powerful movement this time may spiral out of control and pose an unprecedented danger to the Pakistani state.

Hussain Haqqani, the former Pakistani ambassador to the United States, prepared an analysis published by Foreign Affairs magazine, in which he deals with the current situation of his country amid the rapid return of the Taliban movement and its control over the joints of the Afghan state after the withdrawal of American forces.

Haqqani, current director of the South and Central Asia Program at the Hudson Institute, reviews the history of Pakistan’s involvement in the Afghan conflict through its strong ties to the Taliban, and wonders whether his country will bite the finger of regret after decades of supporting the movement.

Pakistan’s security establishment has celebrated the Taliban’s latest military gains in Afghanistan, where militants have supported the movement for decades and are now watching their allies take root in Kabul. Pakistan has fulfilled its wishes, but it will eventually regret it. A Taliban takeover of Afghanistan will make Pakistan more vulnerable to domestic extremism, and perhaps even more isolated on the international stage.

The US ending of its nearly 20-year war in Afghanistan heralds a shift in its relationship with Islamabad. Pakistan has always concealed its ambitions in Afghanistan in order to maintain its relations with Washington, but this delicate equation – which Washington views as a dance on the ropes – will prove impossible when the inauguration of the returning Islamic Emirate in Kabul. Although this is not what the Pakistani military expects, the Taliban is unlikely to acquiesce in Pakistan at the height of its victory, and the Americans are also unlikely to reconcile with the Taliban in the long run. As for the nightmarish scenario for Pakistan, it finds itself caught between the Taliban, which is hard to control, and international demands to rein in it.

A Taliban victory would have an equally disastrous impact on peace and security within Pakistan. “Islamic extremism” has already divided Pakistani society along sectarian lines, and the rise of the Taliban next door will only strengthen the militants in Pakistan. Indeed, efforts to tie the hands of the Taliban may cause violence, and Pakistani Taliban fighters may attack targets inside Pakistan. If the fighting between the Taliban and its opponents intensifies, Pakistan may have to deal with a new wave of immigrants, and a civil war on Pakistan’s doorstep will further deteriorate the already suffering Pakistani economy. Pakistani critics have long expressed their fears of their country’s involvement with the Taliban, and even expected this scenario, but Pakistani generals see the Taliban as an important partner in light of their competition with India. Meanwhile, weak civilian leaders in Islamabad acquiesce in a policy that prioritizes eliminating any Indian influence in Afghanistan, real or imagined.

For decades, Pakistan played a dangerous game by supporting or tolerating the Taliban, as well as trying to preserve Washington’s favors. This approach worked longer than many expected, but it was not sustainable in the long term. Pakistan has been able to procrastinate and keep the ball in their court for a long time, but it will reach the end of that road soon.

Pakistan’s security establishment has long occupied itself with having a friendly government in Kabul, and this obsession stems from the belief that India is plotting to break up Pakistan along ethnic lines, and that Afghanistan will be a springboard for anti-government insurgencies in Pakistan’s Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa regions. These fears are rooted in the fact that Afghanistan claimed sovereignty over parts of Balochistan and the “Pashtun” regions of Pakistan at the time of the country’s founding in August 1976. Afghanistan recognized Pakistan and began diplomatic relations with it a few days later, but it did not recognize the Durand Line it set Britain had an international border between the two countries until 1976. Afghanistan also remained a friend of India, which led Pakistan to allow Afghan Islamists to organize on its soil even before the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in 1979.

Despite intense US-Pakistani cooperation in Afghanistan during the Cold War, the two countries (USA and Pakistan) never reconciled their conflicting interests there. The United States supplied the mujahideen with weapons and money through Pakistan as part of a global strategy to deplete the Soviet Union, but it showed little interest in Afghanistan’s future once the Soviets left it. In turn, Pakistani officials saw the anti-Soviet jihad as an opportunity to turn Afghanistan into a satellite state, siding with the fundamentalist mujahideen in the hope that a future Afghan government under their control would reject any Indian influence and help suppress Baluchi and Pashtun nationalism, centered on their common border.

These unresolved disagreements worsened over the following decades, and even after Pakistan became the logistical hub for US forces in Afghanistan after the events of September 11, 2001, officials in Islamabad were concerned about Indian influence in Kabul. Hence, the Pakistani army supported the Taliban, arguing that the movement represented a reality that their country, as Afghanistan’s neighbor with an ethnically intertwined population, could not ignore. For those sympathetic to Islamists, including those within the security establishment, they, in turn, felt a hidden pleasure that stemmed from harming the United States.

General Hamid Gul, the former ISI chief, articulated in 2014 how his agency used US aid after 9/11 to fund the Taliban, and how it benefited from America’s initial decision to ignore the movement and focus on tracking al-Qaeda’s trail. Gul said in a TV interview in 2014, “When history is written, it will be mentioned that the ISI defeated the Soviet Union in Afghanistan with America’s help. But history will add to our poetry, as the ISI defeated America with American help.”

Pakistani officials recently raised an uproar about the United States’ failure to stamp out the Taliban, and believe that Washington’s diplomatic relationship with the Taliban constitutes a tacit acceptance of its influence in Afghanistan.

After the signing of the Doha Agreement in 2020 between the United States and the Taliban, which paved the way for the withdrawal of American forces, “Khawaja Muhammad Asif” – who previously held the positions of defense minister and foreign minister in Pakistan – tweeted a picture of US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in his meeting with Taliban leader Mullah Mullah Abdul Ghani Barader,” and attached the photo with a comment: “The authority may be your helper, but God is our helper. God is the greatest.”

Khawaja Muhammad Asif

As Foreign Minister, Asif stressed that Pakistani relations with the Taliban only reflected recognition of their political power in Afghanistan, and he also criticized the United States for making Pakistan a “scapegoat” for its failure to destroy the group. Pakistan’s foreign minister therefore saw no need for diplomatic talk at that moment of victory. For Pakistanis like Gul and Asif, the Taliban’s imminent victory is a victory for Pakistan’s covert operations as well.

However, this Pakistani euphoria of victory is likely to be counterproductive. The Americans never recognized the seriousness of the Pakistani vision of an existential threat from India, and so they never understood Pakistan’s preference for Pashtun Islamists over Afghan nationalists. Over the years, Pakistani officials chose to categorically deny or downplay their country’s actions in Afghanistan, which led to the Americans accusing them of having a two-sided policy, and consequently the relationship between the two sides further distrusted. Islamabad’s relations with India and the rest of the world have also been damaged. Pakistan has become highly dependent on China, as Pakistan owes Beijing more than $24 billion, which represents 27% of Pakistan’s total external debt of $90 billion, and the country has been forced to rely on military technology. Relatively low quality Chinese after losing US military aid.

Three decades of support for jihad exacerbated the imbalance within Pakistan. Barring years of generous US support, its economy suffered, and local Islamist militants incited occasional violence, such as terrorist attacks on religious minorities.

This is in addition to publicly threatening women’s rights, and censoring traditional and social media to match the whims of hard-line Islamists.

The government has also been forced to “Islamize” school curricula at the expense of science subjects and critical thinking.

Paradoxically, the US withdrawal from Afghanistan came amid promises to reverse these tracks.

Four years ago, General Qamar Javed Bajwa, the current Pakistani army chief, declared his desire to turn Pakistan into a “normal country” and has since spoken of the need to improve relations with India and reduce Pakistani dependence on China.

Moon Javed Bajwa

This transformative vision included efforts to reach a settlement in Afghanistan, as Pakistan began to fence its long and porous border with its northern neighbor, took positive steps toward the government in Kabul, and promised to help the United States reach a peace agreement. Bajwa indicated Pakistan’s readiness to expand the circle of its partners in Afghanistan to include factions that do not belong to the Taliban, and the Pakistani intelligence also held meetings between US negotiators and some Taliban leaders, which led to the Doha agreement, which set a timetable for the withdrawal of the US army, in exchange for vague Taliban promises. By launching peace talks with other Afghan factions, and preventing the territory controlled by the movement from being used for terrorist attacks against the United States.

However, this agreement may exacerbate the challenges facing Pakistan rather than stimulate a return to normalcy. Given the Taliban’s hard-line ideology, it was unreasonable for US negotiators to expect the movement to conclude settlements with other Afghan factions, particularly the government in Kabul. Although Pakistan facilitated this agreement in the hope that it could improve its position with the United States, it will now be mostly blamed for the Taliban’s refusal to stop the fighting and agree to power-sharing. Bajwa’s stated desire to change course has therefore been hampered by Pakistan’s past policies, and given Pakistan’s poor relationship with most factions in Afghanistan, it may have no choice but to remain stuck with the Taliban in the event of renewed civil war along its northwestern frontier.

Moreover, the agreement will not achieve Washington’s counterterrorism goals. A United Nations Security Council report published last June concluded that the Taliban had not severed ties with al-Qaeda, and that senior al-Qaeda officials were recently killed “with Taliban elements sharing the same location.” The report also revealed the “Haqqani Network”, a group the US military once described as a “real arm of the Pakistani intelligence”, and described the report as the Taliban’s primary link to al-Qaeda. And the report added: “The links between the two groups are still close, based on ideological compatibility, the relationships formed through joint struggle, and the marriages between the two sides.” Meanwhile, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said that al-Qaeda could reconstitute itself in Afghanistan within two years of the US withdrawal.However, none of these facts changed President Joe Biden’s commitment to withdrawing US forces from there.

Pakistan expects a Taliban victory, even as its leaders continue to talk about the need for intra-Afghan reconciliation, and while popular rhetoric in Islamabad will continue to express Pakistan’s desire for peace, US officials are unlikely to believe that Pakistan does not want Taliban military control. Once again, therefore, the relationship between Washington and Islamabad is on the verge of further loss of confidence in the coming years.

Those Pakistanis, who see the world through the prism of competition with India, find their solace in the victory of the Taliban. Pakistan has not done well in competition with India in most respects, but its proxies in Afghanistan seem to succeed in that, even if Pakistan cannot control it. Full control.

However, this victory is, in fact, a hollow victory, as these developments push Pakistan further from its path to become a “normal country”, prolong the imbalance that hits the country, and confine it to a foreign policy based on hostility with India and dependence on China.

Washington and Islamabad’s long involvement in Afghanistan threatens to further weaken US-Pakistan relations, and the United States will likely not soon tolerate Pakistan’s decades-long efforts to empower the Taliban.

In the coming years, Pakistanis will wonder whether it was worth the trouble to gain influence in Afghanistan through the Taliban, when their country secured its interests after 9/11 by backing the Western alliance.

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This report is a translation of Foreign Affairs and does not necessarily reflect the website of Meydan.