Here’s some interesting perspective on the debacle of the Afghanistan war from the NY Times. It would be nice if the people reporting on the current situation would read it:
Just days after the Taliban took Kabul, their flag was flying high above a central mosque in Pakistan’s capital. It was an in-your-face gesture intended to spite the defeated Americans. But it was also a sign of the real victors in the 20-year Afghan war.
Pakistan was ostensibly America’s partner in the war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Its military won tens of billions of dollars in American aid over the last two decades, even as Washington acknowledged that much of the money disappeared into unaccounted sinkholes.
But it was a relationship riven by duplicity and divided interests from its very start after 9/11. Not least, the Afghan Taliban the Americans were fighting are, in large part, a creation of Pakistan’s intelligence service, the I.S.I., which through the course of the war nurtured and protected Taliban assets inside Pakistan.
In the last three months as the Taliban swept across Afghanistan, the Pakistani military waved a surge of new fighters across the border from sanctuaries inside Pakistan, tribal leaders have said. It was a final coup de grace to the American-trained Afghan security forces.
“The Pakistanis and the I.S.I. think they have won in Afghanistan,” said Robert L. Grenier, a former C.I.A. station chief in Pakistan. But, he warned, the Pakistanis should watch what they wish for. “If the Afghan Taliban become leaders of a pariah state, which is likely, Pakistan will find itself tethered to them.”
Pakistan’s already shaky reputation in the West is likely to plummet now, as the Taliban take over Afghanistan. Calls to sanction Pakistan have already circulated on social media. Absent foreign financing, Pakistan faces reliance on a jihadist drug trade encouraged by the new rulers in Kabul. A Taliban-run state on its border will no doubt embolden Taliban and other Islamist militants in Pakistan itself.
Not least, relations with the United States, already on the downslope, will unravel further. Aside from maintaining the stability of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, the Americans now have less incentive to deal with Pakistan.
So the question for the Pakistanis is what will they do with the broken country that is their prize? Already Pakistan, along with Russia and China, is helping fill the space the Americans have vacated. The embassies of the three nations have remained open since the Taliban seized Kabul.
Good luck to Russia, China and Pakistan on that.
I have always wondered why we never discussed this complicated relationship with Pakistan but I guess we never discuss complicated issues like this. If you have time to read the whole story I recommend it. And then imagine Donald Trump trying to understand it. Yikes.