what does it do with its prize?
The Real Winner of the Afghan War? It’s Not Who You Think.
Pakistan, nominally a U.S. partner in the war, was the Afghan Taliban’s main patron, and sees the Taliban’s victory as its own. But now what does it do with its prize?
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.”'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/26/world/asia/afghanistan-pakistan-taliban.html
((My Pakistani friend, actually born in India before Pakistan existed, just recited the Greek Tragedy meme: Everyone can see the approaching disaster, except for the leading party/ies. Will likely hear a lot about this; think I'll have a Black Russian - - cocktail, that is.))
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