Has Pakistan been helping the Taliban?

Pakistan’s Prime Minister hailed the Taliban for “breaking the shackles of slavery,” Dhume noted, while on social media, retired generals, who, in their day worked with the Taliban, “hailed the triumph of Islam."
When the Taliban first established themselves in Afghanistan, it was widely recognized that Pakistani intelligence was behind the new organization. (Photo: AFP)
When the Taliban first established themselves in Afghanistan, it was widely recognized that Pakistani intelligence was behind the new organization. (Photo: AFP)

WASHINGTON, DC (Kurdistan 24) – After 1996, when the Taliban established themselves in Afghanistan, it was widely recognized that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) was behind the new organization.

Pakistan sees Afghanistan as a buffer against its main rival, India. It promoted the Taliban to establish a client regime in Kabul that would end the civil war which followed the 1989 defeat of the Soviets in the Central Asian state, while ensuring that Afghanistan would be a reliable partner.

This key point is little mentioned in the context of the present crisis, but it does not seem that much has changed. Yet it is highly relevant.

Pakistan’s Use of Islam to Dominate Afghanistan

“If there is one global capital” where the Taliban’s victory has been “greeted with barely disguised glee, it was in Islamabad,” Sadanand Dhume, an Indian-American journalist, based in Washington DC, wrote Friday in The Wall Street Journal.

Pakistan’s Prime Minister hailed the Taliban for “breaking the shackles of slavery,” Dhume noted, while on social media, retired generals, who, in their day worked with the Taliban, “hailed the triumph of Islam,” even as Dhume added, “never mind that the defeated Afghan government too called itself an Islamic republic.”

Indeed, the struggle in Afghanistan is less about Islam than it is about power, as this reporter can attest from her own time there as a cultural adviser to the US military.

One ethnic group—the Pashtun—has dominated Afghanistan since its establishment as a modern state in 1921. But there are also Pashtun on the Pakistani side of the border, so while Pakistan supports the Pashtun in their efforts to dominate Afghanistan, it does so in the name of Islam, in order to minimize Pashtun irredentism on its side of the border.

A Similar Situation with ISIS in Iraq

Kurds are familiar with a similar phenomenon. Najmaldin Karim was Governor of Kirkuk until October 2017, when the head of the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Qasim Soleimani, directed Iraqi forces in an assault on the Kurdish Peshmerga in the disputed territories, including Kirkuk.

Karim passed away in 2020, but two years earlier, he spoke with Kurdistan 24. Karim described the terrorist organization, ISIS, that the Peshmerga had fought during his time as Governor of Kirkuk Province.

He was very careful to limit his comments to that which he knew well: ISIS in Kirkuk, and then he affirmed that they were “all local.”

Read More: Najmaldin Karim: Islamic State is resurgent, dominated by locals

The so-called “liberation” of the territory, Karim explained “was basically” that “these people shaved, threw the dishdasha, threw their things, [and] went [back] to their homes.”

Indeed, the German news magazine, Der Spiegel, some years ago published the most authoritative account of ISIS. It was based on captured ISIS documents and was a leak from German intelligence. It was similar to Karim’s account.

As Der Spiegel explained, ISIS was formed in Syria, amid the chaos of that country’s civil war. Notably, the core of ISIS is the former Iraqi regime.

Like Pakistan’s ISI, Saddam Hussein’s henchmen use Islam to attract supporters (the contemporary Islamic equivalent of Lenin’s “useful idiots”) and to legitimize their drive for power and control.

Islam is also used to legitimize the terror they impose on the population that serves to suppress dissent and which is now fueling the panic at Kabul airport, as terrified Afghans press to board some flight out of the country.

US Dilemma in Afghanistan

For twenty years, the US has been fighting Pakistan’s clients in Afghanistan, but at the same time, it has been dependent on Pakistan to supply its own forces in Afghanistan.

“We found ourselves in an incredibly bizarre situation, where you are paying the country that created your enemy so that it will let you keep fighting that enemy,” Sarah Chayes, a former adviser to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Dhume,

“If you wanted to win the war, you had to crack down on Pakistan,” but “if you wanted to conduct operations [in Afghanistan], you had to mollify Pakistan.”

This reporter can attest to that from her own experience. Part of my work involved assisting the army in its messaging to the Afghan people.

Generally, Afghans saw the Taliban as a creature of Pakistan. We wanted to say that in our messaging to further discredit them. But we were not allowed to do so—lest we alienate Pakistan and then it cut off our supplies (which it actually did from time to time.)

But, as Dhume noted, “Successive administrations—Republican and Democratic—refused to take measures that could have forced Pakistan to rethink its support for the Taliban.”

Hence, the US dilemma—and, arguably, an unwinnable war.

“Between 2002 and 2018, the US government gave Pakistan more than $33 billion in assistance, including about $14.6 billion in so-called Coalition Support Funds paid by the Pentagon to the Pakistani military,” Dhume wrote.

“During the same period,” he continued, “Pakistan ensured the failure of America’s Afghanistan project by surreptitiously sheltering, arming and training the Taliban.”

The Wrong Enemy

Dhume is far from the first to make this case. Most notably, The New York Times correspondent, Carlotta Gall, who long reported from Afghanistan and Pakistan, published an entire book, the theme of which was precisely this point.

Gall’s book is entitled, “The Wrong Enemy, America in Afghanistan 2001-2014.” It begins with an epigraph, a quote from the late Richard Holbrooke, US Special Representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan from 2009 to his untimely death the following year.

Even then, over a decade ago, Holbrooke believed the US should end its war in Afghanistan.

As Gall quotes him, “We may be fighting the wrong enemy in the wrong country.”

Editing by John J. Catherine