REGARDLESS of whoever has ruled Afghanistan, the country has been a problem for Pakistan. Unfortunately, Islamabad’s policy responses have aggravated the issue. The Afghan policy needs a fundamental shift. But that requires a clearer understanding of what went wrong.
Afghanistan’s conflict-prone domestic dynamics and location at the crossroads of competitive geopolitics has always tempted external powers to intervene. Soviet expansionism, America’s fatal attraction to war, Pakistan’s security-dominated national priorities, and the global Islamic revival all merged to dominate the country. As instruments of America’s wars, both Pakistan and Afghanistan became tributaries and confluences of extremist influences and jihadist currents, from which arose the Taliban. Afghanistan has not been the same since.
America goes to war trigger-happy, responding to even the slightest challenge. In recent history, America’s sense of ‘exceptionalism’ has merged with its unipolar moment, aggravating Washington’s traditional militarism, which has involved it in failed military conflicts in Afghanistan and the Middle East. The US went to these wars without a clear strategy, believing it did not need one. It felt that the ground realities would submit to its military and technological dominance, creating a new order. The assumption fell flat on its face.
