Perfidious Pakistan

The Pakistani military and intelligence establishments (Inter Services Intelligence - ISI), are believed by many in the West (and Afghanistan), to have nurtured and helped the Afghani Taliban for the last 30 years .... 

Pakistan And The Taliban - Marching Side By Side?

 ... they have always denied this, but their denials were easy to make and hard for the Western powers to disprove, without exposing intelligence assets to serious risk. Something that they can't afford.

However the smoking gun was the fact that Osama Bin Laden, the Al Queda leader, was also living safely in a Pakistani army garrison town, until the US mounted a secret raid to kill him. The fact that US didn't tell the ISI or Pakistani of the raid, even though they were ostensibly partners in the so-called "war on terror", indicates that the US already knew that Pakistan was in fact no partner, and was in truth providing the Taliban in Afghanistan with significant intelligence, material and logistical support to attack US troops.

So now Pakistan has seen the Taliban return to power in Afghanistan, but instead of the dismay that the civilised world has expressed in the last few weeks, the Pakistani Prime Minister, ex-cricketer Imran Khan, hailed the Taliban's return to power as "breaking the chains of slavery". He had previously described Osama Bin Laden as a martyr.

But events have a funny way of taking unexpected twists and turns, aka the law of unintended consequences. Deputy Prime Minister, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, and others in the leadership of the new government, have in the past spent time in Pakistani detention. How friendly they remain towards their former jailers is a question that Pakistan need to be very sure about.

Because now the Afghan Taliban have the levers of power, in a much richer Afghanistan than the smashed state they left 20 years ago. They are now in a position to aid the Pakistani Taliban (The Taliban was actually formed by Afghan Pashtun students in the religious schools - madrassa's - in Pakistan), in their aim of forming an Islamic caliphate in Pakistan itself.

Pakistanis have already suffered from a large number of Islamist terror groups launching attacks over the border from Afghanistan for the last 30 years. So why would those attacks not increase now that the Taliban no longer need ISI support? Pakistan will hope that its new friends, once described as "inseparable brothers", by the former Afghan leader Hamid Karzai, will stay friendly now, and suppresses groups like Al Qaeda and the local Islamic State offshoot - ISIS-K, as well as not supporting the Pakistan version of the Taliban. 

However, the Pakistani Taliban have previously offered bay'ah (pledged loyalty), and recently renewed it, to the Afghan Taliban after their takeover of Afghanistan. Similarly so have Al-Qaeda, but the offshoot Islamic State group (ISIS-K) have not done so, at least publicly, as they are fierce rivals to Al-Qaeda, from whom they split after breaking bay'ah, while operating as an al-Qaeda's affiliate in Iraq. 

The Afghan Taliban cannot easily forget their alliance of more than 20 years with al-Qaeda, no matter what agreements they had with either the departed US or previous partner Pakistan. So they will probably publicly lie, and say that they have done so, while privately continuing to offer support to both al-Qaeda and the Pakistan Taliban. Also, Pakistan, because of its linguistic, tribal and ethnic ties with Afghanistan, already hosts about three million Afghan refugees from its previous wars .... this figure will undoubtedly rise, along with support for the idea of a Taliban state in Pakistan. 

Pakistan has few friends in the West, with US President Joe Biden refusing even to call Prime Minister Khan since he became president. He may be forced to reverse that policy as events unfold, or if the situation in the region unravels further in the future, but he won't be making a friendly call if he does.

Lt Gen HR McMaster, the former US National Security Adviser, has said that Pakistan should be treated as a "pariah state" if it did not stop its support for Jihadi groups. "We have to stop pretending that Pakistan is a partner," he said. "Pakistan has been acting as an enemy nation against us by organising, training and equipping these forces and by continuing to use jihadist terrorist organisations as an arm of their foreign policy." 

However as Pakistan has already moved into the warm embrace of China's belt and road initiative, its economic and political drive in the region, it perhaps feels that it can ignore US and Western opprobrium or distaste, and that countries such as Britain, Italy and Germany (with others to follow), will all have to call on Islamabad for favours, while the Taliban remain in power in Afghanistan. But none will like doing so, and few will trust Pakistan to deliver. 

Holding The Taliban Tiger By The Tail Requires A Firm Grip

How recent events play out, and whether Pakistan's playing of both sides (lip service to the war on terror, while providing support to Jihadist groups), proves to have been a cunning ploy, or simply leave Pakistan with a lot of hostile neighbours, and few international friends, will be questions that will be answered in the coming months and years ...  

But perfidious Pakistan has to hope that, when you grab a tiger by the tail, it doesn't turn round and devour you.

Update December 2022: 

Border clashes have broken out between the Pakistan Army and Border guards, and the Taliban. In November 2022 there were clashes along the Chaman crossing that ended with a Pakistani Security guard being killed. 

Then again, after an exchange about the Taliban setting up a border point, on what Pakistan said was its territory, while the Afghans say it was after its men had tried to cut a hole in the fence, that Pakistan has been building along the border -- Trump style -- and which both the Taliban and earlier Afghan governments have objected to. This ended with another Taliban attack at Chaman, but this time on the town itself, with Afghani mortars and gunfire resulting in the killings of six Pakistani civilians and injuring at least 17 others .... in retaliation the Pakistani army fired back and killed one Taliban fighter, wounding 10 others.

Pakistan has also accused accused the Taliban government of sheltering Pakistani militant groups in Afghanistan, and that attacks launched by these militant groups from Afghan territory, have become more frequent since the Taliban took power .... The Taliban of course deny this. 

But, what Pakistan expected from a Taliban regime, after it had covertly supported the Taliban when the Western troops were in Afghanistan, is beyond me. They backed the wrong horse (as they always do), and should have supported the non Taliban Afghan regime .... now they truly have a tiger next door, and they are not holding it by the tail.

Update January 2023:

As well as border clashes with the Afghan Taliban, the bombings continued in Pakistan, even if there was a ceasefire .... the latest killed at least 100 people and 150 injured (many critically) in a bombing at a mosque in the Pakistani city of Peshawar. There were a large number of police officers killed and they may have been the main target in what was supposed to be a secure mosque. Whether its the Pakistani Taliban or ISIS is currently unconfirmed, although the finger is pointing at the Pakistani Taliban or a splinter group. So much for the ceasefire which had broken down .... as predicted in this post, terrorist activity has risen sharply in Pakistan since the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan in 2021.

On a side note, noticeably once again there are no Muslim mobs on the streets of Islamabad, or in Turkey and the Middle East or Europe, demanding action against mosque attacks by Muslims .... all those Koran's were destroyed without a murmur by the The Grand Poobah of Istanbul, Erdogan, who has said that he's going to block Sweden's attempts to join NATO (along with Hungary, which is increasingly pro Russian these days), after a protest by Kurdish exiles in Stockholm, in which a copy of the Koran was burned (the Kurds of course are also Muslims, but Erdogan blames the Swedes rather than those Muslims who are against him). 

There was also the small matter of a Kurdish support group hung an effigy of Mr Erdogan upside down from a lamp-post. one has to wonder which bothered Erdogan most .....