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Afghanistan Is in Freefall. America Must Punish Pakistan For Its Role.
Afghanistan Is in Freefall. America Must Punish Pakistan For Its Role.
The American defeat to the Taliban and, by extension, Pakistan is a humiliation rooted not in a US military failure but the corrosiveness and shortsightedness of America’s own political debate. It is a blow the United States might have avoided, but should not take without a response. Simply put...
nationalinterest.org
The American defeat to the Taliban and, by extension, Pakistan is a humiliation rooted not in a US military failure but the corrosiveness and shortsightedness of America’s own political debate. It is a blow the United States might have avoided, but should not take without a response. Simply put, it is time to sanction Pakistan.
Afghanistan is in freefall. The Taliban conquer city after city with impunity. The State Department pleads with the Taliban to spare its embassy. A repeat of Saigon 1975 looms.It need not have been this way. President Joe Biden decided to withdraw forces to honor a peace agreement his and President Donald Trump’s Special Envoy Zalmay Khalilzad hashed out with the Taliban, never mind that the Taliban never abided by the terms of the agreement. As Afghanistan collapses, Biden now blames the Afghan government for its corruption and the Afghan military for its failure to counter the Taliban advance. Corruption is a major problem, though Afghanistan has tackled some of the worst abuses and so improved in Transparency International’s ratings. If corruption alone was the problem, however, then its similarly-ranked peers—Burundi, Guinea Bissau, and Turkmenistan—would suffer a similar fate. As for the Afghan military’s failure to fight, Afghans are correct to point out that the fight would have been far easier if the United States had not forced the Afghan government to release imprisoned Taliban fighters.
The real problem, however, is not Afghanistan but rather its neighbor Pakistan. Simply put, if Pakistan had not taken the decision to support, co-opt, and control the Taliban, Afghanistan would never be in such a dire situation. The majority of Taliban car bombs and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) use precursor chemicals that come from two fertilizer plants in Pakistan. While conducting research for a history of US diplomacy with rogue regimes and terror groups, I interviewed a number of Pakistani officials about the Taliban. One former head of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency acknowledged to me over tea in the Islamabad Club that Pakistan was playing both sides of the issue—supporting the Taliban insurgency while then charging the United States extortionate fees so that the Pentagon could resupply its forces. From the ISI’s standpoint, it was like hitting the jackpot. Since the 9/11 attacks, the United States has given Pakistan almost $23 billion in security assistance and Coalition Support Funds.
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The State Department has long been reluctant to impose sanctions on Pakistan. Perhaps senior diplomats believed they might better compel Pakistan with carrots rather than sticks, but the net result of US inaction was a sense of impunity in Islamabad and an emboldened Taliban. American credibility is also at stake. The State Department’s failure to designate Pakistan a state sponsor of terrorism hemorrhages the credibility of the terror list, because it shows it to be subjective rather than objective.
~Snip~
Mr. President, for the honor of not only Afghanistan but also the United States, make Pakistan pay. A future generation of Pakistanis who aspire to live in a normal country not hijacked by extremism will one day thank you.
Comment:
For decades America has known that Pakistan is a bad actor in the Middle East. Our State Dept. has done little to nothing in reining in this rogue terrorist nation. We know that Pakistan’s nuclear program have shared expertise with terrorist organizations such as Al-Qaida. Abdul Qadeer Khan , widely viewed as the father of Islamabad’s nuclear program, developed a multinational network during the 1980s and 1990s for the packaging and sale of nuclear technology and know-how to Iran, as well as to Libya and North Korea.
See: Pakistani generals 'helped sell nuclear secrets'
It's also no secret that ISI has supplied Al Qaeda, the Taliban and ISIS with arms to fight the NATO Forces and interfering with the NATO supply trains through Pakistan.
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To blame any political party or president from Carter to Biden would be wrong this has been the consistent responsibility of our Congress and State Dept. As a reminder we should remember that Osama Bin Laden was found hiding in a house about a mile away from headquarters of Pakistan's Intelligence agency. If you think, like the Deep State Dept. does, that this was probably just innocent coincidence, then you also probably think the fish market where COVID started being just a few miles from the Wuhan Institute of Virology was also just an innocent coincidence.
This however, doesn't absolve Joey Xi Bai Dung's latest precipitous actions in Afghanistan.
