Daily Times

It’s a bit rich of the Americans, and also Afghans, to blame Pakistan for all their troubles in Afghanistan. First, for all the years of this long and ugly war, they kept asking Islamabad to “do more,” and never tired of blaming the Pakistani army, especially its intelligence agencies, for the Taliban’s military victories. Then, when they finally pulled the plug on the war and decided to leave, they discovered that wrapping it up wasn’t quite possible without active help from Pakistan. And it was only when the Pakistani government was involved in the peace process, and Islamabad helped nudge things along by releasing senior Taliban commanders, that negotiations finally took off.

Now, though, with the Americans finally out and the Taliban very likely to snowball into Kabul itself, everybody is suddenly pointing the finger at Pakistan again. It should have been clear to everybody by now that Pakistan had very little leverage over the Taliban to begin with and there is little, if any at all, left of it. Why would the Taliban compromise their military superiority, for which they have out-fought and out-foxed the mightiest military the world has ever seen, simply because the Americans asked the Pakistanis to ask the insurgents to do so? It’s more likely that the Americans, just like the Afghans, are just frustrated because PM Imran Khan pre-empted any requests that they might have made for military bases in this country with a very firm “absolutely not!”

Plus Pakistan has its own problems to deal with. Everybody knows that the Afghan government of President Ashraf Ghani, just like Karzai’s administration before it, is fiercely anti-Pakistan; to the point of accommodating and arming the Tehreek e Taliban Pakistan (TTP). And nothing suits TTP like the security vacuum caused by the sudden departure of American forces and their helicopter gunships. Already there’s been a sudden uptick in violence inside Pakistan, which shows that the enemy was prepared in advance. Therefore, instead of blaming Pakistan for everything that is going wrong, it’s a better idea for the Afghan government to do what it can to put its own house in order. It cannot approach the talks from a position of strength, despite being the legitimate government in Afghanistan, because its armed forces are being cut in half by the insurgents. If this is the state of affairs just days after the Americans left, one shudders to imagine what might be in store just a little down the road. Pakistan has always supported the idea of an Afghan-led and Afghan-owned peace process; and dragging Pakistan into the centre of it is not the way to go about it. g