Kabul wants Biden as president

Usually, this happens in movies. When a kidnapper calls for ransom money, the law enforcement personnel try to track the criminal’s location by tracing the call’s origin. But the phone conversation has to go on for a certain duration. The intense scene usually has the upset family member keeping the talks going while the tech guys are trying hard to locate the criminal caller. The strategy pays off only if the caller is still hanging in there instead of hanging up.

Kabul seems to be doing the same. President Ashraf Ghani’s aim is to keep the peace in abeyance until the US presidential election, which would be held on November 3. He thinks that if he can drag this on until November, he may get a lifeline. His survival depends on it. Ghani knows it is President Trump who wants to end America’s and Afghanistan’s longest war. Biden belongs to the traditional class, the one that wages, not end, wars.

Therefore, Ghani is really hoping for a Biden victory. He tried countless strategies to avoid for peace to return to Afghanistan and for the Americans to withdraw. He even went so far as to declare war on the Taliban after wrongfully accusing them of making the maternity ward attack in Kabul. That was the work of ISIS, whose interests are more aligned with India’s. Finally, Ghani rejected releasing the final batch of the Taliban prisoners arguing that they were involved in high-profile terrorist attacks. Behind all this noise lies the ulterior motive, which is to delay the execution of the peace agreement signed between the Taliban and the United States in February. It is quite thought provoking to realise that the ragtag warriors of the erstwhile called the Taliban are the ones who want peace today and the Kabul regime led by a well-educated man is interested in keeping the war and occupation going.

The end of the longest war in history has already lost its importance in the minds of the American people and so Trump perhaps may not be able to gain from touting it. The media drumbeat in America has made the fight against the pandemic the number one issue that will define this election.

The interesting fact is that the Trump administration tweaked things to ensure that Ghani remains the president instead of his rival Abdullah Abdullah. However, now Ghani is tweaking things by delaying peace in Afghanistan, to ensure Trump’s defeat. Trump had helped Ghani just so that the peace deal between the Taliban and the US goes through successfully. Ghani wants Trump to lose so that that peace deal is killed. Ghani wants Biden to win so that the traditional American presidential habit of keeping countries occupied remains intact.

Pakistanis should welcome a Trump victory because Biden is going to keep the war in Afghanistan going and Pakistanis are quite well familiar with the heat that reaches Pakistan from an Afghanistan that is on fire.

Trump’s victory in 2016 took the world several steps closer to extinction when he withdrew from the Paris Climate Agreement. However, his defeat this time around could prove even worse for world peace because India, being an irresponsible state led by a major terrorist, is doing its shenanigans in Afghanistan. While Pakistan is a responsible state, there is a limit to tolerating a relentless assault on its defence. Both are nuclear-armed states. The threat of a nuclear war is the other reason, besides Climate Change, that can cause human extinction.

An ongoing war on the soil of a destabilised Afghanistan, led by Ghani and policed by the Americans, is what India wants because that is the only way it can continue to hurt Pakistan from its western border. If Trump wins, India and Kabul lose, peace in Afghanistan wins, Pakistan wins. If Biden wins, Afghan peace loses, India wins, Kabul wins but Afghanistan loses. It is that simple.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 20^th, 2020.

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