Prime Minister Imran Khan was extremely critical of US policies in Afghanistan during a recent interview with American public broadcaster PBS. He said the US “really messed it up in Afghanistan”, noting that his anti-war stance led to him being labeled ‘Taliban Khan’. He also said that peace talks were mismanaged, very rightly pointing out that the US and Nato should have pushed for a political solution when there were about 150,000 US and Nato troops in the country, rather than when only a few thousand US troops were left and “the bargaining power of the Americans had gone”. He also said that giving a fixed withdrawal date made it even harder to get the Taliban to compromise as they think they have already won.
The PM also warned of the risk of a protracted civil war, and there can be no doubting that at the bare minimum, it would lead to a massive influx of refugees — something that our economy cannot handle. And the worst-case scenario would be a civil war spilling over into Pakistan. The accusations of Pakistan being a spoiler in Afghanistan are thus extremely annoying given the fact that 70,000 Pakistanis had lost their lives after the uptick in terrorism in the country due to the US-led war on terror. “Pakistan had nothing to do with” nine-eleven attacks, he reminded, adding that “there were no militant Taliban in Pakistan” at that time, and no Pakistanis were involved in the attack.
However, in noting that Al Qaeda was based in Afghanistan, Imran may have undercut his earlier point that he didn’t know why the Americans were in Afghanistan in the first place. The Taliban were shielding al Qaeda, which Washington believed had committed the worst-ever attack on American soil. Unfortunately for the world, the Bush Administration’s obsession with Saddam Hussain forced a diversion of troops from Afghanistan to fight a completely unnecessary war in Iraq. That shift in focus coincided with the return of the Taliban. The end result was that instead of securing Aghanistan, the overstretched American military failed in two wars.
However, we would be willing to chalk that up to a train of thought failure, since PM Imran’s other early points are undeniably accurate when seen through a post-Iraq war prism.
Published in The Express Tribune, July 30th, 2021.
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