Senior Afghan officials, Afghan journalists and social media users responded angrily to Asif’s comment and accused him and Pakistan’s military establishment of showing open support for the Taliban. Waheed Omar, a strategic adviser to President Ashraf Ghani, responded to Mr. Asif’s tweet by writing: “The same guy you think has Khoda (God) with him, was being tortured in a Pakistani jail when you were Minister of Defense. No? When you were Minister, TTP massacred 140 kids in an Army Public School. Was Khoda with them, too?”
Amid this bloody rivalry between the two countries, the question many ask is: Whose side do the Americans stand on?
In order to answer this question, is essential to review the AFPAK (Afghanistan-Pakistan) antagonism which is rooted in historical territorial disputes. The hostility between two countries goes back to 1947 when the Afghan government denied the validity of the colonial Durand Line, which now serves as a de facto border between the nations. Afghanistan was the only country that voted against Pakistan’s recognition as a state in the UN forum. The following Afghan governments and regimes including the Taliban always denied the Durand Line. In addition, starting from the 1960’s, Afghan leaders have openly supported the idea of an independent Pashtunistan by encouraging Pashtun tribal nationalists, and Pashtun separatist movements like PTM (Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement), to use them as a form of pressure against Islamabad. Some scholars and non-Pashtun politicians in Afghanistan argue that while the Durand Line is already recognized as international boundary, the Pashtunistan debate and Durand Line have been used by some Afghan Pashtun leaders, to win “Pashtun ethnic support” and electoral votes.
On the other side, Pakistan has been intimately involved in the four decades of Afghan conflict and keeps interfering in Afghan matters: first by unofficially backing the Mujahideen, and now the Taliban. Many believe that even if the Taliban reaches a peace with the Afghan government, Pakistan will keep interfering in Afghanistan affairs, first because of the Durand Line and secondly because of the close relations between Afghanistan and India. Pakistani authorities accuse Afghan leaders of letting India use Afghan soil for a social-economic proxy war against Pakistan. For instance, India’s plan to invest in a multi-million-dollar water dam project on the Kabul River, was, in Pakistani eyes, seen as a move in a proxy war against Pakistan. The Pakistanis believe that the implementation of the project could directly lead to a water shortage in Pakistan.
But what about the United States? Many Afghans believe that the United States is still a close ally of Pakistan’s because the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) supports Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) activities, and the US government supports Pakistan with financial aid.
Although there is no doubt that the CIA during the Cold War was involved in establishing regional security agencies, including SAVAK in Iran and ISI in Pakistan, to counter the Soviets and communism, nevertheless, from a broader US foreign policy perspective, Pakistan has never been a long-term partner with the United States, as many Afghans wrongly believe. Pakistan has been used by the United States more as a temporary proxy partner during the Cold War as a containment wall against the Soviet Union and later as a supply chain route for NATO troops since the start of Operation Enduring Freedom in 2002.
Although Pakistan has the same status as Afghanistan as a Major Non-NATO Ally (MNNA) with the US, and also has the strategic Bilateral Security Agreement (BSA) with the United States, the relation between the US and Pakistan over the past 75 years has been subject to a turbulent partnership. The war in Afghanistan led many American politicians, including top US military and diplomats, to openly criticize Pakistan’s failure to take up a role in fighting terrorism. As a result, the security assistance to Pakistan became a target for critics of US foreign policy, which led President Trump to minimize its funding.
With President Trump’s new South Asia strategy, the US has prioritized its relationship with India and further reduced Pakistan’s security assistance. His administration also cut the financial aid to the Pakistani government for their role in backing terrorism. The Foreign Military Sales (FMS) relationship has been reduced almost completely as Pakistan shifts toward Chinese and Russian markets for their military equipment. Last, but not least, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), an integral part of the Chinese Belt & Road Initiative (BRI), has led Islamabad to seek closer ties with Beijing than Washington.
Therefore, this entire idea that Pakistan is a closer ally to the United States than Afghanistan is based on deception. Islamabad is an outdated strategic partner for Washington and has no value for US foreign policy in South and Central Asia. In addition, Americans spent $822 billion in Afghanistan in only 19 years, and close to 2,500 American service members lost their lives in protecting Afghanistan and the Afghan government from the Taliban. Pakistan receives almost nothing from the US, but Afghanistan’s national budget largely depends on American assistance.
It’s true that the United States recognized Pakistan one day after its establishment in 1947, and thus also recognized the current perimeter of the Durand Line (DL) as an official international boundary between Pakistan and Afghanistan. As American scholar and former US State Department official Barnett Rubin recently mentioned on Twitter: “The US recognized DL as the international boundary between Afghanistan and Pakistan and has told Afghans that if there is a border dispute, it should be resolved peacefully between the two countries.”
When it comes to the Durand Line, the United States is not the only country that recognized the DL as an international boundary. Therefore, this should not be considered a sign of American preference of Pakistan over Afghanistan. This fiction that the United States stands closer to Pakistan than Afghanistan is played up by Pakistani establishment to show American support for their cause, and by the corrupt Kabul elites who want to take attention away from themselves and let Afghans continue to focus on Pakistan. The fact that Kabul blames Pakistan for everything is an Afghan weakness; it does not mean that Pakistan has regional supremacy.
Ironically, most of those Afghan elites who blame Pakistan for every aspect of Afghan insecurity have for decades been guests at the Pakistani military establishment’s dinner table to fight ISI wars in Afghanistan during the Cold War. This includes Mr. Hikmatyar, Mr. Sayaf, former President Karzai, Ahmad Sha Massoud’s followers, and, in some ways, President Ashraf Ghani himself, who, as an American citizen, was a Fulbright scholar in Pakistan to strengthen the US-Pakistan relationship. Everyone now blames Pakistan while they personally contributed to Pakistan’s influence in Afghanistan.
However, the Afghans should worry about its internal affairs rather than on Pakistan-US relationship. The world, including American policymakers, already knows that the Pakistani ISI establishment supports terrorism for the sake of its own survival. Like Afghanistan, Pakistan is an isolated country dealing with internal power struggles and domestic terrorist threats from the Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP) group. Finally, the recent strategic partnership between Washington and New Delhi has closed all doors between Pakistan and the United States. Pakistan also made its choice by joining China’s side in the Great Power Competition.
While the majority of Afghans are debating about Pakistan, Afghanistan’s young democracy, unfortunately, stands at the crossroads of darkness, at risk of falling back into the Taliban period or another civil war, if the intra-Afghan negotiations don’t deliver a peace accord. Therefore, instead of spending time on each foreign comment and losing weeks about a single Twitter post, Afghans should use their time wisely and not run behind what others say, especially while their own destiny is being decided in Doha by the Trump administration, who upgraded the Taliban status to almost that of a legitimate government. The Taliban legitimacy is not only supported by the Americans, but also by others in the international community, including the European Union, who are tired of two decades of corruption and the incompetence of Afghan leadership.
In conclusion, it is recommended that Afghan politicians, journalists, and social media users put aside their anti-Pakistani sentiments and instead focus on the Taliban, the corruption within the Afghan government, and becoming engaged with the Afghan peace talks, which will determine the future of Afghanistan. Once the peace agreement with the Taliban has succeeded—and we all hope it will—the next step must be ending the Durand Line debate and not postponing it for another decade by moving the problem to the next generation of Afghans. While many countries in that part of the world have become emergent world economies, Afghanistan-Pakistan hostility has led both nations to now sit at the table with terrorists. The young generations of both countries should have the right to live in peaceful conditions near each other.
Arash Yaqin, an Afghan native who fled the Afghan civil war and lived as ex-refugee in Russia and Europe for two decades. In Kabul, he worked as a UN capacity-building advisor for the Afghan Ministry of Foreign Affairs and later for the Afghan Institute for Strategic Studies. Then for three years, he worked as senior cultural affairs advisor for the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, where he managed the Fulbright Exchange Program. In 2016 he moved to the United States where he is pursuing his M.A. degree in Statecraft and National Security Affairs at the Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C. His focus is Counter Violent Extremism and the Great Power Competition in South and Central Asia.
