"A week prior to the 9/11 attacks, the head of Pakistan’s ISI was on a visit to Washington, D.C., where he met with several key policy figures, such as Deputy Secretary of State, Richard Armitage; Senator Joseph Biden, who is going to be Obama’s Vice President; and with his counterparts in the CIA and Pentagon, and several other officials. He was in Washington right up to and after the 9/11 attacks, and was engaged in several key consultations with US officials, pledging support for the US War on Terror instantly. However, the very same Chief of the ISI also happened to have previously approved of wiring $100,000 to the lead 9/11 hijacker, Mohammed Atta, which was also confirmed by the FBI. Thus, the ISI suddenly became a financier of the 9/11 attacks. Yet, no action was taken against the ISI or Pakistan, apart from the ISI Chief being fired upon this revelation making it into the media." - Andrew Gavin Marshall, "Creating an "Arc of Crisis": The Destabilization of the Middle East and Central Asia - The Mumbai Attacks and the “Strategy of Tension” Global Research, December 7, 2008.
The hand Pakistan was dealt after the Second World War was a bad and unenviable one. It was a country literally created from scratch.
But instead of building itself up and making peace with India, it focused its national energies on an eternal religious war with the Hindu "infidel" without the means to fight it, let alone win it.
It found willing allies in Britain, the United States, and China, who all had an interest in preserving Pakistan's hostile relationship with India for their own strategic aims. Hurting the Indians, and also the Soviets, mattered more to them than helping Pakistan.
Pakistan served its role as a Western military outpost dutifully. But Pakistan's generals possessed greater ambitions. They had a country, if you can call it that, but they wanted to be something more. They wanted to be the inheritors of a civilization, like India's rulers.
But as a weak and poor state, Pakistan couldn't afford to compete with India economically or militarily. So it turned to religion and terrorism to expand its power in the region. It invoked the civilization of Islam and used Muslim terrorists to harm India while claiming plausible deniability.
Pakistan's generals oversaw internationally-sanctioned terror camps, claiming the role of the Queen Bee for the sprawling beehives of terror on its territories.
The Taliban in Afghanistan are good little drone bees, but they answer to the Queen Bee.
So far, the Taliban regime has failed to persuade the Afghan people that it acts independently from Pakistan. The terrorists within its government ministries who have ties to Pakistan's ISI can pretend to be Afghan patriots but no one believes them.
Chris Alexander, a former Canadian ambassador to Afghanistan, wrote recently in, "Missing the Forest for the Trees: Pakistan’s Fifty-Year ‘Forever War’ in Afghanistan and American Policy After 9/11":
A total of seventeen members of the Taliban’s 33-strong “caretaker” regime are U.N.-listed terrorists. That the brothers Sirajuddin and Anas Haqqani, together with their uncle Khalil Haqqani, have central roles in the new Taliban regime confirms the central role the ISI have played in this invasion. ISI chief Lt-Gen Hameed Faiz has visited Kabul twice in 2021—once with Bajwa to kick off the invasion on 10 May 10, and once on 3 September to take a “victory lap”, cement the new regime lineup, and oversee a combined Pakistani Special Services Group (SSG)/Haqqani assault on Panjshir, the principal redoubt of the current armed resistance to the Taliban takeover.
Pakistan succeeded in engineering the Taliban's triumph in Kabul, but it signed its own death warrant by invading Afghanistan.
By acquiring "strategic depth" in its futile war against India, Pakistan also inherited a failed state.
Under the Taliban Afghanistan will absorb the worse characteristics of the Pakistani terror state, like hosting terrorist colonies to keep its fighters sharp and ready.
Terrorist drones don't transform into security officers and carry on with a normal life. They get sent on new missions.
The Taliban’s natural targets in the region are India, Iran, and the Central Asian nations.
In the future Pakistan's patrons, the United States and China, may ask it to call on the Taliban to carry out terror attacks in these countries.
And the answer will be a definite yes.
Pakistan would be happy to sell its terror services to both empires in a Chinese-Indian war or an American-Iranian war.
For that reason, both Beijing and Washington are working together to grant international legitimacy to the Taliban's rule in Afghanistan.
They see in the Taliban a weapon to draw upon.
And it will remain ready to wield.
Pakistan will continue to sharpen the edges of its Taliban sword should the need arise to put it to imperial use.
