"Understanding the messiness of Indian and Pakistani independence in 1947, for example, means better understanding the inevitably power-vacuumed, violent repercussions of a meddling Western power pulling abruptly out of a fragile, distant land – what the United States, under Joe Biden’s orders, did in Afghanistan earlier this month. It’s worth noting that Pakistan’s northwestern border with Afghanistan, “The Durand Line”, was marked by yet another visiting Englishman, Sir Henry Mortimer Durand, a civil servant in British India, in 1893. A decision based on rivers and landscape, rather than ethnic ties, it split the land of the native Pashtun people, from whom the Taliban would eventually rise, in two. The region has been a global hotspot of tension and war ever since. What’s past is prologue." - Ciaran Thapar, "It’s time to smash down the wall of silence around British imperialism and partition" GQ, August 23, 2021.
From the two-nation theory that birthed it to the two-Taliban theory that could lead to its end, Pakistan is a country where the military rules with absolute power in a sea of political uncertainty.
From its inception in 1947 Pakistan was used to contain India and the Soviet Union. It was also tasked with the enforcement of the Durand Line. Naturally, the military took center stage.
The Pakistan military enjoys a large share of its country's wealth, more than any other military in the world. They call the shots behind the scenes. Pakistan's political leaders either follow the military's script or they are retired, most of them permanently.
Heads of the Taliban have a higher survival rate than Pakistani Prime Ministers.
"All the Pakistani Prime Ministers" says Indian journalist Rishabh Gulati, "have either been killed, or ended up in jail or exiled. All of them are disposable assets as far as the Pakistani military is concerned."
Pakistan's generals promote war as a way of life but they don't visit battlefields or lead their hapless soldiers from the front. They are a greedy pack of leeches who dress up as warriors for the cameras. They are glorified border police pretending to be the heirs of Muslim conquerors.
Pakistan began aggressively using the iconography, history, and symbolism of Islam to cement their rule over the country beginning in the early 1970s, after their loss of East Pakistan. The Pakistan military, in a disastrous campaign that involved massive atrocities including mass rape, surrendered to India, and not for the last time.
In the aftermath of its defeat the military was fearful that other regions in its territory would follow the path of East Pakistan and break away.
So it turned to radical Islamic preachers to brainwash generations of Pakistanis, and later Afghan refugees, against not only Hindus, Jews, and the West, but even against fellow Muslim nations like Balochistan and Afghanistan.
The idea was to destroy native cultures and identities to make way for the complete acceptance of Islam.
The Taliban, Pakistan's brainchild, is attempting to erase Afghanistan's past in order to make this Pakistani project a reality. Now that it is in total control and has international support it can conceivably achieve its evil aim.
The Taliban has to resort to terror to rule because it is a foreign virus that has taken hold of Afghan culture. Its alien nature is very similar to its creator. Pakistan itself is an unnatural political structure that was imposed on South Asia.
Pakistan has been at odds with geopolitical, social, and cultural realities since its founding. It is not a country but a religious fantasy brought to life by illegal force and maintained through the politics of terror.
It is the original Taliban.
