Debunking Afghan Myths and Lies

[Levina]

Levina Ji

Sometimes you are very balanced person, and admire you
Sometimes you sound like Modi, and I say WDF

Sometimes you have love for the region, and think like Indusite
Sometimes you show ignorance, that you turn into Ganga-ite

I wonder, just wonder.

Blame it on my mood swings.
Btw I am sure I didn't demonise Pakistan, your country and mine are like pawns in Chess, we 're all part of a much bigger game.


Btw somebody is learning to use rhyming words .... Budding poet eh?

 

[ito]

The OP is high on weed. What does he mean when says: "Kashmir and Punjab would finally be united under Pakistani rule. Incorporating Pashtunistan, Pakistan has the potential to become a South Asian superpower"

Some point are hilarious: "Pakistan is relatively democratic compared with its neighbors - even including India, considering its treatment of minorities"

Some point I agree with such as: "There are several small but media-visible Islamist groups operating in Kashmir, or at least proclaiming the Kashmiri cause. But these people are not really interested in Kashmiri independence. They are interested in jihad."

 

[FaujHistorian]

The OP is high on weed. What does he mean when says: "Kashmir and Punjab would finally be united under Pakistani rule. Incorporating Pashtunistan, Pakistan has the potential to become a South Asian superpower"

Some point are hilarious: "Pakistan is relatively democratic compared with its neighbors - even including India, considering its treatment of minorities"

Some point I agree with such as: "There are several small but media-visible Islamist groups operating in Kashmir, or at least proclaiming the Kashmiri cause. But these people are not really interested in Kashmiri independence. They are interested in jihad."

Come on yara.

There are thorns with every rose. Why pick on thorns only.

Just smell the roses and appreciate it.

 

[Levina]

Come on yara.

There are thorns with every rose. Why pick on thorns only.

Just smell the roses and appreciate it.

Roses reminds me ....is there a coffin around??? (Oscar Wild)
Lol
Just being a cynic.

 

[ito]

Come on yara.

There are thorns with every rose. Why pick on thorns only.

Just smell the roses and appreciate it.

I agree on some of his point regarding the importance of Afghanistan to Pakistan, and regarding ISI control over Taliban.

 

[I S I]

My question: did you write all the stuff by yourself? How many days it took you? What were you smoking all the time when writing this?


Sorry for offtopic.

 

[OrionHunter]

Myth No. 1

India and Iran would like to split Pakistan and destroy it

Quite to the contrary. Instability in Pakistan would mean instability in India.


Myth No. 2

Russian geopolitics is still based on a "final thrust to the South".

Which isn't the case now. Times have changed, geoploitics has changed.


Myth No. 3

Iran and India equally fear that Baluchistan, Kashmir and Punjab would finally be united under Pakistani rule. Incorporating Pashtunistan, Pakistan has the potential to become a South Asian superpower with plausible expansionist chances

I thought Balochistan is a province of Pakistan? Or are you talking of the Iranian portion of Balochistan/Sistan? Secondly, there's no chance in hell that Indian Kashmir will unite with Pakistan. The Kashmiris want nothing to do with Pakistan.
Thirdly which Punjab are you talking about? If it's Indian Punjab, then it's a pipe dream.
Fourthly, again, incorporating Pashtunistan into Pakistan is a mirage. The Afghans haven't recognized the Durand Line and never will, meaning this is a territorial dispute between Pakistan and Afghanistan due to the demographics involved (Not religion). You certainly don't expect Afghanistan to hand over their Pashtun territory to Pakistan without a fight, do you? This is a preposterous view.

And lastly, you did not include the shenanigans of Pakistan's Gen Gul with the Taliban who was in the thick of training and providing support to the organization.

 

[haman10]

@Serpentine , @SOHEIL @2800 @raptor22 @MoshteAhani, @rahi2357, @mohsen , @F117
@ای ایران

Was Iran always hostile to Pakistan and had/have intentions to split Pakistan?

Split into what exactly? One might have interest in splitting US up for example. But what could Iran possibly gain from a split up pakistan?

Dude we don't think about you at all. Stop the obsession.

Average Iranian's knowledge of pakistan is limited to 3 words : Poor eastern neighbor.

@rahi2357 bro i cannot visit iranian section. @Serpentine

Catch you guys later

 

[Indus Pakistan]

Send Afghanis back !!!

Rabble rousing again. From what I can see the MQM is more of threat to Pakistan then all of Afghanistan combined.

The worse are traitors hiddden amongst us, those who shout loudest but from inside are gnawing away at Pakistan in conjunction with our enemy ...

This Afghan thing is just a red herring being peddled by some to deflect the attention from where it needs to be focussed. As ever the gullible Pakistani can easily be manipulated.

Somebody representing millions has openly said he is "freedom fighter". Freedom from whom may I ask ?
I notice your conspicous by your absence in condemning this threat from treacherous ungrateful people. Yet you made a mountain of some stupid personal story ..

Amazing ...

 

[Sine Nomine]

Blame it on my mood swings.
Btw I am sure I didn't demonise Pakistan, your country and mine are like pawns in Chess, we 're all part of a much bigger game.


Btw somebody is learning to use rhyming words .... Budding poet eh?

It's up to US whether we want to be Pawns or Players.

My question: did you write all the stuff by yourself? How many days it took you? What were you smoking all the time when writing this?


Sorry for offtopic.

First of all kid i knew it will simply whoosh over minds of many but i rather tagged you for only first Question read it and chill.

Average Iranian's knowledge of pakistan is limited to 3 words : Poor eastern neighbor.

Thanks for letting us know,we were not able to know true identity of Iranian until you back stabbed us in Nuclear saga and then again you destroyed Iraq and Syria for your hunger for Power in ME.

 

[Zarrar Alvi]

The article is full of contradictions, and the words are chosen very carefully to make Pakistan sound like a lesser evil, which is quite an expected outcome when you've super powers like US and Russia involved in this quagmire.

For example:
1)
statement 1


statement 2


contradictory!!!

2)
The sentence means that Pakistan did arm Taliban but it was NOT the only country to do so.

3)
self explanatory...

******************


sorry but that's an exaggerated amount and this is the proof to it...
Jammu and Kashmir Registers Highest Voter Turnout in 25 Years,

Iran has been repeatedly called hostile in the article.

the first point you raise is actually true Taliban was not a creation of Pakistan but when they conquered kandahar and jalalabad our spy agency formed contact with them still they operated independently but when india got involved by supporting general dostum fighters so we decided to financially support and arm talibans to counter nothern alliance ETC

 

[coffee_cup]

Myth No. 1

Quite to the contrary. Instability in Pakistan would mean instability in India.

.

Myth: Instability in Pakistan would mean instability in India.

Quite to the contrary. India has dedicated large sums to finance, train and arm the terrorists in Pakistan so that Pakistan can not progress economicaly and remains instable. And her support for dividing and keeping Pakistan instable is a FACT. Mukti Bahini, BLA, TTP anyone?

Any progress in the neighborhood is seen with suspicion, anxiety and alarm in India.
We have seen the reaction of Indians whenever any neighboring country starts a project with help of China, even if it is a simple high rise building, as in the case of Sri Lanka.

So do us all favor, and spare us this myth that India holds goodwill towards the neighborhood.
Lets remain realistic here.

..

Average Iranian's knowledge of pakistan is limited to 3 words : Poor eastern neighbor.

..

And average Pakistan knowledge of Iran is limited to three words as well: Axis of Evil.

A country which is officially designated as state sponsors of terrorism and is under all kinds of sanctions ever since Mullahs have taken hold of it.

I think misconceptions need a quick handling.

...
Thanks for letting us know,we were not able to know true identity of Iranian until you back stabbed us in Nuclear saga and then again you destroyed Iraq and Syria for your hunger for Power in ME.

Very well said bro.

Iranis are very unthankful folks. Under all those sanction times, Turkey and Pakistan helped this country for the sake of older nicer times (those of Shah's), but we completely misjudged these political Mullahs who are on a mission to spread sectarian violence all around the Muslim world.

Pakistan even provided nuclear know-how and look what they did in the end.

So we are better off with this country. Lets call spade a spade and just have normal neutral relations with this country, nothing more.

 

[pakistani342]

I have came across several folks on WEB and PDF,whose many claims i have tried to Answer in this Article.It is meant for all Pak Liberals. Iranians,Indians and Afghan's.
Read it all Before Typing.


Question: Was the Taliban the creation of Pakistan? Can you tell us about its formation and how was Russia involved in it?

Answer: The Taliban was not a creation of Pakistan, although Pakistan was among several states that contributed to the genesis and development of this peculiar movement. It is true that the Taliban (which was established only as late as in 1994 as a religious movement) had a significant influx from Pakistani madrassas. But the Taliban is not only an extreme religious movement, but also an ethnic Pashtun one. The Pashtuns are a bit less than half of Afghanistan's population, but in Pakistan there are 16 million resident Pashtuns plus 3 million as refugees. There are more Pashtuns in Pakistan than in Afghanistan nowadays. The "Pakistanis" involved in Afghanistan are in fact Afghans.

The role of the Pakistani Islamist opposition in the formation and support of the Taliban is widely recorded. But more important are those who made it a military power. This is where Russia enters the game, too. In order to understand the Taliban, we must recall the background situation in Afghanistan ever since the events in 1970s.

The Taliban is not monolithic. Even less so is the Northern Alliance. Neither were the Afghan communists united. This was made evident by the internal power struggles following the ousting of King Zahir Shah in 1973. Daoud was overthrown and killed by communists in 1978. But the communists were divided into the Khalq faction, favored by China, and the Parcham faction, favored by the Soviet Union. In 1978 it was the Khalq faction that took over, but their more moderate leader Nur Mohammed Taraki was overthrown and killed by the hardliner Khalq communist Hafizullah Amin. In 1979, the Soviet Spetsnaz murdered Amin and replaced him with the Parcham follower Babrak Karmal, who was close to the KGB. Then the Soviet army invaded.

The communist secret service Khad (KhAD), whose leaders were Karmal and Sayid Mohammed Najibullah, was actually an Afghan branch of the KGB. It had been preceded by the communist secret services of Taraki and Amin (AGSA, KAM), but from 1979 onwards this organization of terror was instructed and trained by the KGB. The culture of terror and the horrible persecution of the civil population continued without a pause from the communist takeover up until the overthrowing of Najibullah's regime in 1992 when Massoud liberated Kabul. Western minds seem to implicitly suppose that when the Cold War was over, the communists and the structures they had created just suddenly disappeared. This is a recurrent fatal misperception especially of the Americans.

According to Professor Azmat Hayat Khan of the University of Peshawar, when Ahmad Shah Massoud's mujaheddin liberated Kabul in 1992, and Najibullah gave up power, the communist generals of the army and of Khad agreed to prolong the Afghan civil war in order to discredit President Burhanuddin Rabbani's mujahid government and prevent Afghanistan from stabilizing. The Uzbek communist General Abdurrashid Dostum continued the rebellion against Rabbani and Massoud in Mazar-i-Sharif, massively backed by the Soviet Union and later by Russia and Uzbekistan. Another rebellious general was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Most of the ethnic Pashtun Khalq army generals as well as those of the Khad defected to Hekmatyar's troops. A decisive role was the one played by General Shahnawaz Tanai, the communist commander of the artillery, who defected to Hekmatyar's side as early as in 1990. Later in 1995, when Hekmatyar's rebellion was losing strength, Tanai defected to the Taliban. So did many other communist army and Khad officers.
Shahnawaz Tanai - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

It was Tanai's defection that provided the Taliban with Soviet artillery, Soviet air force, Soviet intelligence and Soviet technical and military knowledge. The American Anthony Arnold argued already then that Tanai's moves were a KGB-inspired provocation. The former KGB General Oleg Kalugin said that it was Moscow who trained most of the terrorists the US is now chasing.
Empire and War - Imperial Co-operation League - Google Books

As regards the Taliban, it was nothing special when they took over Kandahar in 1994. Kandahar was a Pashtun city and the strict interpretation of Islam the Taliban propounds is not so much based on the Qur'an but on the narrow-minded social norms of an agrarian Pashtun village. Mullah Omar is often described as having the background of a relatively simple-minded rustic mullah, although he was also politically active in Mohammed Nabi Mohammadi's Harakat-i-Inqilab-i-Islami (Revolutionary Islamic Movement), which later opposed the Taliban.

But apart from Mullah Mohammed Omar and some other leaders who seem to have truly religious backgrounds (and no other education), the Taliban's military and intelligence are dominated by Soviet-trained communists.

Besides Tanai, there is for example the late first Taliban military commander and one of its founders, "Mullah Borjan", whose real name was Turan Abdurrahman, a prominent communist military officer. Many Taliban "mullahs" have no religious training at all.
Empire and War - Imperial Co-operation League - Google Books
They are former communist military and security agents who have grown up beards and adopted new names and identities replete with the title "mullah".
The Taliban artillery commander was the former Soviet Army's Afghan military intelligence officer Shah Sawar.
The Taliban intelligence service chief Mohammed Akbar used to head a department of the Khad.
And the Taliban air force commander Mohammed Gilani was a communist general, too.
Perhaps because of this immensely influential influx into the Taliban, their interpretation of Islam is quite alien for most of the world's Muslims, but closely resembles the interpretation of Islam that the communists and Russia have traditionally espoused in their anti-Islamic propaganda.

The decisive strengthening of the Taliban took place in 1995-1996, when it was seen as a "stabilizing" force in Afghanistan. This was a great fallacy based on the Taliban's success in Kandahar, which was indeed their "home field". Anywhere else the Taliban did not bring about stability, but quite the opposite. Among those with a rising interest in the Taliban forces, were all the main players: Russia and its satellite regimes in Central Asia, the US, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. At the initiative of the Turkmen dictator Saparmurat Niyazov, the Russian energy giant Gazprom, headed by the then Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, and the US firm Unocal, contracted to lay a pipeline from Turkmenistan to Pakistan, circumventing Iran and crossing the Afghan territory that the Taliban had supposedly "stabilized". For Pakistan, it has been a traditional national interest to secure energy supplies from Central Asia, since it is sandwiched between two vehemently hostile great powers, India and Iran. For Russia, this was seen as a way to control Central Asian energy resources and to extend its influence towards the Indian Ocean. Two Saudi Arabian oil companies were also involved.

Power Increase:
During the same years, the Taliban received sizable armed support. It did not come mainly from Pakistan. Financial succor came from Saudi Arabia. But the most decisive increase in the Taliban's strength came from Russia: the defections of the Khalq and Khad generals directly into the Taliban's leadership, vast amounts of Russian weaponry in several mysteriously "captured" stashes, including a very suspicious "hijacking" and escape of a Russian jet loaded with weapons that ended up in the hands of the Taliban's ex-communist leaders. With these new weapons, the Taliban marched on Herat in 1995, and finally managed to capture Kabul in 1996. Najibullah was hanged, but Najibullah's hanging by his former Taliban-turned protégés seems to have camouflaged the actual developments in the Afghan power struggle.

Russia had an interest to cut the strong ties between Massoud's mujaheddin and the Tajik opposition that Russia had crushed since it attacked Tajikistan in 1992 and backed the communists into power there. The old provocateur Hekmatyar was by then defeated and had finally given up his fight - after losing his men and arms by Tanai's defection to the Taliban - and accepted a seat in the government in compensation. Since Hekmatyar was finished, a new Pashtun force was needed in those years. Taliban was a rising force that various external players tried to exploit by infiltration, support and manipulation.

When the Cold War was declared over by the West, it did not stop elsewhere. After 1989 the West really lost interest in Afghanistan and until some months before his death Massoud was trying to appeal to it in vain. The West was uninterested, but others were. Pakistan, of course, was interested in the goings on in its unstable neighbor. Saudi Arabia was financing and supporting dangerous Sunni fundamentalist groups, and later the Taliban. The Saudis also provided them with their own Saudi fanatics that had become troublesome at home. Iran was supporting its own agents within Afghan Shia groups. And the Soviet Union and later Russia continued to provide massive armed support to the last communist dictator of Afghanistan, Najibullah, and later to the notorious General Dostum.

The Russian principle was "divide and rule", with the basic idea of keeping the West out and assuring that the region would not strengthen so that the Soviet empire could return once it has regained its military might. Because of this stratagem, Russia has supported the Tajiks of the Northern Alliance through Tajikistan - only sufficiently to form a buffer zone against the Taliban, but without being able to gain substantial victories or to intervene in Tajikistan. Moreover, Russia has been arming and supporting the Uzbeks under the command of Dostum and General Malik who later defected to the Taliban's side. This support has been directed through Uzbekistan and still continues - ironically, with the West's full blessing. Less known has been the Russian support directed through Turkmenistan to the Taliban, and to the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan that is said to threaten Karimov's rule there.

Question: What was and is the role of the CIA in all this? Was Pakistan's ISI the CIA's long arm? Was bin Laden a CIA agent?

Answer: A chronic feature of American intelligence policy seems to be historical amnesia and inability to see the complex nature of conflicts and local relationships. This was also manifested during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. British intelligence and part of the Pakistani intelligence community clashed with the US already during the Cold War period, because they wanted to support Ahmad Shah Massoud, the "Lion of Panjshir". It was Massoud and his mujaheddin who finally, after getting Stingers from the British, managed to make the war too expensive for the Soviets, forcing them to retreat in 1989.

Meanwhile, the CIA was incompetent enough to be dependent on the Pakistani intelligence services that, especially in Zia ul-Haq's period, favored Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a pompous figure who claimed to have extensive contacts throughout the Islamic world. He indeed had some contacts, including with Osama bin Laden, but he was considered to be a KGB provocateur by Massoud and many others, and was never of any help in the Afghan independence struggle.

Instead of fighting the Soviet occupants, Hekmatyar preferred to fight other Afghans, and to conspire with suspicious Arab circles imported by his contact bin Laden to Peshawar. The Stingers that the CIA had provided to Hekmatyar, were not used to liberate Afghanistan. Instead, Hekmatyar sold them to Iran, and they were later used against the Americans in a well-known incident.

When the Soviet troops moved out, Hekmatyar pursued a bloody rebellion against the legal Afghan government, devastating the country along with another rebel general, Dostum. (Though they were not aligned.) In 1993, Hekmatyar supported the KGB general and spymaster Haidar Aliyev's coup in Azerbaijan and, in 1994, Hekmatyar was involved in supporting pro-Russian Lezghin terrorists in the Caucasus. Hekmatyar is still active. He lives in Teheran, and has recently finally revealed his true colors by siding with the Taliban.

As far as I know, Osama bin Laden was never a CIA agent. However, there are relatively plausible claims that he was close to Saudi intelligence, especially to the recently fired intelligence chief Prince Turki bin Faizal, until they broke up. Osama first appeared in the Afghan War theater either in 1979, or, at the latest in 1984. But at the beginning he was first and foremost a businessman. He served the interests of those who wished to construct roads accessible for tanks to cross through Afghanistan to the Indian Ocean. This might also explain his characteristic opportunism - quite atypical for a self-proclaimed warrior of faith.

International jihadists surely want to portray him as a religious fighter or Muslim hero, but this is not the true picture, but, mostly, a myth created by the Western media. This is where Arab, Pakistani and Indonesian teenagers learn that Osama is a fighter in a universal struggle of Islam against its oppressors.

But bin Laden never fought the Soviets to liberate Afghanistan. For most of this period, he was not even in Afghanistan. He was managing an office in Peshawar, and the only credible claim about him being in a battle has been made by the former CIA official Milton Bearden concerning a minor skirmish that took place in spring 1987.

Bin Laden's first significant contact in Peshawar was the Palestinian Professor Abdullah Azzam, whom bin Laden has later described as his mentor. Azzam was an Arab idealist, who wanted to concentrate on the liberation of Afghanistan, and who wanted to support Massoud, whom he correctly regarded as being the right person to uphold. Bin Laden disagreed. He wanted to support the disloyal Islamist fanatic Hekmatyar. As a result, Azzam and his son were blown up in a car bomb in 1989, and consequently, bin Laden took over his organization and transformed it into Al-Qaida (the Base). Already before these events, he started to transform the agency by flooding it with his Arab contacts from the Middle East. These Arabs were not interested in liberating Afghanistan as much as in hiding from the law enforcement agencies of their own countries, most of all Egypt's.

When Russia attacked Tajikistan, bin Laden and his folks were by no means interested in liberating Tajikistan from a new communist yoke. Instead, bin Laden left Afghanistan and dispersed his terrorist network, directing it to act against the West. It is bizarre that a man claiming to be an Islamic fundamentalist supported the invasion by the Arab socialist (and thereby atheist) Iraq against Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, both with conservative Islamic regimes.

Al-Qaida's supported all causes and activities against the West: the US, Turkey, Israel, and any pro-Western Muslim regime like Pakistan. Robbers on the island of Jolo in the Philippines qualified for Al-Qaida's support although they hardly knew anything about the Qur'an. They were immediately they were portrayed as "Islamic fighters". Even the strictly atheist anti-Turkish terrorist organization PKK has been welcomed. At the same time they definitely have not supported Muslims advocating Turkish-modeled moderate independence, like the Chechens, the original Tajik opposition or the Azeri government under President Abulfaz Elchibey.

As concerning Pakistan's intelligence service, the ISI, I think it would be gross underestimation of a potential regional great power and its British colonial traditions of military and intelligence to describe it just as an arm of the CIA or of the Islamists. These are widespread myths. The ISI is neither the hero nor the villain of this story. I think the ISI is interested simply in the national interest of Pakistan, which consists of four main elements: security against the hostile strong neighbors India and Iran, security against the instability and uncontrolled forces ravaging Afghanistan and infiltrating Pakistan through the large Pashtun population, the conflict over Kashmir, and Pakistan's own international status.

Afghanistan is an historical buffer zone in the ancient Great Game of Central Eurasia. It is the gateway through which Pakistan's enemies can attack or destabilize it, and it is equally the buffer that stops these enemies. Pakistan's is interested in regional stability while its enemies seek to use any instability against it. There is a great divide within Pakistan between Pakistani nationalists and internationalist Islamists. Pakistan is relatively democratic compared with its neighbors - even including India, considering its treatment of minorities and the Kashmir issue. It, thus, has the problems of a democracy. Pakistan has quite free and critical press, local administration and intellectual opposition, the Islamists included. It is not, and has never been, an Islamist dictatorship like Saudi Arabia.

Question: Can you chart the relationship between the ISI and the Taliban?

Answer: The policy of the ISI was strongly correlated with developments in Pakistan's leadership. The main divide concerning the ISI's Afghanistan policies did not concern religious issues as it did the ethnic question related to the political and military aspirations of the Pashtun people in both Pakistan and Afghanistan. Actually one of the greatest dangers to Pakistan's national existence would be the emergence of the idea of Greater Pashtunistan, splitting Pakistan in two.

This was an idea favored and agitated by the pro-Soviet Pashtuns - many of whom are now influential in the Taliban. The Pakistani researcher Musa Khan Jalalzai noticed this and described these people as "enemies of Pakistani interests".

India and Iran would like to split Pakistan and destroy it, and Russian geopolitics is still based on a "final thrust to the South". Iran and India equally fear that Baluchistan, Kashmir and Punjab would finally be united under Pakistani rule. Incorporating Pashtunistan, Pakistan has the potential to become a South Asian superpower with plausible expansionist chances. Yet this has never really been an aspiration of Pakistan. Like Turkey under Ataturk, Pakistan under such leaders as Ayub Khan and now Pervez Musharraf has been introverted in its nationalism and based on constitutional and national ideas similar to those of present day Turkey and France.

During the military dictatorship of Zia ul-Haq the policy turned more Islamist, and during this period the ISI strongly supported Hekmatyar. Hekmatyar proved disloyal and finally defected to Iran. During Benazir Bhutto's government, support has shifted to the Taliban. This was decided by the Interior Minister Nasirullah Babar. It is history's irony that the first female prime minister of Pakistan helped to strengthen the misogynist Taliban regime. The ISI started to get disillusioned and disappointed with the Taliban during the thoroughly corrupt "democracy" continued under Nawaz Sharif. There have been rumors that the ISI wished to influence the Taliban and to empower "a third force" among the more moderate Taliban leaders to take over it. It is in connection with this that Shahnawaz Tanai actually defected to Pakistan, and the ISI was dealing with the former communists who were so powerful within the Taliban.

Luckily for Western interests, General Pervez Musharraf took over. This takeover was the best event in Pakistani history as far as the West is concerned, although it was sadly ignored in the West during the Clinton administration. Musharraf was portrayed as a military dictator and a supporter of the causes of the Taliban and of an alliance with China (all sins of his predecessors). Musharraf is profoundly pro-Western, secular in mind and pragmatic in foreign policy. He in fact tried to form constructive relationships with all the neighboring countries (Iran, India and Afghanistan). His peace initiatives in Kashmir were stalled by Indian arrogance, and the West turned a cold shoulder to its old ally, which has been a source of great bitterness in Pakistan, especially since the West has been very inconsistent in choosing when to support Pakistan and when not to. But during the Musharraf reign, human rights and the position of women in Pakistan have improved considerably.

Constructive relations with whomever rules Afghanistan have been Realpolitik for Pakistan. Although Musharraf, immediately after seizing power, started to undermine the support for the Taliban, he could not remove the recognition given to the Taliban government, as there was no other Afghan government - the Rabbani government having been ousted and categorically hostile to Pakistan, partly for legitimate reasons. Pakistan has been trying ever since to construct new anti-Taliban alliances, as well as trying to find intra-Taliban frictions to exploit. But the West should be very careful and measured in its pressure on Pakistan. The Taliban is really not under Pakistan's thumb, and never was.

I think the ISI first saw the Taliban as a potential instrument. Then it saw it as a threat that had to be infiltrated and controlled. Then they saw it as a burden. Surely the ISI wished to control and contain the Taliban, but their success has been rather doubtful (as has been others'). Many analysts have paid attention to the fact that Afghan as well as non-Afghan adventurers like bin Laden, have always been very talented at exploiting the surrounding states as well as both superpowers.

Another distorted myth is propagated by India. It is that the Kashmiri secessionism is terrorism and a Pakistani creation. This is very far from reality. More than 80% of Kashmiris would probably prefer independence, but at the same time they reject the Islamist model. There are several small but media-visible Islamist groups operating in Kashmir, or at least proclaiming the Kashmiri cause. But these people are not really interested in Kashmiri independence. They are interested in jihad. Such Islamists appear wherever there is a war (during Bosnia's struggle for independence and in the Albanian civil war, in Chechnya, Kashmir and so on). Their "help" is usually just an added burden to the ones they purport to help, since they are seldom fighting for any liberation. These "professional" jihadists also seem to be more common in internet cafes and among Arab diasporas in the West than in places where Muslim nations face real oppression.

We must remember that Musharraf cannot possibly surrender to India in the Kashmir dispute. This would not only be political suicide, but it would not end the Kashmir conflict - quite the contrary. It would mean importing the Kashmiri conflict into Pakistan, and against Pakistan. What happened in Afghanistan, with millions of refugees flooding to Pakistan, should not happen with Kashmir. This would be an outright catastrophe for both Pakistan and India, let alone the Kashmiri people. Therefore it is the most crucial interest of the West to prevent India from escalating the Kashmir conflict and turning Kashmir into another weapon against Pakistan's stability.

Question: The "Arab" fighters in Afghanistan - are they a state with a state, or the long arm for covert operations (e.g., the assassination of Massoud) for the Taliban? Who is the dog and who is the tail?

Answer: The dog and tail can get very entangled here. Everybody is exploiting everybody, and finally all organizations and states are tools which consist of individuals and used by them. The Arabs in Afghanistan are indeed Arabs. There are also lots of "Pakistani" volunteers on the Taliban side, but these are mainly Pashtuns, that is, Afghans.

The mentioning of Chechens, Uighurs and so on is more designed to satisfy the propaganda purposes of Russia and China. There are less than one million Chechens and they have a very harsh war going on in Chechnya. Chechens who choose to go to Afghanistan instead must be quite unpatriotic.

The Arabs form the hard core of Al-Qaida. They are the Egyptian, Syrian, Iraqi etc. professional revolutionaries and terrorists who have gathered around the figurehead of Osama bin Laden. Many of these share the same old background in Marxist-inspired revolutionary movements in the Middle East. Ideology and facade have changed when green replaced red, but their methods as well as foreign contacts have mainly remained the same. This is why they are much more interested in attacking the West and pro-Western Muslim regimes than in supporting any true national liberation movements. Even if they try to infiltrate and influence conflict outcomes in the Balkans, the Caucasus, East Turkistan and Kashmir, they are set against the nationalist and secular - and usually pro-Western - policies of the legitimate leadership of these secessionist movements. So the people whom Al-Qaida may support and try to infiltrate are usually exiled or otherwise opposition forces acting in fact against the idea of independence. This has been the case in Chechnya, Dagestan, Bosnia, Kashmir and so on.

And this has been the case in Afghanistan as well. Osama bin Laden and his Arabs never contributed to the actual Afghan national liberation struggle. Instead they acted against it by infiltrating Afghan circles and turning them against each other. Their jihad is not intended to defend the Muslims against infidel oppressors, but to cause chaos and destruction, in which they apparently hope to overthrow Muslim regimes and replace them with the utopia of Salafi rule. It is not hard to see how this set of mind was inherited from the communist utopian terrorist movements that preceded the present Islamist ones. They had the same structures, the same cadres, the same leaders, the same sponsors and the same methods.

The Arabs in Afghanistan have feathered their nests, though. Osama bin Laden and his closest associates have all married daughters of Afghan elders - from different factions and tribes - and their sons and daughters have, in turn, married the off-spring of eminent Afghan leaders. This is how they secured their foothold in Afghan social networks - something neither the West nor Pakistan succeeded to do. When issues are reduced to family relationships, it is not to be expected that the Afghans would hand over the Arabs to the West or to Pakistan. Al-Qaida is not only fortifying itself physically, but also socially. At the same time their cells and countless collaborating agencies - some of whom are clearly non-Islamist, and some of which are government agencies of certain hostile states - are hoping to escalate this "war against terrorism" and to exploit it for their own purposes.

Question: Do you believe that the USA had long standing designs to conquer Afghanistan and used the September 11 atrocities as a pretext?

Answer: I would rather say that somebody else had long standing designs for a major conflict in which it was necessary to get the US involved. Those who wiped out Mr. Massoud(The assassination of Massoud is considered to have a strong connection to the September 11 attacks in 2001 on U.S. soil, which killed nearly 3,000 people. It appeared to have been the major terrorist attack which Massoud had warned against in his speech to the European Parliament several months earlier.) a couple of days before the terror strikes in the US probably knew that the terrorists will be hunted in Afghanistan.

It is clear that the US, among many others, has long desired to overthrow the Taliban, and I see nothing wrong with it. Afghanistan was the easiest target, because the Taliban was not internationally recognized (except by three countries at the beginning of the war), and because there was nobody strong enough to really side with the Taliban. There was no special need to demonize them, as they seemed to have done a good job demonizing themselves. The West was more concerned with the blowing up a couple of Buddha statues than with the thousands of victims of the Taliban's tyranny and of the civil war that continued to rage in Afghanistan all this time totally ignored by the Western media until the US got involved again. The US can, of course, be blamed for hypocrisy, as always, but the truth is that getting the US involved has greatly helped those in Afghanistan who had hoped for decades to overthrow the Taliban.

It is also quite surprising that even Musharraf's Pakistan seems to have actually benefited from the present course of affairs, since terrorism has given Musharraf the pretext of openly siding with the West, and abandoning all remnants of Pakistan's tolerance of the Taliban.

Still I would be inclined against any conspiratorial depiction of the recent events that would blame the US for all that happened. The US had to react, and Afghanistan was a logical target. In this sense, the US did what the terrorists wanted. But they did so in a much more moderate way, and after much longer preparations than their enemies had probably hoped for. One reason is that in the Bush administration there seems to be significantly more foreign political expertise than in the Clinton administration that hastily bombed a couple of targets, including a factory in Sudan, but always failed to respond to the real challenge.

In the long run, the threat posed by terrorism will not be defeated by military operations and not in Afghanistan. What can be done there is just the removal of the Taliban regime and helping to construct a stable and recognized Afghan government. It is important to give security guarantees to Pakistan and to support the development that is transforming Pakistan into a strong and relatively stable pro-Western Muslim country that can play a similar role in Central and Southern Asia as Turkey does in the West and Middle East. At best, this could even encourage a Musharraf to rise in Iran, which would yield ultimate benefits to Western interests in Asia.

But then, terrorism must be fought by other means.

This means that Western intelligence must rise to the level of the Cold War to face challenges by terrorist organizations as well as by colluding governments. The West must also resist Huntington's vision coming true, since this is exactly what the terrorists want: a clash of civilizations. And we must keep in mind that there are also many others who would like to see a worldwide conflagration between the West and Islam.

Question: What is the geostrategic and geopolitical importance of Afghanistan?

Answer: Afghanistan is not so significant in itself, if we only consider economic interests. Of more importance are some countries situated near Afghanistan, especially those in Central Asia and Azerbaijan. Afghanistan is also a traditional buffer zone, since its landscape is hard to penetrate for tanks and modern armies. It has prevented the expansion of the Eurasian Heartland Empire towards Eurasia's southern rim lands for centuries. It has protected the areas included in Pakistan and India today, but on the other hand, turning Afghanistan into a politically or militarily active area was used to destabilize Pakistan, or Central Asia, in order to alter the status quo, whatever it was.

Regarding oil, Afghanistan again forms a bridge or a barrier. As long as Iran is regarded as a hostile country by the US, Afghanistan forms an oil transport route from Central Asia to Pakistan. As long as there is war in Afghanistan, it remains a barrier preventing the countries of the Caspian Sea from benefiting from their oil. Wars in the Caucasus have exactly the same outcome. While this is the case, only Russia and perhaps China will have access to and hegemony over the energy resources in the vast Eurasian heart-land.

I think this is the main geopolitical importance of both Afghanistan and the Caucasus. It is the question of Russia monopolizing the geopolitical heartland, first and foremost. Considering the colossal weight of geopolitics and geopolitical thought in present Russian security thinking, these implications cannot be overestimated.
Sources:
Anssi Kristian Kullberg
Afghanistan archive
Empire and War - Imperial Co-operation League - Google Books
Afghan Myths - An Interview with Anssi Kullberg
Shahnawaz Tanai | The Taliban | ZoomInfo.com
Hostility, the nature of the enemy in the 21st century: a European vision - Xavier Raufer
The Strange Facts?!?
Afghan Myths - An Interview with Anssi Kullberg

Very impressive -- did you put all of this together -- if you did -- might I suggest that this go into a separate site which servers as at least a Pakistani narrative.

What would be interesting is that if simultaneously have Afghans put up their narrative -- we don't have to agree with the Afghans and the Afghans with us but we need to help each other explore our own narratives as well as understand the other sides' narrative. I for one despite my repeated events have not been able to piece together a coherent Afghan narrative: simple things:

Did the USSR invade or was invited by the government de jure -- evidence seems to suggest that the USSR was invited in -- but what I've found frustrating is that in paragraphs 1, 8 & 11 and Afghan will say the USSR invaded or was invited by a puppet regime -- in paragraphs 13, 21 and 66 they will proudly show General Karimi wearing medals that the so called puppet government awarded him or how brake the brave Afghan air force took on air strikes against the Mujahideen. Perhaps all of this can be reconciled within reasonable extensions to logic -- however I've failed to do so and have often asked for the real Afghan to stand up.

 

[Levina]

the first point you raise is actually true Taliban was not a creation of Pakistan but when they conquered kandahar and jalalabad our spy agency formed contact with them still they operated independently but when india got involved by supporting general dostum fighters so we decided to financially support and arm talibans to counter nothern alliance ETC

Let me see where the problem began by listing out the events in the sequence it happened
1) Pushtunistan problem begins in 1893.
2) status quo continued until 1947 when India was partitioned, after which Afghanistan argued that Pushtun areas of Pakistan should have the option for independence.
3) Pushtunistan issue continued to simmer into the 1950s.
4) 1961, Kabul and Islamabad severed diplomatic relations.
5) The 1971 war, which reinforced the point that in Pakistan ethnicity trumped religion.
6) 1973, Daoud overthrew his cousin Zahir Shah and declared Afghanistan a republic.
7) Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto responded by supporting an Islamist movement in Afghanistan >>>>> The problem began here.

but when they conquered kandahar and jalalabad our spy agency formed contact with them still they operated independently

Mere contact???
Well afaik............. many senior leaders of the Afghanistan Taliban were closely associated with and had attended the Darul Uloom Haqqania seminary in Akora Khattakin Pakistan, includingMullah Omar, and its role in supporting the Taliban.The seminary is run by Maulana Sami ul Haq of theJamiat Ulema-e-Islam who is often referred to as the "Father of the Taliban".

It's up to US whether we want to be Pawns or Players

Lets begin by bringing peace to Kashmir.

 

[OrionHunter]

Pakistan even provided nuclear know-how and look what they did in the end.

Huh? So you admit! Then why do you fellows keep shouting from the rooftops that you are NOT selling nuke secrets to other countries?

Pakistan is the world's biggest nuclear proliferator providing nuke know how to North Korea, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Libya and Iran! And you want to join the NSG? And conclude a nuke deal with the US like India? Jeeez!