Not "a lot", most if not all of our aggrsssive attitude to them is because of their irredentist claims on our territory. If they cry foul play now then they only have themselves to blame. For goodness sake the country tried to block our entry into the UN. Not even India did that. And of course Pakistan made mistakes, but in the grand scheme of things Pakistan did what any other country facing this kind of a threat from its neighbour would have done.
Completely destroyed Afghanistan...
Superb military chess game!
Their 7 generations will remember the lesson!
The thing is people have been treating Afganistan as if it is there own property . The likes of Pakistan from the independence and then later the USSR and then the Us and Nato forces .
And now India as well..its Afghanistan own's fault instead of looking after issues at home they think it is still the era of Mehmood Shah Ghaznavi and they can go around looting and pillaging!
September 5, 1951
The Afghan prime minister, who is paying yet another visit to Delhi, is invited to address members of the Indian parliament, and he reaffirms his hope that the close and sincere relations already existing between Afghanistan and India will remain for the benefit of world peace. At a press conference Shah Mahmud Khan stresses the
friendliness of Afghan policy toward Pakistan, and maintains that in supporting the "Pashtunistan" movement Afghanistan is not animated by hostility to Pakistan.
October 16, 1951
Liaquat Ali Khan, prime minister of Pakistan, is assassinated, calling forth from Kabul a sympathetic message and a tribute to his ability. The Pakistan government on its side is careful to stress the point that,
although the assassin is stated to be of Afghan origin, there is no sinister significance in that fact, especially as he has been an exile in Pakistan for some time.
From a legal perspective, Afghanistan’s claim about the
illegitimacy of its border with Pakistan was rather weak.
Though Afghanistan claimed that the border had been drawn under duress,
it had in
fact confirmed the demarcation of this international frontier on multiple occasions,
including in agreements concluded in 1905, 1919, 1921, and 1930.10 But the weakness of Afghanistan’s legal case took a backseat to the historical connection it felt to the
Pashtun areas, and the strategic benefits it would derive from expanding its territory
Afghanistan’s Early Incursions into Pakistan
Less than a decade after the birth of the new state of Pakistan, James Spain noted, “relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan have come to be centered on one issue.”11 That
single issue was Pashtunistan. It was Afghanistan rather than
Pakistan that chose to make this border dispute, and the
issue of Pashtunistan, so central to the two states’ relations.
At the outset, Afghanistan was the only country to vote
against Pakistan’s admission into the United Nations,
justifying this vote with the argument that Pakistan’s
northwest frontier “should not be recognized as a part of
Pakistan until the Pashtuns of that area had been given the opportunity to opt out for
independence.”12 Pakistan was admitted despite Afghanistan’s objections. But thereafter
Kabul launched a series of low-level attacks against Pakistan, maintaining some degree
of plausible deniability throughout (as Pakistan would later do when non-state actors
that it sponsored struck at India, Afghanistan, US forces, and others).
George Montagno, who served as a visiting professor of American history at the
University of Karachi, has noted that for years after Pakistan’s creation, Afghan agents
operated within the Pashtun areas, “distributing large amounts of money, ammunition
and even transistor radios in an effort to sway loyalties from Pakistan to Afghanistan.”13
Another of their obvious goals was to build support for an independent Pashtunistan.
At the same time that Afghanistan worked to build support within Pakistan’s Pashtun
areas, it also escalated its attacks into Pakistan proper.
Pakistan claimed that on September 30, 1950, its northern border was attacked by
Afghan tribesmen, as well as regular Afghan troops, who crossed into Pakistan 30
miles northeast of Chaman in Baluchistan.14 It didn’t take long for Pakistan to repel
this low-scale invasion, and its government announced that it had “driven invaders
from Afghanistan back across the border after six days of fighting.”15 For its own
part, Afghanistan claimed that it had no involvement in this attack, which it said was
comprised exclusively of Pashtun tribesmen agitating for an independent Pashtunistan.
But given Afghanistan’s later use of irregular forces dressed as tribesmen, Pakistan’s
claims that the aggression had emanated from Afghanistan’s government seem credible
Tensions between Afghanistan and Pakistan rose markedly in 1955, when Pakistan announced that it was consolidating its control over its tribal areas. In response, Afghan
prime minister Mohammed Daoud Khan criticized Pakistan’s actions over the airwaves of
Radio Kabul on March 29, 1955. Demonstrations that were reportedly inspired by the
Afghan government flared up in Kabul, Kandahar, and Jalalabad. S.M.M. Qureshi of the
University of Alberta noted that “Pakistan flags were pulled down and insulted and the
[Pashtunistan] flag was hoisted on the chancery of the Pakistan
Embassy in Kabul.”16 This incident caused the two countries to
withdraw their ambassadors, and relations weren’t fully restored
until 1957
The next crisis in Afghanistan-Pakistan relations came in 1960-
61. Khurshid Hasan, at the time a member of the department of
international relations at the University of Karachi, recounts, “In
1960, fresh border clashes took place. Afghan irregulars and Army
troops dressed as tribesmen were reported to have penetrated the
Pakistan side of the Durand Line with the sanction of the Afghan
Government. Two other raids took place in May and fall of 1961.”17
News reports from that period corroborate Hasan’s account. In
late September 1960, an Afghan lashkar (irregular forces) crossed
into Pakistan’s Bajaur area. Pakistan’s government announced
that the lashkar “clashed with loyal tribesmen and fled after suffering heavy casualties.”18 But Pakistan alleged that conventional
Afghan military resources, including tanks, had also massed on
the Afghan side of the border near Bajaur.19 What Afghanistan’s
official news agency described as “a major battle” eventually broke out between the two
sides.20 Pakistan bombarded Afghan forces using its airpower; rather than escalating
the conflict, this quelled hostilities, at least for the time being.
The May 1961 clashes occurred in the area of the Khyber Pass. Pakistani president
Muhammad Ayub Khan announced that regular Afghan forces had attacked Pakistani
posts at the border. The Pakistani air force strafed Afghan positions in response.21 On
May 22, Pakistani warplanes struck again, attempting to wipe out a base of raiding
Afghan troops in Baganandail.22 With this aerial strafing, alongside police patrols,
roadblocks, and even bombs going off, the New York Times noted in late May that
“relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan appear to have reached a new low, and
no relief is in sight.”23 Indeed, after the next skirmishes broke out in the fall of 1961,
Afghanistan and Pakistan formally severed diplomatic relations.24
These broken relations had acute economic consequences for both countries, particularly
for landlocked Afghanistan. The shah of Iran helped to mediate a détente between the two
neighbors in 1963. The resulting peace lasted about a decade, until Mohammed Daoud
Khan (who served as Afghanistan’s prime minister during the 1955 crisis between the
countries) deposed his cousin, King Mohammed Zahir Shah, on July 17, 1973.
Daoud’s Legacy: A Rivalry Reignited
Daoud was an ardent supporter of the Pashtunistan concept, and his passion for the
matter produced the collapse of détente. He referred to the border dispute almost
immediately upon assuming power, and the independent state for which he agitated
included not only Pakistan’s majority Pashtun areas but also its majority Baluch areas.
Daoud’s regime provided sanctuary, arms, and ammunition to Pashtun and Baluch
nationalist groups. Pakistan saw this as a significant challenge because its Baluch
regions had been in “virtual revolt,” requiring the intervention of Pakistan’s military
even before Daoud began to support Baluch separatism.25 Even as Daoud fomented
ethnic insurgency inside Pakistan, his regime simultaneously condemned Pakistan
before the United Nations for being “genocidal” in its treatment of ethnic minorities.
This escalation came at a time when Pakistan had already lost nearly a third of its
territory, as East Pakistan seceded in 1971 and became Bangladesh. Rizwan Hussain,
a research scholar at The Australian National University, writes that Afghanistan’s
actions “posed the greatest threat to Pakistan’s integrity since the secession of East
Pakistan.”26 Obviously, this called for a response.
Pakistani president Zulfikar Ali Bhutto—a secular reformist whose rule included
several questionable decisions that unwittingly empowered Islamist factions27—fashioned a two-part responsive strategy. One part was to suppress nationalist uprisings
in Pakistan’s Frontier. A second part was a “forward policy” that supported violent
Islamist factions inside Afghanistan. This was symmetrical with the manner in which
Afghanistan had supported violent nationalist groups inside Pakistan.
A.Z. Hilali, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Peshawar, notes that
Bhutto’s government “found many Afghan Islamists who were useful as a counterweight
to the pro-Indian and relatively pro-Soviet policies of Daoud’s government.”28 Afghan
Islamists who received covert aid from Pakistan during this time included Gulbuddin
Hikmatyar and Burhanuddin Rabbani, both of whom were destined to become important figures during the Afghan-Soviet war and beyond.29 (After the communist-leaning
regime of Mohammad Najibullah collapsed in 1992, Hikmatyar became Afghanistan’s
“prime minister,” and shelled the capital city held by “president” Rabbani on a daily basis.)
There were strategic reasons behind Pakistan’s support for these Islamist factions. For
one, Pakistan believed that groups whose primary identification was religious might be
less likely to support ethno-nationalist demands of the kind that drove Afghan policy
toward Pakistan’s Pashtuns and Baluchs. It also seems that Pakistan believed Islamist
groups in Afghanistan were more likely to be hostile toward India. This calculation
proved to be correct: The only time since Pakistan’s creation that Afghanistan has had
warm relations with Pakistan while simultaneously being hostile to India was during
the Taliban’s rule in the 1990s.
Thus, Pakistan’s initial support for violent Islamist groups in Afghanistan was spurred
directly by the Afghan government’s sponsorship of separatist groups in Pakistan under
the Daoud regime, as well as aggressive Afghan actions that had preceded Daoud.
Pakistan’s support for such groups would of course grow during the 1980s, which saw
the Afghan-Soviet war grip the region, and also during the 1990s, when Pakistan supported the Taliban during Afghanistan’s civil war.
Full PDF:
http://yalejournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Article-Gartenstein_Ross-and-Vassefi.pdf
