[I can't find that blame Pakistan for the Afghan loss thread but this is related. Also including my own response in Comments to the NY Times article].
My comments [Unpublished so far].
" So United States could block the Soviets to lay its missiles on the Cuban soil---mind you, Cuba is a country several dozen miles from the southern most point from the American soil. And Cuba was/is a sovereign country. But Pakistan can't block Pakistan's perennial and powerful rival India to encircle Pakistan via Afghanistan--a country, with whom, Pakistan shares a long land border?!! We are in this situation in Afghanistan precisely because of the lack of empathy for 'the others' viewpoint! "
The original NY Times article (from today).
Pakistan, nominally a U.S. partner in the war, was the Afghan Taliban’s main patron, and sees the Taliban’s victory as its own. But now what does it do with its prize?
www.nytimes.com
The Real Winner of the Afghan War? It’s Not Who You Think.
Pakistan, nominally a U.S. partner in the war, was the Afghan Taliban’s main patron, and sees the Taliban’s victory as its own. But now what does it do with its prize?
Just days after the Taliban took Kabul, their flag was flying high above a central mosque in Pakistan’s capital. It was an in-your-face gesture intended to spite the defeated Americans. But it was also a sign of the real victors in the 20-year Afghan war.
Pakistan was ostensibly America’s partner in the war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Its military won tens of billions of dollars in American aid over the last two decades, even as Washington acknowledged that much of the money disappeared into unaccounted sinkholes.
But it was a relationship riven by duplicity and divided interests from its very start after 9/11. Not least, the Afghan Taliban the Americans were fighting are, in large part, a creation of Pakistan’s intelligence service, the I.S.I., which through the course of the war nurtured and protected Taliban assets inside Pakistan.
In the last three months as the Taliban swept across Afghanistan, the Pakistani military waved a surge of new fighters across the border from sanctuaries inside Pakistan, tribal leaders have said. It was a final coup de grace to the American-trained Afghan security forces.
“The Pakistanis and the I.S.I. think they have won in Afghanistan,” said Robert L. Grenier, a former C.I.A. station chief in Pakistan. But, he warned, the Pakistanis should watch what they wish for. “If the Afghan Taliban become leaders of a pariah state, which is likely, Pakistan will find itself tethered to them.”
Pakistan’s already shaky reputation in the West is likely to plummet now, as the Taliban take over Afghanistan. Calls to sanction Pakistan have already circulated on social media. Absent foreign financing, Pakistan faces reliance on a jihadist drug trade encouraged by the new rulers in Kabul. A Taliban-run state on its border will no doubt embolden Taliban and other Islamist militants in Pakistan itself.
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