Prime Minister Imran Khan has said that Pakistan must not be blamed for the outcome of war in Afghanistan and for the losses of the United States and stressed on setting eyes on the future to avoid another conflict instead of sticking with the blame game.
“Today, with Afghanistan at another crossroads, we must look to the future to prevent another violent conflict in that country rather than perpetuating the blame game of the past,” he said in his article published in the Washington Post on Monday.
Imran Khan said surely, Pakistan was not to blame for the fact that “300,000-plus well-trained and equipped Afghan security forces saw no reason to fight the lightly-armed Taliban”. The underlying problem, he said, was an Afghan government structure lacking legitimacy in the eyes of the average Afghan.
He also expressed “surprise” over the recent Congressional hearings on Afghanistan, where “no mention was made of Pakistan’s sacrifices as a US ally in the war on terror for over two decades”. “Instead, we were blamed for America’s loss,” he said.
Khan recalled that since 2001, he repeatedly warned that the “Afghan war was unwinnable” and pointed that given their history, Afghans would never accept a protracted foreign military presence.
Even an outsider including Pakistan could not change this reality, he said. The prime minister said unfortunately, the successive Pakistani governments after 9/11 sought to please the US instead of pointing out the error of a military-dominated approach.
Imran Khan said the people the US asked Pakistan to target, included the groups trained jointly by the CIA and Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) to defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
The prime minister pointed out that after the defeat of the Soviets, the U.S. abandoned Afghanistan and sanctioned Pakistan, leaving behind over five million Afghan refugees in Pakistan and a bloody civil war in Afghanistan.
“From this security vacuum emerged the Taliban, many born and educated in the Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan,” he said. Post 9/11, he said, the U.S. needed Pakistan again, “but this time against the very actors we had jointly supported to fight foreign occupation”.
He mentioned that Pakistan suffered over 80,000 casualties and lost over $150 billion in the economy, besides driving 3.5 million citizens from their homes.
“Pakistan had to fight for its survival,” he stressed and quoted in this regard a former CIA station chief in Kabul who in 2009 wrote that the country was “beginning to crack under the relentless pressure directly exerted by the US.” Yet the U.S. continued to ask us to “do more” for the war in Afghanistan, he said.
He mentioned that Pakistan suffered over 80,000 casualties and lost over $150 billion in the economy, besides driving 3.5 million citizens from their homes.
He said former president Asif Zardari as “undoubtedly the most corrupt man to have led the country” told the Americans to continue targeting Pakistanis because “collateral damage worries you Americans. It does not worry me.”
Nawaz Sharif, he said, the next prime minister “was no different”. Imran Khan said while Pakistan defeated the terrorist onslaught completely by 2016, the Afghan situation continued to deteriorate.
“Taliban leaders will have greater reason and ability to stick to their promises if they are assured of the consistent humanitarian and development assistance they need to run the government effectively,” he said.
He said providing such incentives would also give the outside world additional leverage to continue persuading the Taliban to honor their commitments.
Otherwise, he said, abandoning Afghanistan as tried before would “inevitably lead to a meltdown”. “Chaos, mass migration and a revived threat of international terror will be natural corollaries. Avoiding this must surely be our global imperative,” he said.
