by MOHAMMED HANIF
Many of us are gloating at the US retreat, but there is dread in our hearts. We can’t forget how the Taliban brought their fight to our mosques and schools
Not too long ago, Pakistan and Afghanistan were called Af-Pak: two countries joined at the hip, doomed to live and die together. You didn’t get to choose your neighbours, we were told. Geography, we were taught, was our destiny.
There was a lot of talk about geostrategic significance – which was the Pakistan military’s way of saying there were great advantages to be derived from our unfortunate neighbours.
More than four decades ago, our leaders insisted we had to help the Afghan mujahideen fight the Soviets because that would help us ward off communism in our own country. Having lived most of my life in Pakistan, I have probably come across half a dozen communists – and even they never agreed with each other.
That first jihad made generations of Afghans homeless but it also made some people in Pakistan very rich. The Soviet-Afghan war also sustained our brutal military dictatorship, brought us abundant supplies of cheap and high-quality heroin, and introduced something called “Kalashnikov culture”, which made it easier to settle political and personal disputes by killing each other.
Pakistan won that war. Our generals and seasoned defence experts still can’t stop boasting that not only did we defeat the Soviet Union but we also brought about the end of communism. The United States and the rest of the free world surely owed us. But they upped and left. This was when we learned what the rest of the world already knew: America had no shame.
But when the victorious mujahideen finally took power in Kabul, a few years after the Soviets left, they turned out to be the wrong sort for Pakistan. After all the years we spent training and hosting them, they still didn’t really like us much. So another war had to be started to get rid of our mujahideen.
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