The actual winner of the Afghan conflict? It’s not who you assume.

Just days after the Taliban took Kabul, their flag was flying excessive above a central mosque in Pakistan’s capital. It was an in-your-face gesture supposed to spite the defeated Americans. But it was additionally an indication of the true victors within the 20-year Afghan conflict.
Pakistan was ostensibly America’s associate within the conflict in opposition to al-Qaida and the Taliban. Its navy gained tens of billions in American support over the past twenty years, at the same time as Washington acknowledged that a lot of the cash disappeared into unaccounted sinkholes.
But it was a relationship riven by duplicity and divided pursuits from its very begin after 9/11. Not least, the Afghan Taliban the Americans had been preventing are, largely, a creation of Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI, which by means of the course of the conflict nurtured and guarded Taliban belongings inside Pakistan.

In the final three months because the Taliban swept throughout Afghanistan, the Pakistani navy waved a surge of recent fighters throughout the border from sanctuaries inside Pakistan, tribal leaders have stated. It was a closing coup de grâce to the American-trained Afghan safety forces.
“The Pakistanis and the ISI think they have won in Afghanistan,” stated Robert Grenier, a former CIA station chief in Pakistan. But, he warned, the Pakistanis ought to watch what they want 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 fame within the West is prone to plummet now, because the Taliban take over Afghanistan. Calls to sanction Pakistan have already circulated on social media. Absent international financing, Pakistan faces reliance on a jihadi drug commerce inspired by the brand new rulers in Kabul. A Taliban-run state on its border will little question embolden Taliban and different Islamist militants in Pakistan itself.
Not least, relations with the United States, already on the downslope, will deteriorate additional. Aside from sustaining the soundness of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, the Americans now have much less incentive to take care of Pakistan.
So the query for the Pakistanis is what is going to they do with the damaged nation that’s their prize? Already Pakistan, together with Russia and China, helps fill the area the Americans have vacated. The embassies of the three nations have remained open for the reason that Taliban seized Kabul.
A Pakistani protégé, Khalil Haqqani, a Taliban chief who was an everyday customer to Pakistan’s navy headquarters in Rawalpindi, is likely one of the new rulers of Afghanistan.
Known to American intelligence because the Taliban emissary to al-Qaida, Haqqani confirmed up in Kabul final week at their new chief of safety, openly armed with an American-made M4 rifle, with a safety squad wearing American fight gear.
“Governing a war-ravaged country will be the real test and imposing challenge especially as the Taliban have been a warring force, not one adept at governing,” Maleeha Lohdi, a former Pakistani ambassador to the United Nations, wrote in a column in The Dawn newspaper this week.
During the conflict the Americans tolerated Pakistan’s duplicitous sport as a result of they noticed little alternative, preferring to combat a chaotic conflict in Afghanistan to warring with nuclear-armed Pakistan. Moreover, Pakistan’s ports and airfields offered the primary entry factors and provide strains for American navy gear wanted in Afghanistan.
Pakistan did that, at the same time as its spy company offered planning help, coaching experience and generally on the bottom recommendation to the Taliban all by means of the conflict, American officers stated.
Though Pakistan was alleged to be an American ally, it at all times labored towards its personal pursuits, as nations do. Those pursuits didn’t embody a big American navy presence on its border, an autonomous Afghanistan with a democratic authorities it couldn’t management or a powerful and centralized navy.
Rather, Pakistan’s purpose in Afghanistan was to create a sphere of affect to dam its archnemesis, India. The Pakistanis insist that India makes use of separatist teams just like the Balochistan Liberation Army, working from havens in Afghanistan, to stir dissent in Pakistan.
“The Pakistani Army believes Afghanistan provides strategic depth against India, which is their obsession,” stated Bruce Riedel, a former South Asia adviser to the Bush and Obama administrations. “The U.S. encouraged India to support the American-backed Afghan government after 2001, fueling the army’s paranoia.”
The Pakistanis had been incensed that former President Barack Obama visited India in 2015 however conspicuously boycotted Pakistan, he stated.
During a go to to Washington this spring, Moeed Yusuf, the nationwide safety adviser to Pakistan’s prime minister, Imran Khan, burdened the necessity to eradicate the Indian presence in Afghanistan, Americans who met him stated.
Yusuf is taken into account a reasonable on the Pakistani political spectrum, and the Americans stated they had been struck by his vehemence on India’s position in Afghanistan.
When Indian diplomats had been among the many first foreigners to evacuate from Kabul, their departure was performed within the Pakistani press as a singular victory.
The nexus between the Pakistanis and the victorious Haqqani was indeniable and indispensable to the Taliban victory, stated Douglas London, a former CIA counterterrorism chief for South and Southwest Asia.
The head of the Pakistani Army, Qamar Javed Bajwa, and the top of the ISI, Hameed Faiz, met with Haqqani on a “recurring basis,” London stated. The prolonged Haqqani household has lengthy been recognized to stay within the largely ungoverned areas of Pakistan alongside the Afghan border.
“All the time Bajwa was pressed by the U.S. to give up Khalil Haqqani and two other Haqqani leaders, and all the time, Bajwa would say, ‘Tell us where they are,’” stated London, who has written an upcoming memoir of his CIA years, “The Recruiter,” stated. “My favorite quote was when Bajwa said: ‘You just have to come to my office and we will go in a helicopter and we will go and pick them up.’”
Pakistan’s assist, he stated, encompassed a gamut of companies. Safe havens within the borderlands of Pakistan, significantly within the metropolis of Quetta, sheltered Afghan Taliban fighters and their households. Medical companies handled wounded fighters, generally in hospitals within the main cities, Karachi and Peshawar. Free rein for the Haqqanis to run profitable actual property, smuggling and different companies in Pakistan saved their conflict machine churning.
The ISI normally saved its operatives out of the particular battle, fearful that they is likely to be captured in Afghanistan, delivering a smoking gun to the Americans, London stated.
The ISI additionally offered the Taliban with belongings that elevated their worldwide standing. The Taliban chief Abdul Ghani Baradar traveled on a Pakistani passport to attend peace talks in Doha, Qatar, and to fulfill in Tianjin, China, with Wang Yi, the international minister.
“The Afghan Taliban would not be where they are without the assistance of the Pakistanis,” London stated.
Washington’s relationship with Pakistan cooled after Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden in 2011 at a protected home situated close to a Pakistani navy academy. Top American officers stopped visiting Pakistan and help was decreased.
But the Obama administration by no means stated publicly what it suspected: that the Pakistani navy knew all alongside that bin Laden was residing together with his prolonged household in Abbottabad, certainly one of Pakistan’s best-known garrison cities.
If Washington had declared that Pakistan was harboring bin Laden, then Pakistan would have legally been a state sponsor of terrorism, and topic to necessary sanctions like Iran, stated Riedel, the previous South Asia adviser to the Bush and Obama administrations.
That would have compelled the Americans to finish its help for Pakistan and that in flip, would have led Pakistan to cease American conflict provides from transiting Pakistan, rising the price of the conflict.
The bin Laden raid performed into long-standing fears inside the Pakistani navy that the Americans needed to dismantle Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, and would violate Pakistani territory to do it.
Despite the strained relations, the U.S. continues to work with Pakistan by means of the Department of Energy to assist present safety for the weapons, and fissile materials, stated Toby Dalton, co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program on the Carnegie Endowment.
But Pakistan can also be agile in its alliances. China, a longtime patron of Pakistan — they name one another as “close as lips and teeth” — is investing closely in Pakistani infrastructure.
Publicly, China says it’s cheered to see the Americans exit Afghanistan, and is able to step into the void, increasing its Belt and Road initiative into Afghanistan, the place it hopes to extract minerals.
But privately, the Chinese are cautious. Chinese staff in Pakistan have been killed in terrorist assaults, which may presage a tough journey in Afghanistan. And the Taliban favor isolation to roads and dams that would serve to loosen their management on the inhabitants.

China is relying on Pakistan to function its facilitator in Afghanistan, stated Sajjan Gohel, International Security Director of the Asia-Pacific Foundation in London.
“The Chinese appear confident that they will be able to secure more security guarantees from the Taliban,” Gohel stated, “because of their mutual ties with Pakistan.”