Can the American Government Pressure Pakistan?

We certainly can—and we must—pressure Pakistan to do much, much more in the war against the Taliban. How can we do that? We can use the Durand Line Agreement against them. In 1898, the British Indian colonial government foreign secretary William Durand signed a treaty with the Afghan ruler Amir Abdul Rahman to partition a significant amount of Afghan land and put it under British India control. 

Over the past century, that treaty has been questioned for several reasons. First, Amir Abdul Rahman was illiterate and unable to read even Farsi or Pashto, let alone English, which was the language used in the treaty. Also, Amir Abdul Rahman signed that treaty in exchange for weapons and money which were supposed to be paid every year. It is more than likely that Abdul Rahman's understanding was that British India control would exist only for an interim period; that is, during the time over which he accepted the payments. In other words, he probably considered this a temporary arrangement and did not know that it could—or would— become permanent. Nonetheless, after a while the yearly payments were stopped by British India, thus constituting a breach of the original treaty and agreement.

While all of these issues might have cast a shadow over the Durand Line Agreement, the real blow came in 1945, when the British government lost India, and Indians got their freedom, thus effectively invalidating any previous treaties signed by that colonial power. In point of fact, India itself gained its independence from Britain using this very same argument. What that meant later on however, was that when India formally declared its independence in 1947, Pakistan was created—partitioned by the now null-and-void Durand Line Agreement; in other words, with Afghan lands passed over through a defunct and repudiated treaty signed by a deposed colonial power. They did it anyway and the world- community took little notice of these critically important facts. 

Without those illegal treaties masterminded and signed by the colonial Indian British government, Pakistan itself could not be created, and might not even exist today as a sovereign state. Technically speaking, the entire Northwest frontier of Pakistan belongs to Afghanistan. Over half of Pakistan, all the way to the Arabian Sea, is Afghan land. In fact, Pakistan itself has never formally ratified the Durand Line Agreement through which it came into existence!

In February of 2009, when the Taliban marched perilously close to Pakistan's own capital of Islamabad, we in America became very nervous and our officials criticized Pakistan for not confronting and stopping the Taliban's approach on the city. We had no reason to be worried. In fact, instead of being worried, we should have seized this opportunity to gain a powerful position in our stance toward Pakistan. The march of the Taliban to Islamabad gave us all of the reason we needed to take control of a significant amount of land that is controlled by the Taliban. Thus the Taliban's march to Islamabad could have spelled the beginning of the end of the Taliban, because all of those areas that are currently off limits to our troops and military operations could have been restored to Afghanistan over night, thereby making it perfectly legal for us to go in and flush out the enemy from lands that now belonged to Afghanistan and no longer to Pakistan.

Furthermore, one would have hoped that the Taliban march to Islamabad—and the threat of losing a vast portion of it's geography—would have stirred up the Pakistani's sense of patriotism and thus forced a divorce between ISI and the Taliban. And that too could have been the beginning of the end for the Taliban and Al Qaeda. 

At this time, I still firmly believe that we can put Pakistan under tremendous pressure to listen to America and Europe simply by reminding them of the illegality of the Durand Line Agreement. We can obligate them to keep the territory clean of Taliban or risk the loss of the vast territories now under Pakistani control. This can be used as a wild card to pressure Pakistan to do much more to flush out and destroy the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

Pakistan's ISI is Stepping Up

As you read these words, Al Qaeda and the Taliban—with orders from Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI)—are stepping up their terrorist activities in Afghanistan. They know that the Americans are confused and uncertain about both the short and long-term future of the war. They know that President Obama is reviewing America's policy in Afghanistan. They know that if they are able to successfully mount vicious attacks to kill Americans and Europeans in Afghanistan, they can pressure America to become discouraged and to forget about the war in Afghanistan. To this purpose, they are skillfully exploiting the American media for free and to their own advantage. That is why the month of October 2009 was one of the deadliest months since the beginning of the war. 

The war in Afghanistan is taking a toll on us. We are tired and confused and disillusioned, because we don't see any light at the end of the tunnel. Statements such as "Afghanistan is the graveyard of superpowers," are made more often in the news lately, as an excuse for our problems in Afghanistan. As an Afghan, I can assure you that Afghanistan is not the graveyard of the superpowers. In the case of the Soviet Union, if Afghans were to accept that honor, make no mistake that it was only because we as a nation fought together with everything we had against the Soviets, and in point of fact, the whole world was helping us as well. 

By contrast, when the United States went to Afghanistan in 2001, perhaps 80% of the people in Afghanistan supported them. Within two and a half months, the US flag was waving even on the top of the Taliban compound. Tens of thousands of Afghan soldiers belonging to the Northern Alliance were poised to follow the Taliban and Bin Laden anywhere they had to in order to bring them to justice, free of charge. Unfortunately, and sadly, the United States, heavily influenced by Pakistan and General Musharraf, rejected their aid. When we had Bin Laden cornered in Tora Bora, even then we did not use the help of the Northern Alliance. Instead, we used the same local forces that previously were with the Taliban and ISI. That is exactly why Bin Laden escaped. Wasn't capturing Bin Laden the reason we went to Afghanistan in the first place? We are not losing the war in Afghanistan because the Taliban are making the biggest IEDs. We are losing because we made huge mistakes and we are paying the price for it now.

Can we turn this war around? Easily! To do so, we need to take action swiftly and pervasively. No, we don't need any more troop surges. We have already had too many. We need to change our policies. Here is what we need to do in order to win: (1) Pull American and NATO forces from the front line. (2) Allow the Afghans to take over. Re-enlist the same Afghans who were fighting against the Taliban before 9/11. Help them financially and with weapons. We need about 200,000 of them to replace American and NATO forces. Give them the privilege to clean their own country from the germ of the Taliban and Bin Laden. It is their country, and they will clean it. (3) We need to cut the poppies to the last plant. It is critical that we realize and understand that opium is the reason for this war. (4) We must absolutely stop talking about sharing the government with the Taliban. This is the biggest mistake we have made from day one of the war in Afghanistan. 

Instead of engaging the help of the Afghan people and pounding the Taliban out of existence, we coined the term "moderate Taliban" and started to share the government with them. We confused the Afghan people. Today, 90% of Afghans think that the US is in league with the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Afghans also believe that if the US wants to capture Bin Laden, we can do it easily, and that the only reason that we have not done so is that Bin Laden is with us. The Afghan people believe that Americans will soon leave and then the Taliban will come back with a deadly vengeance. They fear for their lives—and rightly so—and therefore they will not dare to side against the Taliban. We need to regain their trust. If we fail to do all of the things I have listed in this article, we could send a million more troops and it would not do one bit of good. Soon the US will leave Afghanistan just like the Russians, broken and frustrated.

Taliban Leaders Arrested in Pakistan

March-15-2010

For several months, President Karzai has been bragging about making peace with the Taliban in Afghanistan, and through all of this time, secret negotiations were going on between parties. Suddenly, starting in February 2010, the Pakistani secret service started arresting some key Taliban leaders. The naive American media quickly got very excited - was this a bold new shift in Pakistani policy? But then as Pakistan made even more arrests of key Taliban members, the news broke that in fact these Taliban were the ones participating in those secret peace talks with the CIA or the Afghan government.

All those years, when these murderers were fighting in Afghanistan and were sending suicide bombers to target allied troops and innocent Afghans, they were living freely in Pakistan, and nobody was arresting them. Why now? Quite simply, the Pakistan government realized that the peace talks with Afghan government were inevitable, and that they might very well lead to a stabilized government in Afghanistan that would threaten their opium trade. So they came up with a diabolical plan. On the one hand they started arresting those Taliban leaders who were engaged in those secret talks with the Afghan government to prevent any American or Afghan intervention, and on the other hand they hand-picked their own representative to participate in those so-called peace talks. That person was Gulbuddin Hykmatyar! ISI has 30 years of experience with Hykmatyar. He was responsible for shelling Kabul in 1992 for several months to help ISI gain the control of Afghanistan. He was the one that, when ISI asked him to leave all of his arsenal and fighters to the Taliban, he obeyed and did so.

So, after all of these years that Hykmatyar and his guerrillas were busy targeting American and allied forces, as ISI wanted, when ISI needed someone to engage in those so-called peace talks (I would suggest that they needed someone to disrupt those peace talks), Hykmatyar was picked to trick the allied forces. ISI's calculation, perhaps accurate, was that the Americans by that time were tired of being in Afghanistan, and desperately were trying to create some kind of new unified government in Afghanistan so that they could leave, just like Gorbachev had done in the late 1980s. In other words, they wanted to exploit growing American sentiment against continued involvement in Afghanistan. Furthermore, at about the same time, Bin Laden boasted that he would spend 30 billion dollars to modernize the Afghan army.

Naturally, ISI would want to have their agents already in place within the Afghan government, so that as soon as the Americans leave, the Afghan army would simply fall into their hands, and then of course ISI would reap the benefits of this huge arm deal. That is the multi-billion dollar dream of ISI. As an expert, I can categorically state that these peace talks will not in any way help Afghanistan or bring peace to the region, nor will they help American and European long term interests.

Mistake After 9/11

Probably the biggest mistake we ever made in Afghanistan after 9/11 is that we continued to listen to Pakistan. Pakistan was perhaps the first country to send its condolences to the US after the attacks on 9/11. And just as quickly, they sent their envoy to the Taliban and asked them to surrender Osama Bin Laden! This is the same Pakistan that was responsible for creating the Taliban, secretly transporting Bin Laden into Afghanistan, and helping Al Qaeda build military training camps there. Pakistan, which never paid any serious attention to our interests previously, and in fact totally ignored US interests in the region, was now consoling us and was pretending to be the hero that was coming to our rescue after that tragic day. Imagine if it had been Iran that had aided Afghanistan's Taliban and Al Qaeda, in which case we probably would have bombed them immediately after 9/11.


Instead, we attacked Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with Al Qaeda or the 9/11 attacks. Pakistan was in large part responsible for 9/11, but we allowed ourselves to be misled by their feigned shedding of tears for our losses and their deceptiveness in acting as if they wanted to bring the people responsible to justice. We fell for it, and as soon as they saw our guards down, they began to deceive us even further. They began to tell us:


(1) Please don't attack the Taliban because there are lots of Moderate Taliban and we can work with them;


(2) Don't allow the Northern Alliance forces to come to Kabul and attack the Taliban, because the Taliban are Pushtoons, and therefore all of the other Pushtoons will join the Taliban; and


(3) Don't attack the Taliban because they are having a clerics meeting to discuss the possible surrender of Bin Laden.


And further, Pakistan, being the great "educator" that they are, told us that Afghanistan is made of tribes that are often enemies of each other. Taliban belong to the Pushtoon tribe, and their opposition belong to the Tajik, Hazara, and Uzbek tribes. As I stated earlier, Pakistan told us not to use Northern Alliance (United Front) forces to pursue the Taliban because then all Pushtoons would join forces with the Taliban. We bought that argument hook, line, and sinker, and we backed off pursuing the Taliban. That was probably our biggest mistake of all, because we had tens of thousands of Afghan forces ready to go after the Taliban, and we lost the initial momentum that we could have used.

Contrary to what Musharraf and Pakistan told us, Afghanistan is one country and one people. And in fact, even prior to the US joining the fight after 9/11, there were tens of thousands of Pushtoons fighting alongside Tajik, Hazara, and Uzbek against the Taliban. We did not use them, and the results were tragic. Because instead, we listened to our so-called friends in Pakistan and we played right into the hands of both the Taliban and the ISI. We gave them billions of dollars in aid that they continue to use against us, because they use that money to acquire weapons and to continue to recruit extremists. We need to turn our back on Pakistan and its deceptions once and for all.

Osama

General Musharraf's neighbor, was killed.

All these years while we were trying to find Osama in N.W. Waziristan, lo and behold, he was General Musharraf's neighbor, and President Zardari's hometown boy, an Islamabadi! He was not hiding in a filthy cave, he was living in a million dollar mansion! I knew it all these years! I remember just like yesterday: Dave Russell, a radio talk show host here in Seattle, in December of 2001, asked me in an interview, "Where do you think we can find Osama?" I answered, "Under Musharraf's desk!" Yes, that is why I call myself an Afghan expert. I even have a website, Afghan-expert.com. 

Should we celebrate Osama's death? Of course! After ten years and six hundred billion dollars? It deserves a huge celebration. But wait a minute, stop the music for a moment, and let's ask why it took ten years? And why 600 billion dollars? That is exactly the reason why Pakistan was not informed about this whole operation until it was over. Finally we realized that if we want to do something serious against Al Qaeda, we should not inform ISI. 

This operation raises yet another question about Pakistan, a nuclear power: Two American helicopters fly from a military base in Afghanistan, go through Pakistani N.W. Waziristan, all the way to the capitol of this nuclear power country in Islamabad, attack a compound, kill Osama, take his body and leave as fast as they came. Only after all of that does Pakistan's army get a call from Americans that "the operation is over!" and only then do they discover it! Yes, now the question is "Is Pakistan's arsenal of nuclear weapons safe?" If their army was not able to detect this whole operation on their own, then why should we believe that the extremists don't have access to nuclear material? That is why Pakistan is the most dangerous place in this whole world for the entire human race.

As Americans, we can celebrate Osama's death, because at least it brings some small measure of closure to the 9-11 tragedy, and at least symbolically we believe that justice was taken to the mastermind behind the 9-11 attacks. However, as Afghans, we should not expect any relief for Afghanistan and the Afghan people, because after all, Osama, while we would love to believe that he was the mastermind, the plain fact is that he was only a puppet at the hands of ISI who quite simply used him and his resources for their express evil purposes. ISI is intact, Taliban will be intact and no changes should we expect.

Wali Karzai Assassination

Many people around the world mistakenly think that the Karzai brothers are on the opposite side of the Taliban in the Afghan conflict. No - the Karzai brothers are friendly with the Taliban. It is the Taliban who are anti-Karzai. It has been ten years that President Karzai has been sincerely and unilaterally begging the Taliban for peace. But it is the Taliban whom are answering it by shooting missiles at the Peace Loya Jirga (grand assembly), doing more suicide bombing attacks, detonating more improvised roadside bombs, and shooting thousands of innocent people.

Yes, it has been ten years since the Afghan people have fallen victim to this shockingly wrong peace policy of the Karzai brothers and thousands have lost their precious lives. This was the first time that Karzai - the president and the biggest associate of this so-called "peace with Taliban" - lost a brother to the brutal Taliban! And yet, even at the grave site of his brother, while he just finished burying his brother, assassinated by the Taliban (at least they claimed the responsibility), he still begged the Taliban one more time: "Once again, I call on the Taliban, my dears, my brothers and friends, come and join me in building the country. Stop destroying the country."

Karzai keeps telling people that he is doing this because Afghan people are thirsty for peace! No doubt about that, but peace with who, how, and why? Ten years of begging is not enough?

But I personally don't blame the Karzai brothers - I blame the American government. There are three things the American government did not do in Afghanistan which has propelled the Afghan War further:

We didn't cut opium production.
We didn't stop trusting Pakistan.

We didn't stop begging the Taliban for peace.

It has been ten years, but in the last few months, this peace talk with the Taliban has taken the highest priority for the American government. The assassination of Wali Karai by the Taliban (or the claiming of it) is a big blow to the American peace talk policy with the brutal Taliban. Any peace with the Taliban is like giving back Afghanistan, the whole army which we trained and built, and all the police and secret service which we spent billions of our tax payers dollars to the Taliban, and indirectly to Al Qaeda. Above all, it would be giving back the Afghan nation which stood by America since 2011, helping us up and fighting against the Taliban side-by-side with our soldiers' back to the Taliban.