Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan, left, with US President Donald Trump in the Oval Office on July 22 (A frame from a Guardian video)
I am conscious that I am addressing this a week too late but my health came in the way and it is still relevant.
I suppose the best way to resolve the intractable Afghan conflict is for US president Donald Trump to tell Afghanistan that he could have had Afghanistan “wiped off the face of the Earth” but for the fact that he does not “want to kill 10 million people”.
I suppose we should be thankful for the small mercies that even the current incumbent has qualms about killing ten million people.
The pileup of the Trumpian transgressions is so high that a statement of such staggering misanthropy barely registers in the global discourse. That he made it sitting next to Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan at the Oval Office on July 22 makes it even more stunning. From what I have read of the media accounts, Khan did not feel the need to challenge that his country’s immediate neighbor was being talked about in such terms. In fact, watching a video of the time when Trump made his remarks—twice in rapid succession as is his wont—Khan merely smirked and smiled.
“Pakistan’s going to help us out to extricate ourselves,” Trump said, “We’re like policemen. We’re not fighting a war. If we wanted to fight a war in Afghanistan and win it, I could win that war in a week. But I don’t want to kill 10 million people. Afghanistan could be wiped off the face of the Earth. I don’t want to go that route.”
Quite amusingly in a span of about one minute Trump’s time-frame to win the Afghan war, if he wanted to, changed from a “one week” to “ten days” to “a very short period of time.”
Khan’s silence over those comments is somewhat strategic. There is not much love lost for Afghanistan in Pakistan. Apart from everything else, it is also viewed as close to India helping the latter keep Pakistan hemmed in.
Pakistan’s game in Afghanistan is not subtle. Having provided shelter to the Taliban since 2001, when the US invaded Afghanistan, it has visions of installing a Taliban government in Kabul which it can control. That approach appears to have been strengthened with the Trump administration more than keen to strike some kind of a deal with the Taliban, which indirectly means significantly strengthening the influence in Kabul of its benefactor, the Pakistani military.
Consider the four decades-long clusterfuck in Afghanistan. A decade after the erstwhile Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, it was forced to depart in February, 1989 after the CIA successfully engineered the push by the mujahideen—those who engage in jihad--some of the same elements that later became the Taliban. The same Taliban came back to harbor Al Qaeda and its leader Osama bin Laden who led the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, triggering Washington to invade, oust it and cause them to flee to Pakistan. Nearly 19 years hence, they seem set to return with the Trump administration willing to reach a deal with the help of the Khan government.
One should not be surprised that Khan smiled when Trump made those threats.
Two giant powers have messed around in Afghanistan for forty years and there is absolutely nothing to show for it other than relentless bloodletting.
