New Shenanigans Cooking

When kids are growing up, they try to wear the shoes and flip flops of their parents. That is how India was behaving in supporting the Afghans before the Taliban took over. It was behaving like the superpower whose baby it has always been. The United States occupied and controlled Afghanistan for 2 decades and might very well have continued to do so in the years ahead, had the Taliban not spoiled their plans. Being a poor nation, which cannot even feed its own millions of homeless citizens, the last thing India should have done was to mimic a superpower.

Lo and behold, just like those little kids cannot be talked into taking off their adult shoes, India was enjoying being a superpower in a 3D simulation. It was involved in dirty actions inside Afghanistan, propping up the now defunct Kabul regime that was elected in a fraudulent election, with the lowest turnout in decades, if not the entire history of Afghanistan. It wanted to prop up any troops available for hire so as to create a bulwark against the Taliban. India may not hate or love the Taliban but what it was and is obsessed with is Pakistan and opposing the Taliban stemmed from that obsession.

Wars are usually waged against defenceless states so as to avoid being defeated and the rule of thumb for waging a war is to assess if it would be a winnable one. When countries have nuclear weapons they do not go to war against each other because they know they would both be destroyed. This is usually referred to as Mutually Assured Destruction (M.A.D). Pakistan and India cannot go to a full scale war against each other for this reason. All India can do against Pakistan is play dirty and wage a proxy war from Afghan soil. It’s a pity that with the coming of the Taliban, India’s mischief has been sunk.

India was waging a multi-pronged proxy war against Pakistan, aimed at weakening the state. In the fifth generation war, many journalists, under the guise of freedom of press, furthered the agenda funded by India. As it is, funds can do the kind of damage that a standing army can not. Pakistan had always believed in the ‘strategic depth’, it had in Afghanistan. This meant that in the event of an all-out war with India, Pakistan would have enough space to go deep into Afghanistan in order to fight the war effectively. India tried to block the western border for Pakistan to deny it any maneuverability.

Pakistan’s interest has always been in a peaceful Afghanistan. Prime Minister Imran Khan always reminded the United States that he would assist America only for achieving peace, not war. After all, a chaotic Afghanistan’s heat would be felt across the border inside Pakistan. This is what has always happened. In creating the so-called chaos inside Afghanistan, Pakistan would be blamed for the mess, as usual. Scapegoating is an age- old tactic, especially when retreat comes as a result of defeat. The accusing finger is usually raised at Pakistan when the superpowers lose in Afghanistan. India’s interests have always thrived in a chaotic Afghanistan. If there is chaos ins Afghanistan, the Taliban and, indirectly, Pakistan would be blamed. This would be a perfectly fertile ground for making the FATF situation worse for Pakistan.

With Afghanistan as the center of the chaos in the region, India managed to keep the fire burning near Pakistan and away from its own land. The fighters could have been kept busy fighting in Afghanistan, which would also achieve the aim of keeping their attention away from Kashmir, where India continues to commit massive injustices and atrocities and myriad human rights violations.

The scenario in Afghanistan has now completely changed and India is one of the major losers. With Ashraf Ghani and his lackeys having fled the country and disappearance into thin air of the US/India-backed Afghan regime, the Hindu state is at present doing nothing but licking its wounds. What has happened in Kabul and the rest of Afghanistan is absolutely shocking for a country which was the regional Big Brother and was always coercing its unrepresentative ‘friends’ to militate against Pakistan and run it down with the help of terrorism on its western border, while it itself continued to create trouble on its eastern border.

There are all the chances that India will extend a hand of feigned friendship to the new Taliban disposition in Afghanistan in an effort to one-up Pakistan. At the same time, it will further sharpen its ‘fifth-generation war’ knives and create more funding to continue striking at Pakistan in more creative ways.

The lesson in all this is that Pakistan needs to be always wary on both its western and eastern flanks.