Events in Afghanistan bring to mind a large container truck suddenly tipping over and spilling its load across a busy highway in front of traffic moving in both directions. As we see the situation shift not by the day but by the hour, it is important that people look not just at Mazar-i-Sharif, Kunduz, Kabul and Khandahar, but also at nuclear Pakistan: what happens in Islamabad, Karachi, Rawalpindi and Quetta will certainly end up being far more important in the long run.
For weeks since the US bombing started, the Islamic political parties in Pakistan have been whipping up sentiment with a world view that pits Islam against the godless foreigner. Large numbers of young Pakistanis heard the call for jihad against the United States and were urged to stand shoulder to shoulder with the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the defence of Islam. Thousands streamed across the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan seething with religious zeal to take up arms against the hated infidel.
The secular General Musharraf looked on uneasy as the streets swelled with crowds incited by his political enemies and has also been forced to keep looking over his shoulder at his own intelligence service, the ISI, who have always been the Taliban’s primary patron.
And then, the container truck unexpectedly tips over, scattering its cargo of… jack-in-the-boxes.
Weakened by the USAF/USN airstrikes far more than the ignorant and willfully pessimistic western pundits would have had us believe, the Taliban suddenly starts to collapse. Like dominos, town after town falls to the various anti-Taliban forces.
In Mazar-i-Sharif, we have learned that the Afghan Taliban forces took all the available motor vehicles and retreated as Abdul Rashid Dostam’s forces enveloped the city, leaving about 600 newly arrived pro-Taliban Pakistanis to face Dostam’s soldiers alone. The school in which they made their last stand is now a twisted ruin and at least 400 Pakistanis were wiped out in the bitter fighting.
In Kunduz, accounts suggest most of the Afghan Taliban forces have either defected or bailed out of the town prior to it being completely surrounded. What is left are largely Chechens, Chinese Muslims and Pakistani fighters. They are clearly doomed.
And so, it is interesting to note that the streets of Pakistan are surprisingly subdued. Far from ‘Islam’ rising up against the United States and its anti-Taliban friends in Afghanistan, city after city is filled with cheering throngs and America is saluted by the very people who lived through the bombing for contributing to the Taliban’s misfortunes. Hundreds and possibly thousands of young Pakistanis are already dead, killed not as Islamic holy warriors but as hated foreigners by Afghans who have had it up to ‘here’ with the interference of its neighbours.
So as the Islamic politicians of Pakistan survey how in the matter of eight days the entire situation in Afghanistan has turned upside down, the families and friends of the dead Pakistani boys who listened and then marched to their deaths across the Khyber pass are going to start asking ‘why?’ When people start to figure out the answer, I don’t think the forces of Islamo-fascism are going to like what happens next. It must be slowly dawning on the more secular forces in Pakistan that their Islamist political enemies are starting to look very exposed indeed.
For the west, nuclear armed Pakistan is far more important in the long run than that ‘Mad Max’ nation called Afghanistan.
Yes, the leitmotif for Afghanistan and Pakistan really is a jack-in-the-box. You heard it here first.
