New Delhi, Oct 25 (IANS) Pakistan’s military establishment appears to be turning around its decades-old strategy of using militant proxies against its former allies, the Afghan Taliban, by reportedly recruiting and arming Afghan factions to fight anti-Pakistan insurgents, a report said.
According to South Asia Press, the concern was raised by Zalmay Khalilzad, the former US special envoy to Afghanistan, who pointed to emerging reports that the Pakistani military had begun arming Afghans to take on militants hostile to Islamabad.
“As things currently stand, relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan are likely to get much worse,” Khalilzad warned, as per the report.
Pakistan’s Ministry of Information has rejected the allegations as “baseless and misleading”, but analysts see in the move a long-standing institutional habit of Pakistan’s security establishment, the report said.
It noted that Islamabad had for nearly four decades treated the Afghan Taliban as a strategic asset to keep India at bay and secure a friendly regime in Kabul, but ties have since soured into a low-intensity border conflict over the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which Pakistan accuses Kabul of sheltering.
“Frustrated by Kabul’s refusal to rein in its ideological brethren, Islamabad appears to be reverting to its historical playbook: fighting fire with fire, or more accurately, proxies with proxies,” the report stated.
Warning that the gamble was fraught with risk, the report said Pakistan’s past reliance on militant proxies had repeatedly backfired, with groups armed to fight abroad later turning their guns on Pakistan itself.
“By allegedly arming new Afghan factions to suppress the TTP, Islamabad risks opening a Pandora’s box of uncontrollable local militias, further destabilising an already volatile border region,” it said.
The report pointed to the recent exchange of heavy artillery fire between Pakistani forces and Afghan Taliban personnel in the Kurram district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where Pakistani officials claimed to have destroyed Taliban border posts.
“The very proxies that Islamabad nurtured to guarantee its western flank have become its primary security threat. If the reports of Pakistan arming new Afghan proxies are validated, it signals a desperate gamble by a nuclear-armed state running out of options,” the report said.
“In trying to contain the monsters of its past, Pakistan may simply be breeding the adversaries of its future,” it added.
–IANS
ksk/vd
