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Friday March 29, 2024

‘Pakistan has been the biggest loser in Afghan war’

By our correspondents
February 05, 2018

Pakistan has been the biggest loser in the Afghan war. There are 3 million Afghans in Pakistan since 1979. Undesirables are going and coming back and forth to and from Pakistan with impunity.

These views were expressed by Senator Abdul Haseeb Khan while speaking at the launch of the book, ‘The Afghan Papers’, penned by noted journalist Agha Masood Hussain, at the Pakistan Institute of International Affairs on Saturday evening.

“Whatever’s happening in Afghanistan has ramifications in Pakistan,” he said. Lauding the book and the efforts of the author, the senator said the book lucidly described how and why Pakistan’s economy was shattered. The US, he said, had made all efforts to decimate the Taliban but did not succeed.

“Why has our region been turned into hell?” Khan posed the participants a question. He answered his own question by saying that it was because the people’s voice was not heard. There was poverty in the country. There was no guarantee of security to the common man. The policies of the successive governments catered only to the microscopic elite. “Damn such democracy,” he said in utter disgust.

Speaking on a very patriotic note, he said that the people of Pakistan were very patriotic and resourceful. They, Khan added, were imbued with a store of ingenuity but regretted that they were given no incentive to bring their ingenuity to fruition.

He concluded his speech by listing three essential points for bringing normalcy to the South Asia region. These were:

- The ‘worm’ should be removed from the tree, meaning thereby that the US must be made to quit Afghanistan.

- Pakistan, Afghanistan, and India should sit down together and formulate long-term measures for meaningful cooperation instead of the enervating confrontation, and devise ways and means to eradicate poverty and give their people a viable quality of life.

- There should be free and fair elections in Afghanistan.

Former Sindh governor Kamal Azfar, while posing a question to the gathering – “How long does the US intend to occupy Pakistan?” – quoted three passages from the New York Times, critical of the US military involvement in Afghanistan. He quoted a statement of the former chief of the CIA published in the paper, saying, “The US can’t win a war it doesn’t understand”, from the edition of January 29, 2018.

History, he said, told us that no invader had ever succeeded in Afghanistan, whether it was Alexander, or the British. The latter, he said had to give up their plans to subdue Afghanistan after fighting two wars.

Afghanistan, said Azfar, had a history of never being colonised. Even the Soviet Army, which had never lost a war and had to its credit, smashing Hitler’s otherwise invincible campaign, failed to subdue the Afghans.

He quoted an Asian Development Bank (ADB) report issued in 2015 which said that the 21st century was going to be “Asia’s century”. This, he said, was confirmed by the case of Pakistan. Agriculture, which was just at the subsistence level in Sindh, was now flourishing. There was overall development in every sphere of activity in Sindh.

Former editor of Jang, Mahmood Shaam, in his speech, showered plaudits on author Agha Masood Hussain and praised his journalistic acumen and integrity. However, he strongly refuted the claim of the Jamaat-e-Islami and the rightist lobby that Communism had been defeated.

Professor Dr Tanweer Khalid said the war in Afghanistan had been the longest ever. She blamed this on the lackadaisical attitude of Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani.

Author Agha Masood Hussain said the US’ policy was ruining the prospects of peace in Afghanistan. He said that there could be no peace there as long as India continued to play a role in its affairs.

He said the US taxpayers’ money was being whittled away in the futile efforts and they were being taken for a ride. The only way out of the imbroglio, as per Hussain, was that all the regional powers be allowed to get together and hammer out a negotiated settlement.

Winding up, Dr Masuma Hasan, chairperson of PIIA, made some remarks which were a constructive exercise in self-reflection. She asked as to how long we could go on cursing outside powers for the situation without reflecting on where we had erred. She blamed the attitude of the former rulers who were overly pliant towards the US and were hand-in-glove with it in trying to force the USSR out. “Why just go on blaming others?” she said.

She also posed the question as to whether holding of elections in Afghanistan would be of any use when 40 per cent of the area was controlled by the Taliban, who were most inimical to the very thought of elections.