IRS Webinar: ‘US committed mistakes in Afghanistan’

ISLAMABAD: Michael O’Hanlon, Senior Fellow and Director of Research in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution, US has admitted that the US committed mistakes in its foreign policy towards Pakistan and Afghanistan in the past.

O’Hanlon was speaking at a webinar on ‘Post-withdrawal Afghanistan’ organised here by the Institute of Regional Studies (IRS). O’Hanlon said that despite Pakistan’s support to the US in the Cold War, the latter left the region in the 1990s without any long-term engagement strategy for Pakistan. He termed it a “serious foreign policy mistake” at a time when the US was having one of the best foreign policy administrations of its recent history. He maintained that Pakistan chose to develop a relationship with the Taliban during the same period adding that the the astuteness of that decision was still being debated in Pakistan owing to its ramifications for the country in terms of the rise of religious extremism and militancy.

He was of the view that when the Taliban took over Kabul in 1996, life wasn’t any worse for a typical Afghan than before them in the early 1990s.

Nevertheless, he blamed the flaws in the US counter-insurgency strategy in Afghanistan as well as its unwillingness to facilitate some kind of early power-sharing between the Afghan government and the Taliban for its failure in Afghanistan. In addition, he listed the US failure to establish a functioning independent judicial system in Afghanistan as a factor in its inability to stem a Taliban comeback.

Looking ahead, O’Hanlon argued that the likelihood of a long-drawn civil war in Afghanistan seemed low since the Taliban had taken over Kabul rather effortlessly. The Taliban, he said, are not going to be our friends and hoped that we can avoid them being our enemies. The greater likelihood is that the United States would try to forget about the region as we did in the 1990s, which is always a danger, he said.

He opined, however, that if the Taliban were to commit gross human rights violations against its people or endanger regional or global peace, the US could be forced to act once again through a different strategy. He said that in such a scenario the US would need the assistance of regional countries like Pakistan.