With the departure of America and NATO from Afghanistan, will Afghanistan’s neighbors pull together in the interests of the entire region and work toward a brighter future for that war-blighted nation? Under the contary. Rather than promising greater India-Pakistan cooperation, this editorial from Pakistan’s Frontier Post suggests that Afghanistan is set to worsen as a flash point between the two countries, which in one way or another have been at each other’s throats since they became independent of Great Britain.
The Frontier Post’s blistering attack on America’s turn toward New Delhi starts out this way:
U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta says India will be encouraged “to play more active role” in Afghanistan. But when was it that India did not have an active role? From the very day the U.S.-led invaders descended on Kabul, ousted the Taliban and occupied the Central Asian state, Indian has been active there. Indeed, it was Pakistan that American picked, making it a sacrificial goat in Afghanistan. But India they lifted up at once, making it into a ram and fattening it there.
As Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance minorities rode into Kabul on American tanks to occupy positions of authority in occupied Afghanistan, under the satrapy of the CIA, India, too, came along on NATO’s shoulders, embedding and entrenching itself there. In the civil strife prior to the U.S.-led invasion and occupation, India sided militarily with the Northern Alliance against the predominantly Pashtun Taliban.
The Alliance more than compensated the favor by affording India every opportunity to carve out a critical place in occupied Afghanistan, with the CIA warmly embracing India’s leading intelligence service – RAW [Research and Analysis Wing]. Apart from handing India lucrative development projects, Afghanistan’s new power players very powerfully entrenched themselves militarily as well.
Soon after the occupation began, India’s paramilitary, the Indo-Tibetan Border Police, which specializes in espionage, subversion and sabotage, was permitted to enter Afghanistan in large numbers under the pretext of providing security at Indian diplomatic posts and Indian development projects. But the paramilitary force was also deployed to areas in close proximity to Pakistan. At one time, there was even feverish talk of deploying two fully-fledged Indian Army divisions in Afghanistan.
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