Colonel Lawrence Sellin Retd, United States Army, has served in Afghanistan, northern Iraq and on a humanitarian mission in West Africa, recently wrote in an article that Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) of Pakistan was the one responsible for providing arms and ammunition to Taliban fighters in October 2001, right after U.S. bombing of Afghanistan commenced.
At that time, General Pervez Musharraf the President had held a meeting with ISI director Lt. Gen. Mahmod Ahmed and other top brass of the army. They had decided that Pakistan should not help the United States at all in its war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
This duplicity of Pakistan has continued since then till date. Where as, US has provided billions of dollars in military and economic aid to Pakistan. This has been slowly bleeding the U.S. to death in Afghanistan, as Pakistan has been giving full support to the Taliban, Haqqani Network and other terrorist groups.
Pakistan has been playing this duble game in Afghanistan while dealing with the Taliban and other terror outfits, alleged the veteran Colonel Sellin.
Pakistan’s strategy on Afghanistan was in fact explained by Lt General Hamid Gul in an Urdu television interview, a few weeks before his death in 2015. The General had not only been the ISI Chief but was also a hard core Islamist.
Hamid Gul had added that “One day, history will say the ISI drove the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan with the help of USA and another sentence will be recorded that says the ISI drove the USA out of Afghanistan with the help of the USA”.The audience roared with laughter and applauded in approval.
Sellin feels that no combination of U.S. conventional, CIA or special operations assets can defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan as long as the Taliban infrastructure and support network in Pakistan remains intact. The Taliban may be down in Afghanistan but are sheltered in Pakistan.
They have a strong base including a network of education, recruiting, training, financial and command and control centers. It is also no secret that the ISI employs local individuals and groups as “cut-outs” to facilitate the movement of Taliban fighters and supplies across the porous border.
After the recent Taliban attack on the Afghan provincial capital of Ghazni, large numbers of Pakistani nationals were found dead. They were presumably fighting with the Taliban. The bodies were subsequently returned to Pakistan.
The veteran also blamed Beijing for changing the strategic dynamics of the region largely rendering U.S. Afghanistan policy obsolete. “Not only does China maintain enormous leverage over Pakistan, financially and militarily, Beijing has been conducting its own secret negotiations with the Taliban for over a year”, he wrote.
In July, Pakistan hosted an unprecedented meeting of the intelligence chief of China, Russia, Iran and its own ISI to map out a security strategy for the region, apparently for a post-U.S. Afghanistan.
Sellin wants that US must change its strategy in Afghanistan by introducing new ideas new ideas and recognizing the ground realities.
