“Those who would ignite the fire in our country, will burn themselves.” - Abdul Rahim Ghafoorzai “He who will not apply new remedies must expect new evils.” - Sir Francis Bacon

The main reason why we are still in Afghanistan after fifteen-plus years lies in the title. The sanctuary in Pakistan is the single most significant strategic impediment to stability in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. Almost every U.S. DOD report on progress in Afghanistan since 2008 explicitly states that Pakistan’s sanctuary and support prevent the defeat of the Taliban. The reduction of this sanctuary and stopping the sources of support of the Taliban in Pakistan is a strategic imperative to ending the war in Afghanistan with modest success. Pakistan’s failure to alter its strategic calculus, its incubation, and regeneration of murderous Islamist zealots, continues to pose a grave strategic risk for the war in Afghanistan.

The first quote above reflects the consequences of Pakistan’s decades of delusion and dissembling in support of some of the most virulent strains of Islamist proxies. These groups have prosecuted utterly barbaric acts of violence in Afghanistan, Kashmir, India, and ultimately in Pakistan. This support, in the end, has been to the net detriment of Pakistan’s security and regional stability. It is the metaphorical equivalent of an arsonist ultimately compelled to act as a fireman for his very own house, which he lit on fire.

The second quote is an admonition to the Coalition and the U.S. to desist in the illusion that Pakistan, one of the foremost ideological and physical incubators of Islamist terror, Inc., is an ally and a friend. It is neither. Pretending that Pakistan was an ally in the war against Islamist militants, one that would act in ways to help defeat Islamist networks in the tribal areas, made the West partly complicit and malfeasant in Pakistan’s machinations.

Years of tactical and operational gains in taking away the Taliban’s capacity have been fleeting because defeating an enemy means taking away its capacity and its will. Strategic momentum has been absent because the will of the Taliban and the Haqqanis rest in their regenerative potential and leadership, all protected in Pakistan’s sanctuary. Pakistan has created this contradiction to prevent the defeat of the Taliban, protract the war, and erode the Coalition’s will, to potentially make the capacity of the Coalition irrelevant because it could ultimately depart the fight without achieving its strategic aims.

This is a modest effort to explain why, after 15 years of training, fighting, sacrificing, and outmatching the Taliban, the Afghans and its Coalition partners face a strategic deadlock. The works of the practitioners and scholars Fair, Khalilzad, Hussein, Rashid, Riedel, and the Schaffers inform this essay. The first part examines Pakistan’s history with Islamist proxies. The subsequent parts explore other variables that help explain what has developed in Afghanistan. The last part offers some clear-eyed and hard options to end or curb Pakistan’s pathological strategic propensities, ones that have been harmful to both Afghanistan and to itself.

For the first two and a half decades of Pakistan’s existence, its senior leaders pursued security and strategy policies that were utterly disastrous for Pakistan’s security, policies that bankrupt its economy and diverted resources from development. It started three major wars with India and suffered utter defeats in all of them. The 1971 war was the singularly most traumatic war of them all because it reduced Pakistan to a rump of its former territory and it further ingrained a permanent neurosis about strategic depth and encirclement by India in Afghanistan.

For the next three decades after 1971, as a consequence of its catastrophic defeat in the 71 War and the loss of East Pakistan, the Pakistani security elites shifted even more markedly and deliberately from direct conventional conflict with India, to fully employing militant proxies for strategic depth in Afghanistan and to fully pursuing the nuclear weapons option. It supported proxies to pursue objectives in Afghanistan, India, and Kashmir under the ostensible aegis that its strategic weapons would offer as a deterrent.

For the last fifteen-plus years, Pakistan has employed irregular warfare to promote its chimerical notion of strategic depth by supporting the Taliban and more lethal proxies in Afghanistan. The sanctuary in Pakistan is the most significant obstacle to strategic success. This war will not end, or it will end badly if Pakistan does not stop its perfidy. The U.S. has not yet crafted a strategy that employs its full weight to alter Pakistan’s strategic malice. Sticks and fear work. Carrots and cash do not. The U.S. paid $33 billion to Pakistan in the first fifteen years of war, to little avail.

To explain, but not to exonerate the treachery of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and other senior Pakistani security elites, the partition in 1947 was indeed horrific, visceral, and traumatic. It saw 12 million people moving west and east, and as many as 1 million people killed. It was replete with rape, butchery, and atrocities. Pakistan’s principal real and perceived existential enemy was and has continued to be been India, a behemoth in size, population, and armed forces, one pointed right at the core of a relatively narrow Pakistan (After Pakistan’s 1971 defeat and partition, with the independence of Bangladesh, it was a sliver of its former territory).

Moreover, the U.S. relationship with Pakistan since at least the 1950s has accommodated Pakistan’s narrative and the myth that Pakistan was either a steadfast anticommunist bastion during the Cold War, or a genuine ally in the war against al Qaeda, the Taliban, and their ilk. In fact, U.S. and Pakistani interests really only aligned during the Soviet-Afghan War, and even then Pakistan’s behavior still revealed mendacity and manipulation with the U.S. and its generous funding of that war to defeat the Soviets through Mujahideen proxies.

The Durand Line and the British Forward policy were also a fait accompli when Pakistan became a state in 1947. What’s more, Afghanistan did not recognize Pakistan at its inception in 1947 because of the 28 million or so co-ethnic Pashtuns living on the other side of the line. Afghanistan has raised and played the Pashtunistan card more than once, and the notion of Pashtun irredentism utterly unhinges Pakistan’s leaders. Indeed, Pakistan’s fixation on its fantasy of strategic depth is linked to this concern about Pashtun irredentism, to preventing influence other than its own over Afghan policy, and to Pakistan’s relatively narrow geographic space vis-à-vis India and Afghanistan.

This helps explain, but it does not exculpate Pakistani generals for retaining a core belief and for continuing to rely on the Afghan Taliban as a useful proxy to counter a perceived existential threat from India and to secure its strategic depth west of the Indus and into Afghanistan. Pakistan’s strategic culture stems from the burden of its history, geography, demography, and perfidy. Pakistan’s security leaders have not begun to conceive of tolerating a less than malleable and friendly non-Pashtun regime in Afghanistan.

To be fair, missteps early on in the war on the part of the Coalition and its Afghan partners, for example - the absence of a strategy, the reliance on warlords, the use of indiscriminate air power, an initial unwillingness to help rebuild, and a toleration of venal Afghan leadership - all helped create grievances among the Afghans. These grievances catalyzed support to regenerate the Taliban in the Pashtun belt during the critical first five years of the effort.

However, through the surge and during the comprehensive counterinsurgency approach from 2009-2011, the Taliban and similarly zealous and murderous Islamists would have atrophied into irrelevance without the full support and sanctuary that Pakistani senior security leaders and the ISI bestowed upon them to pursue depth and to assert Pakistan control over the Afghan polity.

Conclusion

Pakistani strategic culture stems from pathological geopolitics infused with a Salafi-Deobandi-Jihadist ideology, suffused by paranoia and neurosis. The principal but not exclusive reason that Afghanistan has seen discernibly improved quality and quantity in its forces as well as fighting capacity, yet continues to face a strategic stalemate, is the Pakistani security elites’ malignant and mendacious strategic calculus.

The reality is that Pakistan needs the United States as much as the converse. The U.S. has and does provide economic and military assistance that will become more important as India continues to prosper. A viable strategy must first recognize that the U.S. does have leverage with Pakistan. U.S. fears that Pakistan will collapse, implode, and fracture are overstated.

Pakistan has been an epicenter and an incubator of Islamist insurgents and terrorists, Inc. The ISI has maintained links between Al Qaeda, its longtime Taliban allies, and a host of other extremists inside Pakistan. It is only possible for Pakistan to become a genuine strategic partner to the U.S. if it changes, and eschews its support of proxy terrorists and insurgents. The fact that America has paid Pakistan in tens of billions of dollars for Pakistan’s malice and perfidy since 9/11 is disconcerting and vile.

Pakistan has employed irregular warfare to achieve strategic depth by supporting its proxies in Afghanistan. The United States and its Coalition allies have not crafted a Pakistan strategy that uses their substantial resources to modify Pakistan’s strategic calculus. A genuine Pakistan strategy needs to bring the full weight of the U.S. and other regional actors to compel Pakistan to alter its strategic rationale and to stop its support to the Taliban and the Haqqani network.

One crucial lesson of the last three decades is that stability in Afghanistan and Pakistan are interlocked. Chaos on one side of the border breeds chaos on the other. The jihadists cannot be fought effectively with partial or short-term measures, or on one side of the border only.

Since this war began, the U.S. has essentially stipulated that Pakistan must curb all domestic expression of support for terrorism against the U.S. and its allies; demonstrate a sustained commitment to and make significant efforts towards combating terrorist groups; cease support, including by any elements within the Pakistan military or its intelligence agency, to extremist and terrorist groups; and dismantle terrorist bases of operations in other parts of the country.

The Coalition should cast off its illusions about Pakistan. It has been viewed as a most important ally in the war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban, but it is essentially the worst ally, an enemy because it has acted in ways inimical to Coalition troops, its Afghan allies, and the aims of the Afghan state. After 15 years of duplicity and death, a menu heavy on sticks and light in carrots is required for Pakistan, to tap into the enduring Thucydidean triad of fear, honor, and interests. The following steps should merit consideration: 1) stop paying for malice; 2) stop major non-NATO ally status; 3) state intention to make the line of control in Kashmir permanent; 4) shut down ground lines of communications via Pakistan; 5) declare Pakistan the state-sponsor of terrorism that it is; 6) issue one last ultimatum to help end the sanctuary and not impede success; 7) invite Indian Armed Forces into Afghanistan for security operations in the Pashtun east and south; and 8) and as a last resort, reciprocate Pakistan’s malice and perfidy.

The Coalition and its Afghan partners need to be ruthless, clear, and compelling. This film has run before, and it had a bad ending. Uncontested sanctuary in Pakistan contributed to the Soviet Union’s defeat in Afghanistan.