One of the things that will be interesting as US leaves Afghanistan is the US doesn't have to have the charade of working with one country that supports the Taliban while also sending soldiers to fight the Taliban....
https://twitter.com/SecDef/status/1424847072856002564
It's strange how in US history this pattern has repeated itself so many times where the US works with countries that openly hate the US, openly seek to undermine US interests and the US role in neighboring areas...
It has happened so often that one wonders if it's like a built-in flaw in the system; the same thing happened with US policy in Syria, where the US was doing one thing in Syria via CENTCOM and other US officials were working with Ankara to do the opposite.
It usually happens when the US deals with regimes that have for a long time sought to utilize extremist groups to their benefit, often groups that the US then ends up fighting (i.e Al Qaeda)...and US partners flirt with the groups or affiliates, while the US fights them...
It also tends to stem from a lack of coordination, where one part of the government knows or does one thing...while another does something else. Or a fear of "alienating" or "offending" the ostensibly partners.
Also there is this myth of "compartmentalizing" interests...like "we can work with country X on common interests and we will agree to disagree across the border"...but the fact is that US policy is undermined in long term.
The countries that do this tend to sense that the US will leave eventually and they want a hand in the neighboring state...they are happy to work with even genocidal extremists because they think they can control them or get them to at least massacre others.
These same countries, whether Turkey, Pakistan or others, tend to not do this when dealing with others, such as Russia, China, Iran etc; they don't have the janus-face, because they tend to take seriously those countries and know that those countries intel services will know.
Some of these countries also try to lobby DC, using think tanks and others to advance their interests, creating even more complex layers of problems.
I tend to think this is a systematic problem, that the US has tried to shoe-horn "interests" into things and purposely ignored the elephants in the room, quietly saying "we know they support extremists but...we need to engage blah blah"...
Many movies even capture this which shows how well known and obvious it is...whether it was Zero Dark Thirty or others like Charlie Wilson's War....basically it's like the US always knows this and generations were like "well this is how we do it."
Even in worse case scenarios it has involved US personnel being killed or threatened, as happened in Iraq when Iran was targeting US forces for years and there was purposeful attempt to ignore it.
One wonders if the US will get to the point, perhaps as US global hegemony is reduced, will it will have a more Clausewitz whole-of-government unified policy and work with actual friends/allies/partners and not always "engage" with countries that are undermining strategy
Also in the name of "geopolitics" there is this charade of manifestly working with countries that don't even share interests under myths that they might, if only they get X,Y and Z...which is how the US worked with Ankara badly from 2016-2020
There might also be a better method of instead of playing the "we need to engage" game that the US does more of the clear mission and willingness to use blunt language and demand action and get quid-pro-quo out of things then "well we know you support extremists against us but"
Relationships built on trust and clear expectations tend to be better than obfuscation and purposeful lying and faking common interests...especially when one country openly supports groups that want to harm the other country...that's not common interests.
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