Thread by @KamranBokhari

Thanks for sharing, @Natsecjeff.

This interview with Ahmed Shah Massoud's brother Ahmed Wali Massoud is a small piece of a very significant and high stakes process underway in Pakistan to shape emirate 2.0 that needs to be unpacked.

https://twitter.com/Natsecjeff/status/1428437935062388736

The Pakistani civ-mil elite is divided between two views of the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan. On one hand it is being seen as a historic opportunity while on the other an existential threat.

These are not necessarily two camps because there are plenty of those who see the Taliban comeback as both an opportunity and a threat.

This terribly complicated perspective is critical to understand in order to get a sense of what a Talibanized Afghanistan will look like. Because Pakistan is the one country that will have the most influence in its western neighbor (with Iran in a not too far behind 2nd place).

Let us call these two parallel viewpoints.

1) Opportunity Viewpoint: The current moment represents a final victory for Pakistan after a 40 year struggle to get a government in Kabul that is not pro-India.

2) Threat Viewpoint: A Taliban-dominated Afghanistan will energize extremist & ultraconservative forces in Pakistan that have made deep inroads into society and thus there is a great risk of the destabilization of the state that has been severely weakened in the past two decades.

It is important to go into a bit of detail as to the origins of both viewpoints, which will then help in understanding how they are intersecting in terms of Pakistan's policy.

The Soviet intervention provided Pakistan with the opportunity to get an Islamabad-friendly gov in Kabul. The anti-communist alliance was broad-based even though Pak favored the Hekmatyar faction, which led to the breakdown of the alliance disrupting Islamabad's plans.

Pak tried to get the warring factions to agree to a power-sharing formula and there were many meetings. But all the attempts failed and an intra-Islamist war ensued from 1992 to 1996.

When the Taliban emerged in '94 as a new faction and broke the post-communist stalemate the Paks got behind the new Pashtun Islamist group and when it took Kabul two years later they felt that they had achieved their strategic objective.

But Pak made a strategic miscalculation when it facilitated the entry of 10s of 1000s of FFs who went to the country to join al-Qaeda. That resulted in 9/11 and the collapse of the Pak-backed emirate 1.0.

From Pak's POV, the post-9/11 scenario was the worst possible outcome. Islamabad's biggest ally was going to spend tens of billions (didn't know it was going to be trillions at the time) to establish a pro-India regime in Kabul.

Islamabad was caught b/w the need to align with the US and support the Taliban. It tried doing both but the strategy failed miserably. By the late 2000s Pak's relationship had tanked and its influence over the Talibs severely weakened.

What was worse is that Talibanization had spread in Pak like a cancer. The country lost control of large swathes of territory in its NW to Taliban rebels under the banner of TTP. By the mid-2010s the insurgency claimed as many as 80k lives and led to econ damage in the billions.

It was not until last month that Pak mil/intel leadership moved away from the good v bad Taliban narrative to the Afghan & Pak Taliban being two sides of the same coin. But the idea that the Afghan Taliban had gone from being an asset to a threat developed over the last decade.

2) Threat Viewpoint

That the Paks could not get the Afghan Taliban to rein in their Pakistani counterparts was not just an indicator of how Islamabad had lost influence over the Afghan Talibs but that if they came back to power it would represent a grave threat to Pak nat sec.

During the PPP gov (2008-13) not only did Islamabad launched major mil ops against Taliban rebels; there was a realization that Pak needed to establish relns w/ the gov in Kabul & the broader anti-Taliban camp. Pak sought to have a counter-weight to the Afghan Talibs.

The efforts to forge ties w/ the anti-Taliban side never made much headway. Thus, Pak could not pull too far away from the Afghan Taliban. From Islamabad’s perspective, yes the Talibs were no longer the old proxy but at least they were a counter to the opposing pro-India camp.

After the Obama WH began talks w/ the Talibs Pak’s position was that an intra-Afghan negotiation was in its best interest. A pwr-sharing deal would posit the Talibs as a counter to the pro-India factions & vice-versa.

Like everyone else Pak never thought that the Afghan state would collapse the way it did towards the end of last week. Though it did hope that the Taliban would have an upper hand in a post-US Afghan gov.

So the question is where does Pak go from here now that the unthinkable has happened and at an unexpected speed?

The US withdrawal & regime collapse has created a situation where Pak sees itself has having been left holding the bag. It got what it wanted: the ouster of a pro-India gov. But it came at a huge cost and now it is trying to mitigate the risks of a Taliban comeback.

And here is where the 2 viewpoints - opportunity & threat - are both informing the Pakistani strategy to try & stabilize the situation in Afghanistan as much as possible. And this is where it now wants to have as many elements from the anti-Taliban camp included in emirate 2.0.

This is why Ahmed Shah Massoud’s brother AW Massoud being in Pak is so significant. The Paks are also relying on Abdullah, Karzai, Hekmatyar, Mohaqiq, etc to either be included in or endorse the new Taliban-led order.

The Paks are likely in communication with the Turks to get Dostum and with the Iranians to reach out to Atta Noor, as well.

The Pak calculus is that even though they failed to get the Talibs and their opponents together in year past the military defeat of the anti-Taliban camp and the Taliban need for int’l recognition could make this possible.

If history is any guide it will be really tough for Pak to accomplish this “inclusive” new order. But from the Pakistani POV 3 key pre-requisites have finally been met and the sit is not going to get more favorable than what it is at present.

1. The forthcoming political dispensation will not be dominated by pro-India factions.

2. Several anti-Taliban elements are willing to be part of a Taliban led order.

3. The Taliban need their opponents to join emirate 2.0 because they need int’l recognition.

The Paks need the forthcoming order to be int’lly-recognized because the more that emirate 2.0 is connected to the outside world the less likely it will be a threat to them. This is why they want the second Talib regime to at least appear as different as is possible from 1.0.

The problem for Pak is that the Taliban leadership can superficially behave differently than when they were last in power but there is no way around the fact that at its core the movement is ideologically the same.

When it comes to int’l recognition only two actors matter for the Pakistanis. The US & China. As far as DC is concerned, Islamabad wants to minimize the extent to which it is being held responsible for the disastrous end to longest war in US history.

The Americans are unlikely to extend recognition anytime soon the Paks are hoping that they won’t create hurdles for the new regime in the making.

This is where the Paks are hoping that the Chinese will be more forthcoming.

But it won’t be easy as I explained in my WSJ essay from last weekend, and is now being confirmed by this Bloomberg report

bloomberg.com/news/articles/…