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If army & ISI did not misrule Pakistan, its contribution might have rivalled India’s

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In this excerpt from his book ‘Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan, 2001-2016’ Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist Steve Coll writes about how Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence has hurt Pakistan and Afghanistan.

By late April 1992, the fall of Kabul to the I.S.I.- backed Islamist rebels seemed imminent. I flew in.

The mujaheddin flowed into the capital unopposed on a Saturday. Kabul’s wary residents had been governed for a decade by an officially secular regime. Hoping to avoid a bloodbath, they greeted the entering long- bearded rebels with flowers.

Najibullah tried to flee but was arrested at the airport. His security forces took off their uniforms, abandoned their posts, and went home, trying to blend into the new order. The mujaheddin seemed uncertain initially about whether to trust their acceptance into Kabul.

That first day of the takeover, I met a rebel straggler near the zoo. He said his name was Syed Munir. He was carrying an assault rifle. He turned in circles and insisted that anyone who wished to talk to him do so from a distance of ten feet.

“Everyone is friendly,” he admitted. “But maybe some people want to take my gun.”

He was right to be wary. That night, a new round of war erupted among factions of the Afghan rebels. The fighting soon shredded Kabul, claimed thousands more innocent lives, and consigned Afghanistan to yet deeper poverty and international isolation. America, by now absorbed by victory in the Cold War and startling geopolitical changes such as the reunification of Germany, looked away.

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For many Americans and Europeans who have lived and worked in Afghanistan and Pakistan before and after 2001, it is frustrating to hear discourse back home holding that Afghanistan and Pakistan are lands of “warring tribes” or “endless conflicts.”

The historical record belies such clichés. Independent Afghanistan was impoverished but peaceful and stable, untroubled by radical international violence, for many decades of the twentieth century, prior to the Soviet invasion of 1979. Its several decades of civil war since that invasion have been fueled again and again by outside interference, primarily by Pakistan, but certainly including the United States and Europe, which have remade Afghanistan with billions of dollars in humanitarian and reconstruction aid while simultaneously contributing to its violence, corruption, and instability.

And for all of Pakistan’s dysfunction, state-sponsored radicalism, and glaring economic inequality, it remains a modernizing nation with a vast, breathtakingly talented middle class and diaspora. If the army and I.S.I. did not misrule Pakistan, in alliance with corrupt political cronies, the country’s potential to lift up its own population and contribute positively to the international system might today rival India’s.

The region’s “endless conflicts” are not innate to its history, forms of social organization, or cultures. They are the outgrowth of specific misrule and violent interventions. They reflect political maneuvering, hubristic assumptions, intelligence operations, secret diplomacy, and decision making at the highest levels in Kabul, Islamabad, and Washington that have often been unavailable to the Afghan, Pakistani, American, and international publics.

Steve Coll is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of ‘Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001’. He is Dean, Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University and former managing editor of The Washington Post

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1 COMMENT

  1. If the Congress and its dynasty did not loot and misrule India for 60 years India would have been a superpower rivaling China and an economic superpower greater than Japan!

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