Roving Periscope: Pashtuns a ticking bomb in Pakistan, and China!
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: With the Taliban fast regaining Afghanistan, Pakistan’s increasing frustration at its inability to retake control over the Islamist militia it raised in the 1990s has come to the fore with Prime Minister Imran Ahmed Khan Niazi blurting out that the Pashtuns are “xenophobic”.
On Thursday, the Taliban, or radical Islamic “students”, who now control around 80 percent of Afghanistan, took over its second-largest city of Kandahar, indicating their unstoppable offensive to take Kabul as well in the coming weeks.
A day before, on Wednesday, the worried Pak PM told foreign media: “We have a larger Pashtun population here in Pakistan than in Afghanistan and they’re probably the most ‘xenophobic’ people on earth.”
Pakistan is home to nearly 60 million Pashtuns who have, for long, been trying to carve out a Greater Pashtunistan (Pakhtoonistan) by merging the adjoining areas of northwest Pakistan and Afghanistan. Should this happen, it may have a cascading effect, triggering disintegration of Pakistan itself—and its spillover right into the bordering Uighur Muslim-dominated Xinjiang province of China.
This the two ‘all-weather’ friends—Islamabad and Beijing—dread the most. They are trying to cool down the Taliban and have quickly ‘recognized’ their imminent return to power in Kabul. China and Pakistan are the only countries to ‘recognize’ the Taliban-led Afghanistan even before the militia takes control of Kabul so as to keep the aggressive Islamists on their side as long as they can.
The Taliban’s imminent return to power in Kabul was facilitated by the sudden withdrawal of the US-led NATO forces as part of their February 2020 deal with Washington in Doha, Qatar. The western forces will fully evacuate Afghanistan by August-end. They are also leaving behind a lot of arms and ammunition, presumably for the Taliban. After some formal protests and attacks, America has left Kabul on its own, an indication that the new geopolitical strategy is working to script.
The real terms of this deal still remain in wraps and both Islamabad and Beijing suspect it involved American aid to the Taliban to push them into Xinjiang. It has created a piquant situation for them.
The Taliban offensive began in May and they swiftly seized more than 160 districts, apart from the 70-plus they already controlled. The terrorist group now controls eight of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces in their entirety, media reported
Here comes the Pashtun conundrum.
Nearly half of the Taliban fighters, including their leader Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, as also the US interlocutor and Afghan-American diplomat Zalmay Khalilzad, are from the Pashtun community. The demand for a Greater Pashtunistan remained dormant until 2001 when Islamabad controlled the Taliban in Kabul. No longer. With Pakistan losing control over them, this demand is expected to be mainstreamed sooner than later.
While the worried ‘liberal’ Pashtuns, a thin minority Pakistan supports, have demanded that Islamabad stop aiding the Taliban, a majority of them are waiting and watching the militia’s next move which, they hope, could now focus on the Greater Pashtunistan issue. Imran had this volatile majority of Pashtuns in mind when he called them the “most xenophobic people on earth.”
While raising the militia in the 1990s, America and Pakistan had unleashed the fighters against an “atheist, communist, and anti-Islamist” Moscow which tried to make a Muslim Afghanistan “secular”. Now, the US is presumably redirecting the same Taliban against another atheist, communist, and anti-Islamist Beijing which is trying to deIslamize Xinjiang.
No wonder China and Pakistan find themselves stuck between the devil and the deep sea.
