S-2
PROFESSIONAL
- Joined
- Dec 25, 2007
- Messages
- 4,210
- Reaction score
- 0
Pretty much spot-on.
Had America remained in Afghanistan, we'd heard nothing but a litany of rants about our supposed neo-colonialist ambitions. THIS, of course, for a country, Afghanistan, that we'd heretofore held NO historical interest.
More to the point, had it been our intent to stay in Afghanistan post Soviet withdrawal, I highly DOUBT the Soviets would have reached an agreement with us to withdraw at all. Were an agreement reached to that effect, I rather expect that Gorbachev would have signed his death warrant and that would have signaled the end of glasnost and peristroika.
More likely, the Soviets would have "doubled-down" their own efforts to assure their near empire in the Soviet republics then along the northern afghan border. After all, it was in 1988 still very much the Soviet Union and NOT Russia.
This complaint, in short, is B.S. and self-serving pity seeking aggrandizement. Pakistan screwed the pooch by their single-minded interest in promoting a pan-pashtu movement intended to DOMINATE Afghanistan IAW their strategic intent to always deflect pashtu nationalist aspirations away from the sacred Punjab and instead onto Afghanistan at the expense of the Hazara, tajiks, and Uzbeks.
Did Pakistan try to create a pluralistic society in recognition that the pashtus weren't AND aren't the absolute majority in Afghanistan? Nope.
Pakistan reaps what they've sown and this has been nothing but pure unmitigated blowback for decades of duplicitious manipulation of islamist radicalism to Pakistan's narrow ends.
Had America remained in Afghanistan, we'd heard nothing but a litany of rants about our supposed neo-colonialist ambitions. THIS, of course, for a country, Afghanistan, that we'd heretofore held NO historical interest.
More to the point, had it been our intent to stay in Afghanistan post Soviet withdrawal, I highly DOUBT the Soviets would have reached an agreement with us to withdraw at all. Were an agreement reached to that effect, I rather expect that Gorbachev would have signed his death warrant and that would have signaled the end of glasnost and peristroika.
More likely, the Soviets would have "doubled-down" their own efforts to assure their near empire in the Soviet republics then along the northern afghan border. After all, it was in 1988 still very much the Soviet Union and NOT Russia.
This complaint, in short, is B.S. and self-serving pity seeking aggrandizement. Pakistan screwed the pooch by their single-minded interest in promoting a pan-pashtu movement intended to DOMINATE Afghanistan IAW their strategic intent to always deflect pashtu nationalist aspirations away from the sacred Punjab and instead onto Afghanistan at the expense of the Hazara, tajiks, and Uzbeks.
Did Pakistan try to create a pluralistic society in recognition that the pashtus weren't AND aren't the absolute majority in Afghanistan? Nope.
Pakistan reaps what they've sown and this has been nothing but pure unmitigated blowback for decades of duplicitious manipulation of islamist radicalism to Pakistan's narrow ends.