وَمِنَ النَّاسِ مَن يُعْجِبُكَ قَوْلُهُ فِي الْحَيَاةِ الدُّنْيَا وَيُشْهِدُ اللَّه عَلَىٰ مَا فِي قَلْبِهِ وَهُوَ أَلَدُّ الْخِصَامِ﴿٢٠٤﴾ وَإِذَا تَوَلَّىٰ سَعَىٰ فِي الْأَرْضِ لِيُفْسِدَ فِيهَا وَيُهْلِكَ الْحَرْثَ وَالنَّسْلَ ۗ وَاللَّهُ لَا يُحِبُّ الْفَسَادَ﴿٢٠٥﴾ سورة البقره
“And of the people is he whose speech pleases you in worldly life, and he calls Allah to witness as to what is in his heart, yet he is the fiercest of opponents. And when he goes away, he strives throughout the land to cause corruption therein and destroy crops and animals. And Allah does not like corruption.”
The people of Pakistan and Afghanistan are brotherly peoples. They have lived beside one another and shared many years of peaceful coexistence. But ever since Pakistan came into existence, its military and intelligence services have viewed Afghanistan as a strategic threat. That is the lens through which they have dealt with Afghanistan and the Afghan people ever since.
If Pakistan sees an advantage in killing Afghans, it kills them. If it believes arresting them serves its interests, it arrests them. If it benefits from handing Afghans over to infidels, it captures them and does exactly that. And if cooperation with Afghans suits its interests, then it cooperates with them. According to some reports, during the early years of the American occupation, Afghanistan was bombed from Pakistani territory more than sixty thousand times. Agents of Western intelligence services were flown into Afghanistan through Pakistan, where they began their covert operations. Throughout the twenty years of occupation, the occupying forces and their servants depended on Pakistan for logistics and military supplies.
After the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) returned to power, Pakistan repeatedly bombed civilian areas inside Afghanistan under the pretext of targeting tribal migrants. Those attacks martyred hundreds of Afghan civilians. At the same time, it tried to keep Afghanistan under economic pressure and isolation.
Over the past five years, Afghan refugees inside Pakistan have been subjected to systematic mistreatment before being forcibly expelled under harsh seasonal conditions. Such treatment has few parallels in modern history. Throughout this period, Pakistan’s military and intelligence agencies answered every effort made by Afghanistan’s current government to resolve disputes through dialogue and mutual understanding with more abuses and more pressure. They left no room for those efforts to reach a reasonable outcome or for the peoples of Afghanistan and Pakistan to live together in peace.
Pakistan has long had disputes with India, yet it has repeatedly used that rivalry as an excuse to act against Muslims and different communities, both inside and outside its borders. Tens of thousands of its own citizens have been killed or forcibly disappeared after being accused of links with India. Today, Pakistan’s military and intelligence services appear determined to apply the same approach against Afghanistan.
The IEA is the only genuine Islamic system in power today. Its friendships and its disagreements are guided by Islamic law. No one can seriously imagine that it would stand with non-Muslims against Muslims. The peoples of Afghanistan and Pakistan know well that Pakistan’s military and intelligence services have a long history of siding with non-Muslims against Muslims. Even today, they continue cooperating with foreign powers against Muslims in different areas, and that cooperation has become one of the foundations of their political survival.
At this very moment, Pakistan is once again organizing and bringing together the same groups of chaos and corruption that, acting on Pakistan’s instructions, squandered the gains of the Afghan people’s fourteen-year jihad against the Soviet Union and the communist regime. Those same groups stripped Afghanistan of the advanced military equipment left behind, sending much of it into Pakistan as scrap. They destroyed much of Afghanistan’s infrastructure, slaughtered tens of thousands of Afghans in the name of ethnicity, language, and region, and plunged Afghanistan into anarchy. Then, over the past twenty years, they fought alongside Pakistan’s military and intelligence services and together with American and other Western forces against the Afghan people, contributing to the martyrdom of hundreds of thousands of Afghans.
Pakistan was founded in the name of Islam, yet its military and intelligence establishment has drifted far from that path. Today it still speaks the language of Islam, but its conduct tells a very different story. Those slogans serve only to deceive people and conceal its actions. The verse placed at the beginning of this article is a clear reflection of that reality.
Pakistan’s military and intelligence services should understand that the old tactics they once used against the Afghan people no longer work. Instead of clinging to hostility toward Afghanistan and relying on false narratives, they should seek lawful means of earning their livelihood. They should abandon confrontation and choose dialogue and mutual understanding as the way to resolve both their own problems and those they have with others.
