The Afghan war is sparked for an array of interests and it needs to flare up to secure a dozens of regional objectives. It can be claimed that the Taliban is a pretext to drain the undergrounds of rare earth elements and siphon off the black money out of drug trafficking or Russia is an alleged reason to ramp up the multi-billion dollar arms sales or the “war on terrorism” is a pretext to establish further military bases.
To ride the Afghan war, there has to be a litany of motives. Regional rivalries are not so sharp and deep nor potential to wreck Afghanistan as much. Admittedly, India and Pakistan are immersed in a feud that has stretched to the Afghan soil thanks to Washington’s authorization of Pakistan in times of Jihad to intervene in Afghanistan on its behalf. If we sum up the entire bombings that represent the two archenemies’ [India and Pakistan] proxy war in Afghanistan, it may constitute a tiny fraction.
By the same token, Saudi-Iran or US-Iran proxy war in Afghanistan is not in full-swing and leaves little to the imagination or doubt. It also account for not more than a fragment of violence.
Then what really drives the war machine? And importantly what is claiming so many Afghan lives a day?
The allegations over India and Pakistan’s confrontation in Afghanistan are unfounded. Actually, it is overblown to cast shadow over the main causes of the war, yet a struggle for mounting clout on Kabul regime is undeniable. Pakistan’s condition, among others, for a halt to terrorism and bringing Taliban to negotiation table is that Afghanistan should break off multidimensional ties to India. The proponents of this idea are false or turning a blind eye to the genuine concerns. This can also be refuted out of a stark reality that this hostility has not gone as far as to destabilize Afghanistan so largely because of the Afghan government’s warming to India. Is the multimillion dollars project of rising ISIS in Afghanistan an outcome of this potato-small issue?
India is of the opinion that Washington needs Pakistan for its Afghanistan conspiracy theory even though this country has obviously named Pakistan a state sponsor of terrorism in international forums and platforms. But Washington has still showered concessions upon Pakistan for not paying lip service. To appease the regional allies countering Pakistan and respond to international calls for solid counterterrorism measures, Washington has at most revealed its determination to stop approving budgets in military or civilian aid to Pakistan, which has later been cleared from suspension.
Former President of Pakistan General Pervez Musharraf (Source: Wikipedia)
Former president of Pakistan General Pervez Musharraf in an interview with AFP said:
“India’s domination in Afghanistan is a threat to Pakistan; Indians want to turn Afghanistan against Pakistan”.
This commentary or fewer others just like it may have shaped up the minds and viewpoints of a comfort majority who seek the root causes of the Afghan war, though it is dimming the other side of the war played by the US-led coalition.
The key to a miraculous remedy to Afghanistan’s violence is within the reach of the Afghan government and its international military partners. The centralization of security on the Afghan borders with Pakistan to block unlawful crossings could give an immediate fix to the current US fiasco in Afghanistan. If the free flow of arms and mercenaries across the border from Pakistan into Afghanistan freezes, the peace may descend on the earth in Afghanistan.
The myth of a proxy war between the nemesis neighbors is a treacherous media hype, consciously or unconsciously. This media trend helps Pakistan to promote terrorism in the shadows of the exaggerated proxy war with India. According to Amar Sinha, Indian ambassador in Kabul, the flurry of media stories of a proxy war is meant to justify Pakistan’s support of terrorism. But now is there someone to pose who is behind Pakistan’s support to extremism.
Yes, the US is juggling all the sides of the war very meticulously that barely allows minds to turn at it. Some, but not all, American authors depict the Afghan war as a product of deep-seated India-Pak row, which is making room for the US to carry on its multitasking process.
If the US was an arbitrator and only an observer of the war, it would have far earlier went into talks with India for a peaceful solution. We can deduce that, in the first place, India – with almost zero engagement in war- and then Pakistan are the targets of media’s war on terrorism. The latter country is no doubt an accomplice in the Afghan slaughter, but it is now entangled in the war agenda of Washington and despite going through ups and downs along the history, it understands that it may get severely hurt if it backs down from the support to Washington and most likely face the fate of Saudi Arabia in 2003.
Indian Home Minister Rajnath Singh (Source: Wikipedia)
Although, the world and domestic media pin the Afghan war on Pakistan and India’s hostility, India asserts it is in no battle with Pakistan and it is all media falsehood to disguise the real scenario. Indian Home Minister Rajnath Singh told media in March 2015 that:
“Pakistan is exploiting terrorism as a weapon in its proxy war against India”
What Indian high ranks actually mean to suggest here is that Pakistan take advantage of the ongoing US bogus counterterrorism battle and the US-facilitated outreach to the supreme Afghan authorities against India. Pakistan, not India, has set eyes on India’s deals with Afghan government and has not spared counterattacks on all of them.
The US is wishful of implicating India in Afghan conflict and deliberating over deployment of Indian forces alongside NATO soldiers in Afghanistan. This way, further fuel is added to the animosity which may possibly be used by the US to divert focus from its war agenda into minuscule encounters as such. The two states shares lengthy borders and there is no striking sign of clash in sight.
Pakistan is the lackey state of Washington taking infamy and risk of seclusion in the world. Its affinity with Washington and harboring of terrorists for a symbolic Afghan war is robbing it of large-scale economic opportunities. China’s economic corridor extending across the Baluchistan province and other restive regions is now grappling with major setbacks and is on the brink of cancellation.
The other element on top of Pakistan is China that nudges India into a solidified relationship with Afghan government. In 1960s, China went to war with India over territorial dispute and therefore edging towards Pakistan as well as making every effort to thaw tension between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
States like Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Ukraine have remained battlegrounds for proxy wars. Israel fired no single bullet in Syrian war which is the most concerned for it, and has had ample cash and arms pouring into the war zone from Arab region kingdoms and others. The proxies and puppet states in today’s global war have no second option in addition to agreeing. The superpowers initiate a proxy war in a fashion that most of the blames and war crimes become the sole liabilities of the lackey states.
