The Pashtun-led Taliban Could Break Apart Both Afghanistan and Pakistan
Former R&AW Chief Vikram Sood, geopolitical analyst Manu Sharma and I argue: Victory against the US, ethnic conflict within Afghanistan and disappointment with Islamabad could lead the Taliban to create a new Pashtun state on the ruins of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
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You can read the full article here: https://www.fairobserver.com/region/central_south_asia/atul-singh-vikram-sood-manu-sharma-afghanistan-taliban-pashtun-pakistan-news-today-43781/
More than a century ago, the Russians and the British played the?Great Game?for the control of?Afghanistan. Immortalized in Rudyard Kipling’s?“Kim,” this game defined three generations of soldiers, spies and diplomats. As the remarkable?Rory Stewart?records, the Great Game never ended. The Soviets and the Americans carried on where the Russians and the British left. Now, a new great game is about to begin.
As is well chronicled, Afghanistan emerged as a buffer state between the Russian and British empires. Dominated by the Pashtuns, this state remained an inchoate entity of competing ethnic groups, feuding clans and autonomous villages. As?Tabish Forugh?and one of the authors noted in an earlier?article?on Fair Observer, this Pashtun-dominated order crumbled when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979.?The?Taliban?brought back this order in the 1990s and are establishing Pashtun primacy yet again.
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Modernity has not been kind to Afghanistan. Until the 1970s, this country was a land where hippies showed up to smoke pot and have a good time. Older Pakistani friends reminisce about driving from Peshawar to Kabul to buy videotapes of Bollywood movies and bask in the relatively liberal milieu of Afghanistan. When the Soviets intervened in 1979, this idyllic version of the country disintegrated. For all the efforts of Soviet troops, engineers and administrators, communism failed.
You can read the full article here: https://www.fairobserver.com/region/central_south_asia/atul-singh-vikram-sood-manu-sharma-afghanistan-taliban-pashtun-pakistan-news-today-43781/