Diplomats in Islamabad confirm Kabul may exercise power over roughly 60% of the population, but the key fact is that only 55% of Afghanistan's 407 districts, and perhaps even less, submit to Kabul. The Taliban are on the ascendancy in the northeast, the southwest and the southeast.
It took a long time for a new head of US and NATO operations, General Austin Scott Miller, to admit the absolutely obvious. "This is not going to be won militarily ... This is going to a political solution," he said.
The world's most formidable military force simply cannot win the war.
Still, after no less than 100,000 US and NATO troops plus 250,000 US-trained Afghan army and police failing over the years to prevent the Taliban from ruling over whole provinces, Washington seems determined to blame Islamabad for this military quagmire.
The US believes Pakistan's covert "support" for the Taliban has inflamed the situation and destabilized the Kabul government.
No wonder the Russian presidential envoy for Afghanistan, Zamir Kabulov, went straight to the jugular. "The West has lost the war in Afghanistan ... the presence of the US and North Atlantic Treaty Organization [NATO] hasn't only failed to solve the problem, but exacerbated it."
Lavrov, for his part, is quite concerned by the expansion of Daesh, known regionally as ISIS-Khorasan. He warned, correctly, that "foreign sponsors" are allowing ISIS-K to "turn Afghanistan into a springboard for its expansion in Central Asia." Beijing agrees.
A grand plan by China-RussiaIt's no secret to all the major players that Washington won't abdicate from its privileged Afghan base in the intersection of Central and South Asia for a number of reasons, especially monitoring and surveillance of strategic "threats" such as Russia and China.
In parallel, the eternal "Pakistan plays a double game" narrative simply won't vanish -- even as Islamabad has shown in detail how the Pakistani Taliban have been consistently offered safe-havens in eastern Afghanistan by RAW (Indian intelligence) operatives.
That does not alter the fact that Islamabad has a serious Afghan problem. Military doctrine rules that Pakistan cannot manage the South Asian geopolitical chessboard and project power as an equal of India without controlling Afghanistan in "strategic depth."
Add to it the absolutely intractable problem of the Durand Line, established in 1893 to separate Afghanistan and the British India empire. A hundred years later, Islamabad totally rejected Kabul's appeal to renegotiate the Durand line, according to a provision in the original treaty. For Islamabad, the Durand line shall remain in perpetuity as a valid international border.
By the mid-1990s, the powers in Islamabad believed that by supporting the Taliban they would end up recognizing the Durand line and on top of it essentially dissolve the impetus of Pashtun nationalism and the call for a "Pashtunistan."
Islamabad was always supposed to drive the narrative. History, though, turned it completely upside down. In fact, it was Pashtun nationalism plus hardcore Islamism of the Deobandi variety that ended up contaminating Pakistani Pashtuns.
Yet Pashtuns may not be the major actors in the, perhaps, final season of this Hindu Kush spectacular. That may turn out to be China.
What matters most for China is Afghanistan becoming part of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). That's exactly what Chinese envoy Yao Jing told the opening session of the 4th Trilateral Dialogue in Islamabad earlier this week between China, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
"Kabul can act as a bridge to help expand connectivity between East, South and Central Asian regions," Jing said.
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