Senior Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation (ORF) and Af-Pak expert Sushant Sareen described Pakistan’s latest border clashes with Afghanistan as a crisis of its own making, calling it “divine retribution” for years of duplicity on terrorism and regional policy.
Speaking on the recent Pakistan-Afghanistan skirmishes, Sareen said the immediate trigger was “an attack inside Pakistan in which some soldiers were killed,” followed by “a couple of other attacks within 24 to 36 hours.” Nearly two dozen Pakistani security personnel were reportedly killed, he said, adding that Islamabad’s airstrikes inside Afghanistan were a “retaliation” that the Pakistani media conveniently “glossed over.”
While some have linked the bombing of Kabul to Afghan Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi’s visit to India, Sareen dismissed it as “a coincidence.” He noted that “these visits are planned weeks and months in advance,” but in Pakistan’s “disinformation sphere, this is how they positioned it.”
Sareen argued that Pakistan was now facing the same accusations it had long levelled at India. “They are blaming Afghanistan for what we have been complaining about for 30 years — terrorism emanating from across the border,” he said. “This is like divine retribution visiting Pakistan for its lies, deceit and deception.”
The veteran analyst traced the roots of the conflict to the Durand Line dispute, observing that Afghanistan never accepted the colonial-era border. “The Pakistanis thought the Taliban would sign on the dotted line,” he said. “But the Taliban and the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) are born from the same womb. The assumption that Afghan and Pakistani Taliban are different is utterly spurious.”
He criticised Islamabad’s lack of “strategic patience” and ideological confusion. “How can a country that swears by Islamist leaders like Iqbal fight the Islamists? There is no ideological clarity,” he remarked.
On US–Pakistan ties, Sareen said renewed American outreach “makes no sense in a realistic world.” He alleged that Pakistan was “selling fantasies” of vast mineral reserves and “using its old playbook of deception.”
Calling Pakistan’s current predicament a long “war of attrition,” Sareen said internal instability, political illegitimacy and religious extremism would prevent Islamabad from resolving the crisis. “They have no political stability and no ideological clarity,” he concluded. “This is a problem entirely of Pakistan’s own creation.”
For more candid insights, including why despite losing all the wars it has ever fought Pakistan seems to be winning the information battle, watch the full interview.
In a career spanning three decades and counting, Ramananda (Ram to his friends) has been the foreign editor of The Telegraph, Outlook Magazine and the New Indian Express. He helped set up rediff.com’s editorial operations in San Jose and New York, helmed sify.com, and was the founder editor of India.com.
His work has featured in national and international publications like the Al Jazeera Centre for Studies, Global Times and Ashahi Shimbun. But his one constant over all these years, he says, has been the attempt to understand rising India’s place in the world.
He can rustle up a mean salad, his oil-less pepper chicken is to die for, and all it takes is some beer and rhythm and blues to rock his soul.
Talk to him about foreign and strategic affairs, media, South Asia, China, and of course India.
