From WSJopinion: It’s only a matter of time before the Afghan state collapses, unleashing chaos beyond its borders. Pakistan and China have the most to lose, writes KamranBokhari
Journal Editorial Report: Paul Gigot interviews Clifford May of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Image: Jalil Rezayee/ShutterstockThe Taliban are taking over city after city in Afghanistan at a stunning speed. But as the U.S. found in 2001, it’s one thing to topple a regime, another to set up a stable new one.
The impact will be most immediate for Pakistan, which is already feeling it. In the past two decades the Taliban have gone from being a proxy of Islamabad to a threat. When Washington toppled the Taliban in late 2001, Pakistan saw it as a major foreign-policy loss even though it cooperated with the U.S. Islamabad continued to view the Afghan jihadist movement as an ally even in 2007-14, when it faced a major insurgency on its own soil from the Pakistani Taliban rebels.
It wasn’t until early last month that the country’s top two generals—the army chief and the head of Inter-Services Intelligence—acknowledged, in a rare briefing to opposition members of Parliament, that the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban were “two faces of the same coin.” These remarks underscore that the Pakistani elite now fears its erstwhile proxies because their own country has been deeply penetrated by the Taliban ideology.
The Taliban comeback in Afghanistan will galvanize many Islamist actors in Pakistan to emulate the Afghan jihadist movement. It will be a huge challenge for a terribly weakened Islamic Republic of Pakistan to sustain itself with an Islamic emirate next door. Only a few years ago, and at great cost in blood and treasure, was Islamabad able to take back large swathes of its territory near the Afghan border from Taliban rebels. Those gains are at risk of being lost again.
Since the end of major military operations against Taliban insurgents in 2015, Pakistan has been increasingly dependent on China for its economic recovery. The biggest project of China’s Belt and Road Initiative is the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, in which Beijing has invested tens of billions of dollars. The fate of CPEC has increasingly come into question, especially in recent weeks with growing attacks, likely by Pakistani Taliban, targeting Chinese workers in the country.
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