The Pakistan Dimension
Pakistan's contradictory role as both a US ally in the War on Terror and a haven for the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
Pakistan's Double Game
No country embodied the contradictions of the War on Terror more than Pakistan. After 9/11, President Pervez Musharraf aligned Pakistan with the United States under intense pressure — Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage reportedly told Pakistan's intelligence chief that the US would bomb the country "back to the Stone Age" if it did not cooperate. Pakistan became a critical logistics corridor for US forces in landlocked Afghanistan, and the US poured in over $33 billion in military and economic aid between 2002 and 2020.
But Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) simultaneously maintained ties with the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani Network — the very groups the US was fighting. The ISI had helped create the Taliban in the 1990s as a tool for projecting Pakistani influence in Afghanistan and countering Indian presence there. After 2001, elements of the ISI provided safe haven, funding, and strategic guidance to Taliban leaders regrouping in Pakistan's border regions, particularly in the cities of Quetta and Peshawar.
The logic was grimly rational from Islamabad's perspective. Pakistan viewed Afghanistan through the lens of its existential rivalry with India. A US-backed government in Kabul that was friendly with New Delhi represented strategic encirclement. Maintaining influence over the Taliban was Pakistan's insurance policy against a post-American Afghanistan aligned with India.
