Consequences of conflict in Afghanistan continues....

Prominent neighbours wielding influence in Afghanistan included Pakistan and Iran, both functioned as a 2-way ‘linkage states’ between internal and external actors. The principal supplier of arms and money to the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (i.e. Taleban controlled Afghanistan) was Pakistan. Its official denials notwithstanding, Pakistan has assisted the Taleban forces by facilitating the recruitment of fighters, offering military training, and planning pivotal military operations, while allowing arms for the Taleban to transit its territory. Pakistan’s policy in Afghanistan derives from its quest for security from India and its intelligence services used Afghan territory to train fighters for Kashmir. The war in Afghanistan introduced massive quantities of small arms into Pakistan and provided capital for investment in smuggling.

An Afghan and Pashtun diaspora reached into the Persian Gulf and Dubai includes the third largest urban Pashtun population after Peshawar and Karachi. This facilitated trade and smuggling throughout the region. Illicit trade, not only by Pashtuns, includes the drug trade, transborder trade in consumer goods, and commerce in emerald. The drug and transborder trades are linked to organized crime groups operating throughout the Indian Ocean periphery, the former Soviet Union, and Europe.

The transborder trade undermines Pakistan’s fiscal integrity and funds corruption, thereby contributing to the crisis of legitimacy of Pakistani institutions, of which the 1999 coup was only a symptom. That crisis could be intensified by the return of tens of thousands of Pakistani Taleban fighters from Afghanistan to a country drifting into a combination of financial and political crisis and increasingly risking international stigma and isolation. Afghanistan provided sources of weapons and refuge (facilitated by cross-border links among Tajiks) that helped intensify the war in Tajikistan, set off by the Soviet collapse.

To be continued.......