A New Afghanistan Strategy

No amount of reassurance or incentives will prevent Pakistan from using radical Islamic groups both to suppress ethnic and nationalist aspirations within its borders and as an instrument of its foreign policy

By: Lawrence Sellin, Ph.D

For sixteen years the United States, NATO and the Afghan security forces have fought a war tactically in a strategic environment that made victory impossible.

We have been fighting the wrong war. The war in Afghanistan is actually in Pakistan.

Current American policy towards Pakistan is one based on extortion, whereby, Pakistan, in exchange for money and a veil of undeserved international legitimacy, permits the resupply of US and NATO troops fighting in Afghanistan, while regulating the battle tempo, adjusting its support for and the flow of Taliban, Islamic State (ISIS), Haqqani network jihadis and other terrorist groups.

US lawmaker Ted Poe refers to ‘Pakistan’ as ‘the backstabbing nation’

Washington: Well-known Islamabad baiter, US congressman Ted Poe, has in a tweet called his country’s putative ally “the backstabbing nation of Pakistan’.

In a tweet earlier today, Poe posted a note “applauding” US defense secretary James Mattis’s decision to withhold coalition support funds to Pakistan.

Poe has often taken Pakistan to task as it “supports multiple terrorist organisations”. He is the chair of the ‘terrorism, nonproliferation, and trade’ subcommittee of the US’s foreign affairs committee.