Here is a quick scorecard of the drawbacks and benefits of this development for regional neighbors:

1. Iran is a winner given that US troops will be out of Afghanistan. In the early zeroes, Iran was surrounded militarily, with over 100,000 troops in each of Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, the Biden administration intends to get all troops out once the Kabul U.S. embassy personnel are safe. The US presence in Iraq is negligible. The US has tried to squeeze Iran economically in a bid to weaken or overthrow its government and to dissuade Tehran from its civilian nuclear enrichment program. With fewer US troops on their borders, Iranian leaders will rest a little easier.

Although Iran is being cautious in its statements on Afghanistan, and denies rumors of border clashes with the Taliban, the dominance of Iran’s neighbor by a hard line Sunni fundamentalist movement will raise some fears in Iran, which almost went to war with the Taliban in 1998.

There will also be a new wave of Afghan refugees into Iran, which the government says it will allow on humanitarian grounds.

2. Pakistan is a winner in this situation regarding foreign affairs, since its main concern is its enemy India, and says it will recognize the Taliban government. The Pakistani military had been unhappy with the governments in Kabul after 2001, viewing them as tilting toward India and hostile to Pakistan’s interests. Just two months ago former Afghanistan president Ashraf Ghani accused Pakistan of sending 10,000 militants over the border and of declining to push the Taliban to negotiate. Prime Minister Imran Khan called the charge “unfair,” stressing that Pakistan had indeed urged the Taliban to enter talks. India’s External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar complained that India could not pursue commerce with Afghanistan as it wished to because of Pakistan’s interference. Pakistan lies between India and Afghanistan, and the latter is potentially a route for Indian overland trade to Central Asia and even, if fast rail lines are built, all the way to China. Imran Khan retorted that India’s isolation was a result of militant Hindu fundamentalism, embodied in the paramilitary Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) that is the handmaid of the governing far right wing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party.

Pakistan had been afraid of being surrounded, with India on one side and a pro-New Delhi government in Afghanistan on the other. With a Taliban victory, Pakistan now has an ally in Kabul.

There are nevertheless drawbacks of this development for Pakistan. At a recent conference a Pakistani academic, Professor Shabir Ahmad Khan warned that developments in Afghanistan could have a “massive spill-over on the neighboring countries in the form of drug trafficking, violence, and refuge crises.” In the 1980s and 1990s, Pakistan had come to host some 3 million Afghan refugees in the north, a heavy burden for a poor country. More than half of those families had returned to Afghanistan in the post-Taliban era, but Pakistan must be bracing for a new influx. Islamabad says it has built fences to keep Afghan migrants out, but it has a long and rugged border with its northern neighbor and I doubt the fences will stop people.

In 2008-2016 the Pakistani military had to fight a Taliban insurgency of its own, centered in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of the northwest, which spilled over onto Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi. Emboldened by the victory of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Tehrik-i Taliban Pakistan could see a resurgence, roiling domestic Pakistani security. Certainly, urban, secular-minded Pakistanis will be alarmed at the fundamentalist takeover of such an important neighbor.

3. India is a loser. Its access to Central Asian markets is further blocked. Pakistan has a new ally. The future of its Chabahar Port in southern Iran, which had been intended to bypass Pakistan, is in doubt.

4. Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, neighbors of Afghanistan, are afraid of the influence of hard line Muslim fundamentalism. Uzbekistan’s elite is post-Soviet and secular-minded, and views Taliban-type thinking as a form of terrorism. Tajikistan had a big fundamentalist movement of its own after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, which elites in Dushanbe suppressed. Both will likely strengthen their military ties with Russia, as Nikola Mikovic points out in his column today.

5. Russia is a potential winner. Since relations with the US soured after the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin has been less supportive of a US presence in Afghanistan. Having the US military out of Central Asia will be seen as a plus for Moscow. Likewise, it is an opportunity to reassert Russia’s security umbrella over former Soviet Socialist Republics in the region, and the latter will welcome Russian bases more readily.

The downside for Russia is that 15 percent of its population is Muslim, and Putin made his bones by putting down a Muslim fundamentalist separatist movement in Chechnya. A Taliban victory could inspire more such movements. Likewise, Moscow fears Afghanistan’s poppy production for fear of a big heroin addiction problem among Russian urban youth, and it is possible that poppy production will see an uptick, with the turmoil in Afghanistan.

6. The U.S. looks like a clear loser, especially the Biden administration, which has egg on its face from the rapid collapse of the Afghanistan government and military. There are fears that the Taliban victory will embolden the fringe of Muslim radicals. On the other hand, the U.S. did not suffer appreciably from the fall of South Vietnam to the communists in 1975. As long as the Taliban victory remains a domestic Afghanistan development, and assuming there is no uptick in international terrorism, especially in the US itself, it could well be that President Biden will weather this storm. The American public after all has a pandemic and economic crisis to worry about and may not be very interested in foreign affairs.

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Bonus Video:

France 24 English: “UN call on Afghanistan’s neighbours to keep borders open as crisis looms • FRANCE 24 English”

When American commentators like Carl Bernstein complain that Muslim authorities have not sufficiently denounced the terrorist attack on the Charlie Hebdo staff in Paris, they show a profound ignorance of the current situation in the Middle East.

The fact is that both governments of Muslim-majority countries and the chief religious institutions have been engaged in a vigorous war on religious extremism for some time.

Egypt has gone too far in this direction, criminalizing the activist members of the Muslim Brotherhood. But it is also committing troops to fight extremists in Sinai. Egyptian acquaintances of mine in Cairo say that it has become unpleasant to wear a beard there (for long a sign of religious commitment).

Egypt’s president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi spoke to an audience of clerics at the Department of Religious Endowments a few days ago. He made waves by denouncing terrorism among Muslims, and said it wasn’t right for the rest of the world to be afraid of 1.5 billion Muslims. He pointedly insisted that the al-Azhar clerics do something about this stain on the honor of Islam, implying that they were not effectively combating extremist ideas. He called for a new sort of “religious discourse” and a “new revolution” to combat extremism.

Then al-Sisi attended Christmas Mass at the Coptic Orthodox Cathedral in Cairo (the first time an Egyptian president has done so). MENA reports that he told them, “It was necessary to attend the Mass to greet you on Christmas . . . Throughout thousands of years Egypt has taught the world humanity and civilization and the world expects the humanity and civilization to kick off again from our country. . . God willing, we Muslims and Christians will build our country and will accommodate and love each other.”

When he left, the Christians were applauding loudly, shouting “we love you Sisi” and “Muslims and Christians are one hand.”

Sisi has put thousands of Muslim fundamentalists in prison, most of them certainly not terrorists. He has gone too far in attempting to curb political Islam. But he cannot be accused of being soft on Muslim extremism or terrorism, for heaven’s sake.

The Egyptian Foreign Minister roundly denounced the assault on the magazine staff.

Al-Azhar Seminary, the chief religious authority in the Sunni world, condemned forcefully the Paris attacks and expressed solidarity with the victims and their families, saying that such acts of violence are forbidden in Islam.

In Pakistan, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has since last June committed himself to rooting out the Taliban Movement of Pakistan along with other extremist movements. He is having his air force actively bomb them and scatter them from their Waziristan base.

In Iraq, the government is dedicated to defeating the al-Qaeda offshoot, Daesh (ISIS or ISIL) and hundreds of troops and tribesmen have already been killed in the process. The day of the attacks, Prime Minister Haydar al-Abadi expressed his solidarity with Paris. After all, what happened there is a common occurrence in Baghdad, which faces ongoing car bombings and sniping.

Not only are most Muslim authorities in the Middle East denouncing the al-Qaeda massacres,, but they are engaged in active warfare against extremists and risking the soldiers lives, with hundreds or thousands killed. And those killed by the extremists in Paris included a Muslim policeman named Ahmad and a Muslim copy-editor, a man of broad learning. How many commemorations of the victims mention that they included Muslims?

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Related video:

AFP: “Top Muslim body condemns deadly Paris attack”

“Drone strikes are the weapon of choice in America’s so-called War on Terror. They’ve been used nearly 500 times in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia since 2002. But while U.S. officials praise their “surgical precision,” the reality on the ground tells a different tale. Here’s what you need to know about the U.S. drone war and its unintended consequences.”

AJ+: “Is America’s Drone War Crashing And Burning?”

Pakistan politics has been mired in stagnation for some time now. In September of 2013, Pakistan undertook the first successful civilian hand-off of power in its entire history. Then-president Asaf Ali Zardari was succeeded by the government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. Despite this milestone, Pakistan’s politics have been full of tumult ever since.

Small but significant political forces refused to accept the legitimacy of the victory of the Muslim League in the fall, 2013 parliamentary elections. What is odd is that on the whole it is not the previous ruling party, the Pakistan People’s Party, that charged electoral fraud but rather the Pakistan Tehrik-i Insaf (PTI or Pakistan Movement for Change) of former cricket star Imran Khan. Also disgruntled are elements on the Punjabi religious right, the neo-Sufi movement of Tahir Qadri. These two political tendencies have staged big rallies all over the country and in the capital of Islamabad demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Sharif, which is a little unlikely to happen. Meanwhile, some politicians and economists have complained that Imran Khan and Qadri are taking points off economic growth because of the turmoil they are fomenting.

Ironically, Nawaz Sharif himself set the precedent here, inasmuch as he led an effort to unseat President Zardari, with a long march from Lahore to Islamabad, and he gave speeches threatening revolution and pledging that Zardari would not serve out his five year term (he did).

So the first problem Pakistani politics has to resolve is losing elections gracefully. Al Gore probably actually won in 2000, but decided not to put the country through a highly divisive process by contesting Bush’s victory. Both Zardari and Sharif actually did win their elections in 2008 and 2013, but rivals refused to acknowledge it, undermining the legitimacy of the state. In a good sign, Imran is keeping politics out of his mourning for the dead children of Peshawar.

The military in Pakistan has been too interventionist in the country’s affairs. It was the branch of government that backed the Pakistani Taliban and the Haqqani Group terrorists. The officers believed that such paramilitary terrorist groups would protect Pakistan’s interests in Afghanistan and Kashmir.

For years now, there has been large-scale blow-back from Pakistani military’s unhealthy obsession with extra–judicial means of power, including backing the Taliban and the Haqqani group even when they hit US interests in the country. Since July, the military has been fighting its former allies among the Pakistani Taliban, producing profound resentments among the neo-Taliban.

So the second problem in Pakistani politics is achieving a political culture in which the military is subordinate to elected officials, and in which the military ceases cooperating with paramilitary groups.

The third problem is that the Federally Administered Tribal areas or FATA need to be made a province and integrated into the Pakistani state. The standard of living of people in Waziristan is extremely low. Maybe some of the investment of China in Pakistan could be slotted for FATA. This is an area where some 800,000 people have been displaced by the Pakistani military campaign against militants in North Waziristan. There are torture facilities and bomb-making workshops. These need to be rolled up and FATA needs to be developed.

Related video:

AFP from last summer: “Pakistani army confident after North Waziristan offensive ”

“”In one of the worst terrorist attacks in Pakistan’s history, militants belonging to the Pakistani Taliban on Tuesday launched a brazen attack on a military-run school in the city of Peshawar. Officials said the eight-hour siege left at least 141 people dead, most of them students.

Tehrik-e-Taliban claimed responsibility for the deadly assault, saying the attack was a response to the military’s recent offensive against the militants. “We selected the army’s school for the attack because the government is targeting our families and females,” Muhammad Umar Khorasani told reporters. “We want them to feel the pain.”

Tuesday’s attack started around 10 a.m. local time, when gunmen entered the Army Public School and Degree College in Peshawar and opened fire on students and teachers. Security forces quickly rushed to the scene.”* The Young Turks hosts Cenk Uygur breaks it down.”

The Young Turks: “Even Other Terrorists Denounce Taliban School Attacks In Pakistan”

[Written by Michael Scollon, based on reporting from Peshawar by RFE/RL Radio Mashaal correspondent Zaland Yousufzai (RFE/RL) ]

Islamist militants have killed more than 140 people at a military-run school in Peshawar, most of them children, in a devastating assault Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif called a “national tragedy unleashed by savages.”

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — In the wake of a brazen mid-morning attack on an army-run school in Peshawar, students who survived described a massacre.

Ebad and other students were assembling at a school auditorium for first-aid training when the militants announced their arrival at Peshawar’s Army Public School with gunfire and explosions.

Bent on revenge for recent military operations in restive North Waziristan, a group of armed men belonging to the Tehrik-e-Taliban (TTP) burst into the room and began taking out students and teachers alike.

Ebad, a 10th-grade student, was one of the survivors of the attack, in which more than 125 were killed and 122 injured, the vast majority of them schoolchildren.

“It was 10:30 this morning when we were called to an auditorium to get first-aid training by an army colonel,” he said. “When we walked in, gunshots erupted and [the militants] entered the auditorium. They killed many students — I saw about 40 to 50 students killed in front of me — and they also fired at the colonel. There were bomb blasts, as well. I saw four or five [militants] dressed in plain black clothes.”

From there, Ebad said, the militants turned their focus to other classrooms, where some 500 students were studying.

“One of my colleagues breathed his last breath in my arms,” he said. “Many students were shot in the legs, the face, in the back.”

Anees was sitting in his fourth-grade classroom when his lessons were disrupted by the sound of gunfire.

“Our teacher said there was a drill outside. But when we looked outside, army soldiers entered our classroom and asked us to leave,” said Anees, who said he saw two attackers. “We ran out of the class as the teachers had ordered. A male and a female teacher were killed.”

Sixth-grader Hammad Ahmand said the militants entered the school disguised as security guards. Their faces covered, they entered the school cafeteria and began targeting students.

At first, Ahmand said, some of the older students thought it was a hoax — fellow students pretending to be militants.

“Then they started firing,” Ahmand said. “The boys ran away…then [the militants] went toward the classes and started entering the classrooms and firing.”

Mirrored from RFE/RL

Copyright (c) 2014. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Ste 400, Washington DC 20036.

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

Survivors Recount Pakistan School Attack | The New York Times

On Tuesday, six members of the Movement of Pakistani Taliban (Tehrik-i Taliban Pakistan or TTP) invaded a school for children run by the Pakistani army in Peshawar

The Pakistani military counter-attacked, with early reports of dozens killed and wounded in the cross fire. Some of the Taliban were wearing suicide bomb vests, and a loud explosion was heard from one of the school buildings.

Unlike the hostage-taking in Australia, which was just a tragedy produced by a lone nut-job, the attack in Peshawar has geopolitical implications and really is the work of persons organized to pressure civilians on policy by routinely blowing them up–the very definition of terrorism.

The Pakistani “Taliban” are a little bit of a misnomer. The word means ‘seminary student,’ and many of those Afghans who flocked to Mulla Omar in the late 1990s actually studied Muslim law and other disciplines. But the so-called Pakistani Taliban are just uneducated men from the Mahsoud tribe in southern Waziristan, an agency of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas [FATA]. People in Waziristan are Pushtuns, an ethnic group with its own language. Most Taliban derive from that ethnicity. Pakistan’s dominant ethnic group is the Punjabis.

Some of the tribesmen of Mahsoud only declared themselves members of the “Pakistani Taliban” in the early zeroes, whereas the Afghan Taliban went back to the 1990s. Many observers believe that the TTP or Pakistani Taliban were behind the assassination on Dec. 27, 2007, of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto. Also in North Waziristan is the Haqqani group of terrorists, who had been with the US against the Soviet Union but in 2001 turned on the US as occupiers.

The ambiguities of FATA are enough for a hundred John LeCarre novels. The Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence is accused of having used or wanted to use the militant Pakistani Taliban and Haqqani group for its own purposes, laying down a marker on the future of Afghanistan.

In 2009, soon after he came to office, President Barack Obama twisted the arm of then Pakistani president Asaf Ali Zardari (the widower of Benazir Bhutto). He succeeded in getting Zardari to launch a major operation against the Pakistani Taliban for the first time. The Pakistani military targeted many of the Mahsoud in South Waziristan, driving others to North Waziristan. The campaign secured some urban areas.

Since July of this year, the Pakistani air force has been bombing positions of the TTP or Pakistani Taliban in North Waziristan. The more aggressive policy was adopted by Prime Minsiter Nawaz Sharif of the Muslim League. He appears to be trying to build bridges to Afghanistan’s president Ashraf Ghani.

It is amazing that the US finally got what it wanted, a Pakistani government willing to send fighter jets to bomb the Pakistani Taliban. But that there has been almost no television coverage of this sea change.

*North* Waziristan had always been protected by military intelligence and so had become a haven for al-Qaeda offshoots. But in the past 6 months Pakistani army troops have killed nearly 2000 fighters and deeply disrupted what is left of the Pakistani Taliban. The group that took over the school complains of the perfidy of the government’s bombing.

So this school attack was the Pakistani Taliban taking revenge for the government’s disruption of their terrorist activities. This is not a sign of strength but of weakness, and they lashed out at a soft target. They are facing a major defeat. That is its significance.

Related video:

RT: “Taliban takes hundreds of students hostage in Pakistan school, scores killed”

Pakistan on Sunday launched another military operation — Zarb-e-Azb — against the extremists in Waziristan. The name of the operation means sharp and cutting or surgical. This is not the first such operation and perhaps will not be the last of its kind. But if this one is executed well, it may not warrant one for some time and it may give the beleaguered country an opportunity to recoup from the persistent terror attacks it faces nearly everyday.

This operation was inevitable given the public outrage at the dastardly attacks on Jinnah International airport in Karachi, which not only killed 26 military personnel and civilians but also underscored the dangerously fragile condition of security in Pakistan. The attack on Karachi airport clearly was a tipping point and the Nawaz Sharif government, which until now was willing to give diplomacy a chance, had to respond with use of force. Rhetoric aside, it remains to be seen how serious this military venture really is.

The military hopes to seriously damage the many extremist groups that operate out of this area.

Counter-Insurgency is Fraught with Peril

As Americans have discovered in Iraq and elsewhere popular insurgencies are hard to suppress. It is difficult to separate the civilian from the enemy; the innocent from the malignant and every misstep increases the intensity of the insurgency and undermines public support for use of force. Counter insurgency strategies, specially when employed at home also destroys the infrastructure of the nation, causes unemployment, slows the economy, exacerbates sectarianism, frightens away foreign investors and destroys internal and international trade.

Prolonged use of force also generates internally displaced refugees who will move away from the battle areas, towards Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad in search of safety. They will provide cover for flee militants and will bring the war to the very cities whose protection is the impetus for the military operation.

There are two fundamental problems with this operation. One, it assumes that the problem is geographically confined to Waziristan. The militancy has now infiltrated into urban areas and according to some reports a significant section of Karachi has been Talibanized. Action in Waziristan alone will not contain or roll it back.

Secondly Pakistan has undertaken this operation unilaterally. While Pakistani army has perhaps the best intelligence on the militants and most experience dealing with them and the power to hurt them, it will be much better if Pakistan works to developing a regional and a global coalition to fight this insurgency. Groups such as the Taliban (all varieties of them), Boko Haram, Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and the Al Qaeda are all manifestations of the same cancer that is eating away at the moral core of Muslim societies. While the damage they cause is local they do present a global threat and must be fought in concert rather than by host states alone.

A Global Coalition

That Pakistan has America’s support is obvious. The U.S. has been pushing Pakistan to launch such a measure for quite sometime now. Military and economic aid will flow and with it will come electronic intelligence and the inexorable reach of the dreaded drones. But limited international support will make it appear as if the Pakistani military is doing this for the US and will undermine the legitimacy of the operation and provide more ammunition for Taliban sympathizers to divert public anger towards the U.S.

But a global alliance that also includes EU, China and maybe even Turkey can strengthen the hand of the Pakistani government and impress upon the extremists and their supporters that they have the world to contend with and not just the weak political will of Nawaz Sharif. Many of these nations share Pakistan’s interest in curbing Muslim extremists everywhere and will not hesitate to support. A little diplomacy from Islamabad and a quiet word from Washington can crystallize such a coalition to help Pakistan.

A Regional Coalition against the Taliban

The Waziristan region in Pakistan has become a watering hole for extremists who threaten many countries. Besides Pakistan, India, Iran, and Afghanistan have strong interests in eliminating threats that emanate from this area. The problem is that most countries in the region feel that Pakistan is hunting with the hound and running with the hare at the same time.

Pakistan’s intelligence is suspected of nurturing many of the same groups for geopolitical reasons even as they threaten its own stability. This perception prevents Pakistan from developing closer relations with its neighbors who have the resources, the will, and the interest to help Pakistan become terror free.

A regional coalition will make the struggle against extremism more potent, more durable and less expensive, but it will take more than deft diplomacy to achieve. Pakistan must convince its neighbors that the alleged ties between the Pakistani state and the Taliban have been severed irreparably.

Perhaps the current operation will achieve that first step and help build the coalitions necessary to make the region safe.

Dr. Muqtedar Khan is Associate Professor at the University of Delaware and a Fellow of the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding. His website is www.ijtihad.org. His academic research can be found at https://udel.academia.edu/ MuqtedarKhan

Mirrored with author’s permission from HuffPo .

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

AFP: “Tens of thousands flee Pakistan offensive against Taliban”

Pakistan pounds ‘terrorist hideouts’ after Karachi attack (via AFP)

Pakistan carried out early morning air strikes Tuesday on a militant-infested tribal district, killing at least 15 people, the military said, a day after a brazen Taliban assault on Karachi airport. A military statement said “nine terrorist hideouts…

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ABC: “Taliban Claim Responsibility for Pakistan Airport Attack”