Pakistan's Afghan policy bearing bitter fruit: Meraj

Former Afghan President Dr. Najeebullah’s prediction, which he made 30 years ago, had proved right as Pakistan was sinking in the quagmire it had created for Afghanistan by supporting Americans in a bid to bring about the downfall of the former Soviet Union, said Meraj Muhammad Khan, one of the founding fathers of the PPP in the tumultuous political era of mid-sixties, in an interview with The Nation at his DHA residence here on Tuesday.

“Dr. Najeeb had especially invited me to Kabul for a personal meeting to explain his point of view on the events that unfolded after the ouster of Daud Khan. In the meeting, Najeeb frankly discussed Pakistan’s intervention in Afghanistan’s internal affairs. He talked in detail about Pakistan’s overt and covert involvement and its supportive role to the opponents of the then Afghan regime by providing them guns and training”, he added.

Meraj said Najeebullah had predicted that what Pakistan rulers were sowing in Afghanistan at that time, would have to reap it in their own country in the future. That dark prediction is unfolding on the far western borders of Pakistan. Pakistan is reaping the bitter harvest, said veteran politician while referring to the suicide bombings, particularly in the upper northern parts of the country.

Dr. Najeeb’s claim about Pakistan supporting anti-Afghanistan forces was later confirmed by none other than the person who was the lynchpin of the entire sordid and gruesome acts, the former ISI head General (Retd) Hamid Gul. Gul, who blatantly admitted in his interviews both in the print and electronic media that Pakistan had trained and financially fuelled the US-backed jihad against Soviet Union and later supported the Taliban during what he called the so-called “war of liberation” during Afghan war.

The Soviet Union withdrew troops from Afghanistan in the lifetime of Dr. Najeeb but Pakistan continued its intervention and propped up a new force called Taliban. Now Pakistan, toeing the US line, has declared the very Taliban as international terrorists and poured its men and material to eliminate them from inside its own territories, Khan maintained.People in the NWFP were peace-loving though being tribal, but now due to wrong policies of the successive rulers at the behest of America, the sovereignty of Pakistan is at stake and uncertainty and terrorism has spread beyond Dir and Swat and has reached the federal capital, Islamabad, he added.