By Khaled Ahmed Pakistan has not learned its lessons from its intervention in Afghanistan in pursuit of 'strategic depth'.
But one can sense the blowback of that strategy from the internal turmoil it is facing these days.
Pak-Afghan relations were never smooth.
Afghanistan was the revisionist neighbouring state, but Pakistan never felt threatened by it.
The condition of 'not feeling threatened' has shaped Pakistan's policy towards Afghanistan with consequences.
Since Pakistan was the stronger status quo power vis-…-vis Afghanistan, it tended to ignore its revisionism.
The other reason for this neglect was Pakistan's own much more self-threatening revisionism vis-…-vis a "status quo" India.
Two revisionist nationalisms: Nationalism kept Pakistan facing India-ward.
The revisionist Afghan state in the west should have been seen as the real long-term danger in relation to Pakistan's Tribal Areas.
Pakistan had influence in Kabul and it had an economic hold over Jalalabad, the border city nearest to Pakistan.
It thus trumped other neighbours who controlled Herat and Mazar-e-Sharif but were distant from Kabul.
The Cold War kept Pakistan out of trouble as the United States and the Soviet Union competed for Kabul's attention.
The Soviet Union was soon to make its blunder of walking in, followed soon by Pakistan with its own 'proxy' blunder.
The Soviet Union 'owned' Mazar-e-Sharif, which gave it the illusion of owning Afghanistan.
It walked into Afghanistan after 'communist' Afghans, educated in Moscow, took Kabul and then started killing one another.
The other 'owners' of Afghan border cities got ready to confront the Soviet incursion.
The United States wanted to avenge Vietnam; it too weighed in.
When the Soviets were defeated and made to run away, Pakistan thought, wrongly, that it had won the war.
It looked at Afghanistan as a trophy- a revisionist trophy now to be hung on the wall in Islamabad.
Pakistan finds 'strategy' in Afghanistan: Pakistan had lost all the wars in the east because of the mandated 'nationalist-revisionist' ban on strategic thinking.
It thought it had finally won the war in Afghanistan in 1989, fighting with mercenaries funded by the US and Saudi Arabia.
It extended this solipsism to Kashmir and deployed the same non-state 'militias' there.
When the blowback struck Pakistan in the 1990s, both ventures started to resemble another defeat.
The blowback came in the shape of loss of internal sovereignty.
A kind of duplication of the 'domain of disorder' in Afghanistan became evident.
After a number of defeats against India, Pakistani officers began vaguely to hint at the need to have a strategy.
It did not happen.
Instead India forced Pakistan to adopt the doctrine of 'strategic depth' which was to be located in Afghanistan.
It meant annexing Afghanistan - once again through proxy warriors - and running it through puppets.
Afghanistan seduced Pakistan the same way it had the British (1842) and the Russians (1979).
In 2001, Pakistan got the second blowback when the Taliban were routed, and this could be terminal, like the one the Russians got.
The dynamic of not feeling loss of territory: Meanwhile, Pakistan collected another defeat at Kargil in 1999 before it could collect its wits and cope with what was coming next from the western border.
The government fell, as if in imitation of what had happened in Moscow earlier.
The second blowback was the loss of the tribal 'buffers' and the beginning of the creeping process of Talibanisation threatening areas as far inland as Islamabad.
The state was responding positively to the nihilism of Islamic doctrines.
The 'buffer' defeated the Pakistan army in 2006 in the only war it had fought after the defeat of 1971.
(Kargil was fought by 'freedom-fighters' and irregulars.) The 'loss of territory' in Waziristan is not felt in Pakistan the same way as the loss of territory at Siachen, a territory it doesn't own.
This is because of the trained Pakistani mind which minimises the threat from the western border.
No longer able to think rationally under the spur of an increasingly irrelevant anti-India nationalism, Pakistanis, official and non-official, have succumbed to the 'domain of disorder' syndrome.
They want the ISAF-NATO and US forces out of Pakistan, thinking that this would restore Pakistan's former dominant position and oust India.
Pakistan after ouster of NATO from Afghanistan: The ouster of NATO from Afghanistan will alter the ethnic-demographic balance in favour of the Pushtuns and will bring about a much empowered Pushtun population by reason of a 'merger' with the Pushtuns of Pakistan's Tribal Areas.
A condominium of Taliban and Al Qaeda will stand behind this new balance.
This will cause the non-Pushtun ethnic entities to come together with 'foreign' help from Afghanistan's Muslim neighbours.
The battle lines will be redrawn between the Pushtun south and the non-Pushtun north, including the Shia province of Bamyan being ruled by a lady Hazara governor these days.
Because of an imbalance of forces introduced by the Taliban and Al Qaeda elements from Pakistan, Iran and Uzbekistan, backed by some distant sympathisers like India and Russia, will stage interventions to prevent Pakistan from taking advantage of the situation.
Pakistan has not learned its lessons from its intervention in Afghanistan in pursuit of 'strategic depth'.
But one can sense the blowback of that strategy from the internal turmoil it is facing these days.
Pakistan doesn't control its vast tribal territories.
If NATO is ousted from Afghanistan, Pakistan too will be overrun by a much strengthened Taliban-Al Qaeda combine.
Just as Pakistan is hinterland to the Taliban's forays into Afghanistan, Afghanistan will become hinterland to forays into Pakistan till a clerical-jihadist state is established here.
Politics of taking on undefeatable foes: Pakistan doesn't recognise the Line of Control in Kashmir as a permanent border.
This is pivotal to its revisionism against India.
But Afghanistan doesn't recognise the entire Pak-Afghan border, making it the basis of its revisionism against Pakistan.
Pakistan has destabilised itself by taking on a much bigger India it can't defeat.
It is moot who first converted itself into a domain of disorder in pursuit of its revisionist nationalism.
Afghan President Karzai says it is Pakistan; Pakistan President Musharraf says it is Afghanistan.
There is a solution in the distance, vague and dangerous.
Pakistan's anti-India nationalism is no longer consensual; Afghan revisionist nationalism is not shared by the non-Pashtuns of the north.
Relieved from the East, Pakistan army can concentrate on breakaway Waziristan.
(Troops sent to Waziristan recently have been withdrawn from Azad Kashmir).
Afghanistan may bisect itself to survive.
