The empire’s orphans: Pakistan and Afghanistan in the ruins of American strategy

President Reagan with Afghan Mujahideen

Oval Office in 1983

Afghanistan and Pakistan are once again at war, each claiming to have struck devastating blows against the other. Kabul says hundreds of Pakistani soldiers lie dead; Islamabad responds with air raids deep inside Afghan territory. 

It is a grotesque irony—two nations that once fought together in the name of faith and freedom now destroy each other in the name of security. But this is not a new tragedy. It is the final act in a drama written long ago by Washington’s pen and executed with Islamabad’s hand.

Since the 1970s, Pakistan has served as the principal instrument of American power in South Asia. It was in Pakistan’s madrassas and military camps that the jihad against the Soviets was conceived, funded, and armed. The United States provided the dollars, and Pakistan provided the zeal. 

In the 1980s, Pakistani generals and politicians openly celebrated their role as “the sword arm of the free world.” They spoke of Afghanistan as their “strategic depth,” a phrase that revealed both ambition and arrogance. The Taliban, born from the refugee camps of Peshawar, was not an accident of history; it was Islamabad’s deliberate project—what its leaders once proudly called their greatest foreign-policy achievement.

The destruction of Afghanistan was thus not merely collateral damage of the Cold War; it was the intended price of Pakistan’s regional fantasies. When the Soviet Union fell, the West walked away, but Pakistan stayed, cultivating the Taliban as a tool of control over its war-scarred neighbor. 

Through the 1990s, Pakistani advisers shaped Kabul’s policies, its economy, even its ideology. Afghanistan was reduced to a protectorate in everything but name. What was once an ancient civilization became an experimental ground for geopolitical engineering.

Then came 9/11. The monster that Pakistan had built and America had sponsored turned against its makers. Washington called for Pakistan’s help once more, and the generals in Rawalpindi obliged—turning on their own creation with one hand while secretly shielding it with the other. 

This double game defined the next two decades. The U.S. poured billions into Pakistan’s military and intelligence networks, only to discover that the Taliban’s sanctuaries lay across the border in Pakistani territory. Islamabad played both arsonist and fireman, ensuring that the flames never died completely. The longer the fire burned, the more aid flowed.

When America finally withdrew from Afghanistan in August 2021, it left behind the same Taliban it had overthrown twenty years earlier. The circle was complete. The irony was cruel: Pakistan had again helped bring the Taliban to power—only to find itself their next target. Today’s war between Kabul and Islamabad is not a clash of civilizations or religions; it is the implosion of a forty-year deceit. 

The Taliban’s protégés in Pakistan, the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), are now laying siege to their old patrons. The “strategic depth” has become a strategic grave.

The deeper tragedy is that both Pakistan and Afghanistan have spent half a century mistaking servitude for strategy. They fought wars not for their people, but for the illusions of empire—first Soviet, then American. The geography of their suffering has remained constant: villages bombed, schools closed, refugees displaced, futures erased. The Americans left, but their architecture of dependency remained. Pakistan’s generals still see power through foreign eyes, and Afghanistan’s rulers still wield it through borrowed guns.

History offers its verdict without emotion. Nations that build their politics on the approval of outsiders end up fighting wars they never truly chose. Pakistan may blame Kabul for harboring terrorists; Kabul may denounce Islamabad’s airstrikes. But both are prisoners of a past they helped create. The smoke rising over the Durand Line today is not just the sign of a border at war—it is the funeral pyre of sovereignty sacrificed to ambition.

Until Pakistan and Afghanistan free themselves from the ghosts of American patronage and their own delusions of control, they will continue to fight not for territory, but for the very meaning of independence. For now, they remain the empire’s orphans—armed, abandoned, and endlessly at war with themselves.