Description
This article illuminates how Pakistan’s Islamization and militarization affected the course of the Afghan-Soviet War. It examines the colonial afterlives of the Duran frontier in energizing subsequent eras of conflictual global encounters, and connects the struggles for Pakistan with planetary transformations. US intervention in the war secured an effective outcome in the short term, defeating the Soviets. Less well recognized is how operations were shaped by Pakistani state and non-state actors, whereby the outcome of the Afghan-Soviet war was shaped by a longer history of Cold War conflict in Pakistan, that saw the onslaught of the state and religious right on left forces within Pakistan, allowing Pakistan to become a laboratory for Cold War militarization and as a launch pad for the US supported Mujahideen insurgency. More broadly, this study asks how is it that complexity defeats strength in world politics, by arguing that the Pakistan-Afghan borderlands were animated by Colonial and Cold War struggles, that animated and internationalized Pakistani political forces in world historical ways, during the Afghan-Soviet War. It argues that the only we we can examine how Pakistanis shaped the late Cold War, is by accessing these Colonial and Cold War afterlives, and through reflecting on the particular universalisms, geographies and temporalities of Pakistani political forces, their worldviews and conflicts, that connected them so deeply to political forces and struggles in West Asia and in Afghanistan.
