We are neither economists nor diplomats; one of us is a soldier, the other a mechanic. What follows is not a technical trade analysis but a raw, unvarnished argument, one we believe demands the attention of the credentialed minds inside Pakistan’s Foreign Office and economic ministries, because we suspect none of them has had the nerve or clarity to make it in thirty-five years. On December 26, 1991, the Soviet Union formally ceased to exist. Fifteen new flags went up, fifteen new anthems were written, and thirty-five years later it is worth asking what that moment actually cost, who helped pay for it, and who has collected the dividend since. On December 26, 1991, the Soviet Union formally ceased to exist. Fifteen new flags went up, fifteen new anthems were written, and thirty-five years later it is worth asking what that moment actually cost, who helped pay for it, and who has collected the dividend since.

Pakistan’s contribution to that story is real and documented, even if it rarely gets said this plainly. Through the 1980s, Pakistan was the frontline state of the Soviet-Afghan war in the fullest sense of that phrase. It was not merely a transit corridor. The mujahideen who eventually fought the Soviet Army to a standstill were recruited, sheltered, and trained on Pakistani soil in Peshawar, in the tribal belt, in camps that turned scattered Afghan resistance factions into a sustained fighting force. The United States funded and armed that effort through Operation Cyclone, and the Gulf states matched Washington’s money, but no American soldier ever fired a shot at a Soviet soldier in Afghanistan. It was Pakistan’s territory, Pakistan’s training infrastructure, and ultimately Afghan and Pakistani-trained fighters who did the dying and the fighting on the ground, while hosting more than three million Afghan refugees on top of it.

That decade-long war is widely regarded by historians as Moscow’s “Soviet Vietnam”: a drain on manpower, morale, and treasury that compounded the economic stagnation, the falling oil revenues, and the nationalist pressures already pulling at the Soviet system from within and the frontline state that made the war possible was Pakistan, not Washington. It is a hard fact that  Pakistan was a genuine, costly, and underacknowledged contributor to the pressure that broke the Soviet state, and it paid for that role in blood, in refugees, and in the long........

© The Friday Times