WASHINGTON—The US Afghanistan War Commission has requested Pakistan’s perspective on the two-decade conflict, formally inviting the examination’s most resourceful student to serve as its external examiner.
Pakistan submitted a 600-page response stating that it had supported every American objective, particularly the ones that contradicted each other. The document described Taliban leaders found on Pakistani soil as “weather-related guests” and said Osama bin Laden’s Abbottabad residence had been overlooked because the neighborhood contained several houses.
Commission staff praised Islamabad’s unique ability to be indispensable to solving problems that became more indispensable after its assistance.
“We supplied routes for NATO trucks, arrested selected militants and repeatedly expressed surprise at the remaining militants,” former Pakistani intelligence chief Asad Durrani testified. “This was not duplicity. It was a balanced foreign policy with two receipts.”
The commission also sought views from current US officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, who agreed Pakistan had deceived Washington but stressed that Washington had continued paying because discovering this annually was an important source of institutional continuity.
Afghans were invited to contribute during a final listening session scheduled between the report’s printing and disposal. Witnesses were asked to limit twenty years of funerals, displacement and abandoned promises to three minutes, including translation.
The draft conclusion reportedly finds that no single country lost the war. Pakistan achieved strategic depth, America achieved strategic departure, the Taliban achieved Ashraf Ghani’s presidential palace, and Afghanistan achieved the perspective necessary to understand why nobody will be held responsible.
The commission will now determine what went wrong by consulting everyone who benefited from not knowing.