By Lt. General P.C. Katoch (Retd) Former Director General of Information Systems, Indian Army

It is interesting to watch the realignment of radical organizations in the Af-Pak region, not that this has not been happening elsewhere. Pakistan's military of course is adept in such orchestrations with the ISI (100 percent military) linked with some 14 major terrorist organizations globally, particularly of South Asia. Change of name itself needs no special art, for example, the Jamat-ud-Dawa (JuD) is no surrogate child of the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) but the LeT with different name. Talking of proxies, the mother-of-all proxies in the region is Pakistan itself whose military is ready to bend backwards to both US and China depending on which way the wind is blowing, even surrendering whole regions to the latter at the cost of sovereignty. Pakistani military thinks it has derived strategic value by making her proxies available to both US and China notwithstanding the fact that the institutionalized radicalization is taking the country down the vortex of terror.

In the process Pakistan is now riding a tiger that perhaps is crossed with a donkey which periodically kicks up its hind legs. Little wonder then that Agha H Amin, defence analyst and former Pakistan army officer described the Pakistan scene post US withdrawal from Afghanistan as, "Pakistani politicians will remain the puppets of the military; terrorism will remain a tool of foreign policy while the Pakistani military runs the Pakistani state under a facade of PPP or PML or Tehrik-i-Insaaf. Pakistani military will be hoping to achieve all its objectives: an extremist dominated Afghanistan; a Baluchistan fully fragmented and crushed; a Pakistani political party leading Pakistan fully subservient to the Pakistani military; renewed infiltration in Kashmir; brinkman's nuclear policy with India; a greater Chinese vassal with far greater Chinese interests in Pakistan... There is no doubt that Pakistan will be a semi autonomous Chinese province by 2030 or so... Pakistani Baluchistan by 2030 would be a completely Chinese run show... This means that Pakistan's... ever growing reservoir of economically deprived youngsters who will fill ranks of extremists and suicide bombers will continue". So, take a look at the radical scene in Af-Pak. Chinese were training the Taliban on Chinese soil even before the US invasion of Afghanistan.

If China has been nurturing the Taliban to safeguard her economic and geostrategic interests in Af-Pak, Pakistan's TTP has been helping the West by assisting Al Nusra to dislodge Syrian President Basar-al-Assad, while Iran has been training Taliban to help Assad remain in place. There are strong links between both the Taliban despite protracted Pakistani efforts to portray they are daggers drawn. When Obama declared the US-NATO drawdown from Afghanistan in 2009, the Afghanis were protesting that the US is subcontracting Afghanistan to Pakistan. That situation perhaps left Ashraf Ghani no choice but to throw his lot with Pakistan. Even if Ghani had not taken this course, Pakistan had already launched the Zarb-e-Azb with the main aim of pushing the TTP and part of the 20 Mujahid battalions trained during 2013-2014 to operate in guise of Taliban into Afghanistan. It is little wonder that the Afghan Ministry of Defence recently stated that of every 10 terrorists fighting in Afghanistan are foreigners from Pakistan, China, Central Asia, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Middle East.

But the fact remains that by November 2014, Pakistan had already pushed some 2,50,000 'refugees' into Afghanistan ostensibly mixed with task forces to attain her strategic depth. To pacify Afghanis accusing US of subcontracting Afghanistan to Pakistan, Obama offered the sweet pill to Ashraf Ghani that Pakistan would be able to persuade Taliban to join the Afghan government, despite US having failed to do so. American scholars admit they don't expect Pakistan has the ability to do so. Ayman-al-Zawahiri had declared his support to Afghan Taliban last year. The ISIS, which is a CIA proxy, is making steadfast entry into the Af-Pak region and while factions of TTP had already declared their allegiance to the ISIS, factions of Afghan Taliban have started doing so. Interestingly, an ISIS delegation visited Baluchistan last September, meeting up with Jundullah who have been executing cross-border raids into Iran. Earlier this year a high level meeting was held in Saudi Arabia of senior level ISIS officials with ISIS heads of Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan. Little wonder, that attacks in Afghanistan by the IMU (Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan) are on the increase. One can expect radical realignments as a continuing phenomenon but the bottom-line is that the region is in for much more violence and instability.