The Pakistani Nuclear Horn emerges as a winner: Revelation 8

Buying Taliban flags outside the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Sunday.Victor J. Blue for The New York Times

Pakistan emerges as a winner. What will it do now?

Aug. 27, 2021

Just days after the Taliban took Kabul, their flag was flying high above a central mosque in Pakistan’s capital. It was an in-your-face gesture intended to spite the defeated Americans — and a sign of the real victors in the 20-year Afghan war.

Pakistan was ostensibly America’s partner in the war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. But it was a relationship rived by duplicity and divided interests from its very start after 9/11. Pakistan’s intelligence service nurtured and protected Taliban assets inside Pakistan through the course of the war.