One of the biggest foreign policy takeaways for India at the UN General Assembly meeting was the total isolation of Pakistan on the global stage. For the longest time, Pakistan willingly played the West’s buffer to curtail the regional ambitions of India and the USSR. The Great Game is finally over, leaving Islamabad to deal with the terror demons it raised. The top dollar US doles it diverted to fund its global jihad project have dried out and left the nation battling penury on its own.
If the Biden administration had any interest in keeping Islamabad afloat with aid to encourage orderly transfer of power in Afghanistan, it evaporated with the installation of the Taliban regime and the power grab by the Haqqani network in Kabul facilitated by Pakistan’s deep state, pushing the relatively moderate Mullah Baradar to the sidelines. India played its part in building the narrative over the years by highlighting the neighbour’s use of terror as an instrument of state policy. New Delhi’s sharply-worded riposte to Pakistan PM Imran Khan raking up Kashmir at the UNGA meet, using the right to reply, calling it an arsonist disguised as a firefighter captured the duplicity eloquently.
US Vice President Kamala Harris herself referred to Pakistan’s terror sanctuary during her one-on-one with visiting PM Narendra Modi, indicating the change in mood in Washington. That Modi had a summit meeting with President Biden apart from participating in the multilateral Quad summit must have been galling for Islamabad’s Army and its puppet PM. More so as Biden hasn’t even spoken to Imran ever since his return to the White House, not even during the height of the Afghan crisis. Given the diplomatic slap, Imran chose to address the UNGA through a pre-recorded speech instead of an in-person visit. He naively wondered in his speech why his nation was out of the aid basket, though the global community pledged support for Afghanistan’s civil society.
That Pakistan is no longer clubbed with India is old news; it is now hyphenated with the brutal Taliban regime it incubated. How that would manifest in Kashmir and elsewhere as the nation manages the domestic fallout of drop in external aid, and the FATF, the terror funding watchdog, remains to be seen.