Taliban Tough on Afghans, But Fearful of Pakistan
A lion at home, a fox outside.
This proverb is used for someone who acts tyrannically and aggressively toward those inside the home and close to them, but is timid and ashamed in front of outsiders. Do you know how many Afghans the Taliban have killed in the 32 years since their emergence? How many suicide attacks have they carried out against Afghans? How many Afghan people have they assassinated? How many Afghan women and children have been killed in Taliban indiscriminate attacks? How many public-benefit facilities, including bridges and roads in their own country, has this group destroyed? Only God knows the numbers and figures.
At present, this group also shows no leniency or tolerance toward its own compatriots and brutally suppresses even the smallest protest. At the moment, dozens of Afghan citizens are in prison simply for the slightest criticism of the Taliban, but when it comes to foreign violations, including by Pakistan, of Afghanistan’s territory, the Taliban seem to have their hands and feet bound in chains and, out of fear, show the slightest reaction.
Perhaps in the next few hours or days, the Taliban will fire a few bullets in border areas against Pakistani forces and kill a few of their own ethnic kin on the other side of the border instead of Punjabis, but they will not do anything else that would make Pakistan no longer dare to attack Afghanistan.
The Taliban’s fear of Pakistan has many and various reasons, which there is no room to explain in this note, but one of them is that Pakistan’s intelligence agency holds the Taliban’s confidential files and documents, and even those of their fathers. If the Taliban make the slightest move against Pakistan, the ISI puts together what they have done and what they have not done. In common parlance, the Taliban are subservient to Pakistan, and for that reason, they cannot take any serious action against Pakistan. This is where the proverb ‘a lion at home, a fox outside’ or ‘a desert fox’ becomes meaningful.
Mohammad Moradi
