Teams are based on Patronage, not being Pashtu
Many Pashtu individuals, tribes and families did not have patronage under the Taliban that do under the current Northern Alliance-based government.
Second; Pakistan will always see it to be an absolutely existential vital national interest to exercise influence into Afghanistan through their shared Pashto population. So it has been, so it will always be. Get over it. We are the interlopers from afar. Interlopers who worked with this "devil's spawn" during our first foray into this region when our interest in thwarting Soviet occupation of Afghanistan aligned with the Pakistan interest of having influence over that same space and populations.
Now we work with the same Afghans we worked against during "Charlie Wilson's War"; and equally are at cross purposes with former and current Pakistan allies. We demand that Pakistan act against their vital national interests. Then we get pissed when they drag their heels in doing something that they knew would be horribly disruptive to their national stability; and then we blamed the instability that followed once they finally did what we coerced them into doing on their slowness and half-hearted efforts, rather than recognizing that it was because of what we asked them to do, not how they were going about doing it.
None of this is about who is "right" or who is "wrong" - there are always winners and losers and in this patronage-based society it is very nearly a zero-sum game. Winners and losers have flipped several times over the past 40 years as a result of Western meddling, and it has created even more chaos and enmity than the traditional norm as so many have been on both the winning and the losing side, often more than once, in their lifetime. Very different than if one lives their life as seeing being on the outside as the norm. Their is far less acceptance of being squeezed out, particularly when one can reasonably rationalize that "but for" the help of some foreign power, one would still be on top.
This is not about fact and American interests. This is about perception and the interests of the people, families, tribes and nations that actually live there. We've read this one wrong from the start, and then have overly focused on forcing our ill-conceived solution to work, rather than adjusting to a more realistic solution based on the place where we actually are and reality as it actually is - and then making that work.
That is the real lesson of the Brits in Malaya. They went to Malaya to execute plan A, restore the colony; the Brits then succeeded once they gave up on plan A as infeasible and instead implemented plan B, enabling the creation of the common wealth nation of Malaysia that was much more inclusive of ethnic Indian and Chinese populations.
We need a plan B if we want to "succeed" as well. Sometimes winning is folding a losing hand and drawing new cards. We just keep throwing more money into the pot and blaming the other players with better cards for not folding. That doesn't make our cards any better.
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