Populist political slogans over the years have distorted historical facts, and the above post did good to remember the actual situation back in 2001.
I would like to add a few more notes to the respected member's post (apologies for lengthy post).
Unlike today in 2026 where the US is a declining power largely exposed as an enabler of genocide, Post 9/11 the situation was quite different. It was a unipolar world. US had weaponized its victimhood to gain the full sympathy of the world, and had a carte blanche to conduct a military invasion wherever it deemed fit.
Predictably, the Indians went into overdrive, frantically lobbying for their "Pak is the epicenter of terror" propaganda. I remember the Indian govt even sent an urn with the water of the Taj Mahal as a tribute to the victims of 9/11. They made huge efforts to make Pak a military & economic target. From Pak's perspective, it would have been incredibly stupid & in fact suicidal to play into this Indian design.
Therefore Musharraf made his decision logically, but also hedged his strategic bets knowing the history and track record of the US, ensuring the survival of the Afghan resistance. The US accused him of "double dealing".
Why did Mush hedge his bets? Because the fact is that the US was also double dealing with Pakistan since day 1.
There are many reasons but one of the big ones was that Musharraf did not compromise on deepening relations with China, despite becoming a major US ally.
In 2002, Chinese Vice Premier visited Pakistan at ground breaking ceremony of Gwadar port. This is when construction of the port actually started. Followed by a major bilateral roadmap signed with CCP in 2003. Sure it was not under label of "CPEC" (which was essentially a marketing term launched in 2015 and all politicians have claimed credit for it). But practically, 2003 is when CPEC started with the construction of Gwadar. Balochistan coast was not only going to be a major economic conduit for both China & Pak's underdeveloped western regions, but also provided a "Plan B" to China to safeguard against the then emerging US strategy in the Indo-Pacific and South China Sea.
Musharraf played the game, befriending Bush to gain his trust. Pakistan also had a strategic leverage over the US due to its logistical dependence on Pak supply lines. But in the background, the US intelligence establishment with support from the rabid Karzai (and later Ghani) govt, and the dozen or so Indian consulates that suddenly sprung up along the Af-Pak border, started their covert actions. The US objective was to (a) build regional leverage over Pak to enable a policy of coercion if and when required and (b) keep Pak off balance in the context of the long term goal of building up India as a counter weight to China.
In 2002/2003, the defunct organization known as BLA resurged and started launching attacks with increasing frequency. I use the word "defunct" because BLA was originally a Soviet creation back in the Zia era. Back then, it was effectively neutralized through a combo of military action and tribal agreements. How come BLA suddenly got revived in 2002/2003? And why when Balochistan was finally getting a massive development project?
Then in 2004, the AQ Khan scandal emerged. I remember Time Magazine (was the biggest current affairs mag in those days, this was pre social media era) published a huge propaganda issue titled "Merchant of Death" in which the first time the boogeyman of Pakistan's "Islamic" bomb was brought into the Western public and policy discourse. A great deal of pressure was brought on Pak. We can argue about how Mush handled it, but whatever he did was in interest of protecting the nukes (and I believe AQK was not entirely innocent either, but that's a different topic). Later I also came to learn that US put immense pressure on Pak to abandon its tactical nuclear development program, but establishment strongly resisted it. This program was initially our main deterrent against India's emerging cold start doctrine - up until PAF modernization efforts started bearing fruit and Pak gained a qualitative edge in multi-domain ops.
Around this time, US had started putting the pieces in place to conduct actual military strikes within Pakistan. This is around the time UAV tech had really matured, giving intelligence agencies direct capability to conduct missions in what were deemed "frenemy" countries (by avoiding the potential embarrassment of having pilots shot down in an allied country). Musharraf had strongly resisted ISAF boots on the ground in Pak, stating that any counter terror ops required within Pak territory would be conducted by Pak army itself. Musharraf was largely successful in this aspect. However, India/Afg support to anti Pakistan terror groups grew exponentially with the blessing of the US. The intent was to bog down the Pak army & create a pretext for direct US actions on Pak soil. They started succeeding post 2006 (in my opinion thanks largely to political instability which weakened Musharraf's internal position, but that's debatable). A massive information warfare program was simultaneously launched to lionize elements like Akbar Bugti or the fanatics of Lal Masjid, creating a huge counter cost, and deterring a "hard" response by the state.
India was also encouraged by the US to utilize Iranian border areas to boost anti-Pak terror launchpads. While the covert support was always known, it was formalized in a brazen public agreement in 2015, allowing India to officially run Chabahaar. The US also granted sanctions waivers to provide a legal cover to it. I wonder why AIPAC & US establishment didn't oppose it, despite knowing it would directly fund Iran's military?
Net-net, the US was double dealing with Pak throughout its presence in Afghanistan.
It's easy to criticize Pak policy of that time and it certainly deserves its due share. But hindsight is always 20/20. The reality is that since 1947 Pak never had any good options in Afghanistan, only hard choices. Just imagine what the situation would be today had establishment not played its "double game". Afghanistan would still have a rabidly anti Pak govt, that much is certain. Not only that, but with the added headache of having an internationally recognized hostile govt controlling it, and that too directly protected by the US military. And there would still be terror attacks from Afghan soil on Pakistan. This would have been the real two front disaster for Pak. At least today Pakistan has the strategic autonomy to conduct military strikes across the border in response to the terror attacks. Today you have forces conducting ops deep inside Afg, would you have been able to do that with a US backed, internationally recognized govt sitting in Afg? And had the US not ended up in a quagmire in Afghanistan, it would have gained full strategic autonomy to shape the region as per its whims particularly vis a vis setting up India as the regional hegemon. We would be hard pressed to conduct Bunyan-ul-Marsoos style ops, and India would not have suffered the geopolitical reversals it has experienced since that point. To be clear, I'm not saying establishment policy post 9/11 was 100% correct, I'm just theorizing that the alternatives would have been just as unpredictable and almost certainly even more disastrous.
Who knew the idiotic Taliban would end up in the Indian camp post the US withdrawal. I suppose Pak underestimated the resurgence of that deep ethnonationalist malaise which has afflicted the Afghan national psyche since 1947. And overestimated its ability to control them. But what we have today is at least the strategic space to counter this threat at the source, and the current long overdue ops are a proof of that.
