Over the past fortnight, Indians and Pakistanis experienced something that was at once both familiar and unexpected. Pakistan’s relationship with the Afghan government nearly blew up over the intensifying extremist insurgency in Pakistan’s border area; a Pakistani airstrike in Kabul led to a shooting match between Afghan and Pakistani soldiers along the border, which was then shut. The two sides agreed to a ceasefire on Wednesday, but amid the violence Afghanistan’s top diplomat was courted by India with a visit to New Delhi.
Tension between Kabul and Islamabad – and friendship between Kabul and New Delhi at Islamabad’s expense – has been a consistent dynamic between the three capitals for nearly a century. What has been unexpected, though, is that this dynamic has persisted even after Afghanistan fell to the Taliban – a group that since its inception was, in large part, funded, trained and armed by Pakistan.
Nonetheless, the events of the past fortnight had been brewing for four years, since the Taliban took power. And they suggest that unless Wednesday's ceasefire can be converted into a permanent resolution, the region is heading towards escalating mutual tension, destabilisation and violence that is almost independent of who is leading any of these countries.
From Islamabad’s perspective, this problematic dynamic was supposed to have been fixed when the Taliban took power. Afghanistan’s ruling classes had questioned the legitimacy of Pakistan from its birth in 1947, particularly its inheritance of borders and populations from the British empire. The result was persistent insecurity on Pakistan’s part about its western frontier, especially when Kabul collaborated with the Indian government. The civil war in Afghanistan to oust the country’s communist government in the 1980s offered an exciting new opportunity for Islamabad. Although the communists had chased away the traditional Afghan elites, it seemed clear that they were too unpopular to survive. Pakistan planned to ensure that Kabul would be liberated by an Islamist regime that would always share an ideological affinity with Pakistan and an allergy to India.
These plans appeared to succeed in 1992, in 1996 and, most recently, in 2021 when the Taliban overthrew the post-9/11 Afghan Republic. But if anything, Afghanistan’s Taliban has been a huge disappointment to Islamabad. This is partly because a related group of insurgents comprised of co-ethnics in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK) province, Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), has come roaring back to life since the fall of Kabul. Worse still, it has been operating out of safe havens in areas of Afghanistan dominated by the Haqqani Network, a militant group under the Taliban umbrella which had distinguished itself since the late 1980s as Pakistan’s most useful asset in the country.
Despite the vast differences in their ideology, Afghanistan’s social contract has always demanded its governments – royalist, communist, democratic and now Islamist – be dominated by ethnic Pashtuns. And they have all felt compelled to support their fellow Pashtuns engaged in violent struggles against the Pakistani state in KPK. Whenever Kabul has been punished or threatened by Pakistan for this, all of its successive governments have inevitably turned to New Delhi for backup.
Despite the years that the Haqqani Network spent during the most recent Afghan civil war repeatedly targeting Indian consulates and personnel in Afghanistan with suicide bombers and snatch squads, after becoming Interior Minister in August 2022 Sirajuddin Haqqani has been a pioneer in building diplomatic relations with India. Islamabad has since cancelled the Pakistani passport it had quietly given him years ago, and in fact most major Pakistani airstrikes in the last two years have been on Haqqani strongholds where TTP elements have safe havens.
It should be remembered that between 1996 and 2001 the US government was unable to either bribe or coerce the Taliban into expelling Osama bin Laden and the rest of Al Qaeda despite its best efforts. Pakistan is unlikely to be any more successful in its demands to the Taliban regarding the TTP. If anything, Pakistan’s dilemmas are even sharper than the American ones were. Attempts to generate economic pressure on the Taliban by closing border crossings have deeply alienated many on the Pakistani side who depend on the cross-border trade for their livelihoods. This anger is particularly significant given that the insurgency is the strongest in the formerly semi-autonomous “tribal areas” that were merged with KPK in 2018. These areas lost their degree of independence without gaining much new infrastructure and development, and with little prospect of catching up.
But Afghanistan is itself in an extremely shaky situation. Hunger increasingly stalks much of the country, and local commanders are often deeply frustrated by the central leadership’s indifference to their concerns. Under these circumstances, it is likely Pakistan will turn to a mix of strategies from different eras; harder border controls and air strikes, combined with the search for local allies on the Afghan side of the border who can establish buffer zones in exchange for everything from medical treatment to education.
Significantly, Pakistan is likely to have some support from US President Donald Trump in any such efforts. Although it was the first Trump administration that negotiated the agreement for a US withdrawal from Afghanistan, Mr Trump has subsequently come to see his successor Joe Biden’s fulfilment of that treaty as a catastrophic error and has mused on the need to re-establish a US presence there.
As I wrote in my column here after the 88-hour air war between India and Pakistan in May of this year, there is now a worrying tendency for India and Pakistan alike to escalate to the use of conventional military force alongside covert escalation. The growing closeness of India and the Taliban means these tendencies will add ever more risk and unpredictability to regional crises.
If the Afghan-Pakistan conflict continues to grow, the Taliban may pursue other opportunities to apply pressure on Pakistan. Afghanistan also shares a border with Pakistan’s restive Balochistan province, where the Baloch Liberation Army’s (BLA) separatist insurgency continues to intensify. The Taliban would not be alone in these troubled waters. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his national security adviser, Ajit Doval, have publicly expressed support for the Baloch, and the Pakistani military increasingly seems willing to retaliate against India for events in the province. What is particularly worrying is that the BLA has increasingly made it a policy to target Chinese citizens and assets in Pakistan for attack, something the TTP has also often done, although more opportunistically.
Ultimately, Pakistan’s leaders should recognise that while it is tempting to follow the American style of counterterrorism from the air (which Pakistani cable TV loves just as much as its American counterpart) the costs are likely to be much higher, and the returns even lower. Instead, decades of experience suggest that what would work is restoring the badly damaged credibility of parliamentary politics and addressing the grassroots developmental challenges of KPK’s former tribal areas and Balochistan. While this may not make for the most satisfying television spectacle, it will ultimately provide the only truly sustainable form of national defence.
