The Pakistan-Taliban divorce gets messy
The statement issued by Afghanistan's Taliban government denouncing the recent terrorist attack in the Indian resort of Pahalgam, in Jammu and Kashmir, was eye-opening. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs conveyed condolences to the families of the overwhelmingly Indian victims — 26 civilians — emphasizing that such attacks jeopardize regional security. The implicit rebuke of the terrorists' handlers in Pakistan has not gone unnoticed.
This is hardly the first sign of the Taliban's growing estrangement from their erstwhile backers in Pakistan. In fact, by the end of last year, relations had deteriorated enough that Pakistan's Special Representative for Afghanistan, Muhammad Sadiq Khan, headed to Kabul for talks with senior Taliban leaders, ostensibly to ease tensions. But while he was there, on Dec. 24, the Pakistan Air Force carried out strikes against alleged Pakistani Taliban — officially known as the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) — targets in Afghanistan's Paktika province, killing 46 people. The strike was viewed as retribution for a Dec. 21 TTP attack that resulted in the deaths of 16 Pakistani soldiers.
Three days later, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry, who leads Pakistan's Inter-Services Public Relations directorate, delivered a grim report: Some 383 officers and soldiers in Pakistan's security forces had lost their lives in counter-terrorism operations over the preceding year. He also claimed that approximately 925 terrorists, including members of the TTP, had been eliminated in around 60,000 intelligence-based operations. The TTP, he pointed out, had been targeting Pakistan and its citizens, while enjoying a safe haven in Afghanistan.
The statement hung heavy with irony, given Pakistan's long history of providing logistical, military and moral support to both the Afghan Taliban and the associated Haqqani Network during their campaigns against the previous Afghan government and American forces, culminating in the Taliban's return to power in Afghanistan in 2021. What a difference a few years makes. (It is worth noting that India does not officially recognize the Taliban as representing the Afghan people.)
On Dec. 28, the conflict escalated further with Afghanistan's Ministry of Defense announcing and claiming responsibility for attacks on multiple locations inside Pakistan in retaliation for the air strikes. Interestingly, the Afghan government refrained from explicitly acknowledging that it was targeting Pakistani territory, instead saying that attacks were being carried out beyond the 'hypothetical line,' a reference to the colonial-era border, known as the Durand Line, which no Afghan government has recognized.
While things seem to have cooled off since then, the limits of Pakistan's influence over its former proxies are now starkly apparent. Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency spent decades nurturing, sheltering, arming, training and financing the Taliban, which it used as a proxy of Pakistan's security establishment. Though the Pakistani military was aware of a certain intransigence among the Taliban, it consistently treated the group as a means of exerting control over Afghanistan and achieving 'strategic depth' against India. When the Afghan Taliban captured Kabul in August 2021, Pakistan celebrated with unconcealed glee.
But as Dr. Frankenstein discovered, you cannot always control the monsters you create. For Pakistan, neither coercion nor diplomacy has proved effective. The problem is that Pakistan's military has been deemed insufficiently Islamist by the militants it has spawned. The TTP is now determined to do to Pakistan what its parent did to Afghanistan: take over the government and turn the country into an Islamist theocracy. And given their ideological affinities, the Afghan Taliban may well be helping the TTP pursue that goal.
Pakistan's relationship with Afghanistan has become strategic quicksand. So deep is the quagmire that, under growing public pressure, segments of Pakistan's government have suggested turning to the United States for assistance and even offering drone bases to the US to target militants in Afghanistan. The idea that sophisticated US drones and other weapons might help Pakistan confront an insurgency born from its own anti-American policies in Afghanistan is absurd. And yet, it is no longer unthinkable.
Pakistan's army chief, Gen. Asim Munir, embodies his country's strategic confusion. An Islamist ideologue himself, he has urged the Afghan regime not to prioritize the TTP over their 'long-standing and benevolent brother Islamic country.' But he also once stated, 'When it comes to the safety and security of every single Pakistani, the whole of Afghanistan can be damned.'
The tensions between Afghanistan and Pakistan extend beyond cross-border terrorism; they are rooted in competing territorial claims and clashing national identities. The Afghan Taliban's support for the TTP, coupled with persistent disputes over the Durand Line, stoke Pakistani fears of irredentism. The Pakistani government is withholding recognition of the Taliban-led regime in Kabul, while seeking tangible measures against the TTP, which continues to pose an existential threat to Pakistan's stability and to the dominance of its military establishment.
Pakistan-Afghanistan tensions — rooted in historical grievances, fueled by misguided policies and compounded by ideological conflict — are rising fast, with Afghanistan now serving not as a strategic asset for Pakistan, but as a grave liability. India must wait and watch how this drama on its western flank plays out.
Shashi Tharoor, an MP of the Indian National Congress, was re-elected to the Lok Sabha for a fourth successive term, representing Thiruvananthapuram.© Project Syndicate, 2025
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