The deadliest week on the Durand Line since 2021 has ended with an immediate ceasefire agreed in Doha under Qatari and Turkish mediation on Saturday. Before the truce, there was a grim sequence of events—Pakistan’s unprecedented strikes on Kabul, intense cross-Durand line fire exchanges, closures of Torkham and Chaman crossings, and later bombing in Paktika, where an airstrike killed civilians, including three young Afghan cricketers Kabeer Agha, Sibghatullah and Haroon, prompting Afghanistan’s withdrawal from a planned tri-series in Pakistan.
The deadly clashes that began with Pakistan’s bombing of Kabul for the first time in history on 9 October, apparently targeting Noor Wali Mehsud, the leader of Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), brought relations to their lowest point after violating Afghanistan’s sovereignty.
Historically, ceasefires have been temporary pauses rather than lasting solutions. Unless concrete steps are taken, this pause after the Doha talks will only delay the next round of violence.
A strategic shift is hidden beneath the bombardment of Kabul, Kandahar and Paktika. For decades, Islamabad’s doctrine of “strategic depth” instrumentalised Afghan actors to offset India’s influence. It hasn’t delivered at home: inflation and currency shocks have deepened poverty, with lower-income hardship rising in recent years. Politics has swung between civilian cabinets and long stretches of military rule, with the latter still shaping key decisions.
Meanwhile, Baloch separatist attacks, including on the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and Chinese targets, have grown more brazen. Net result: “depth” bought neither leverage in Kabul nor security or prosperity in Pakistan.
Despite retaining channels and leverage in Kabul, Islamabad chose airstrikes to focus more on the dramatisation of its own victimhood instead of resolving the TTP problem. Reaching for airpower as a stand-in for political brokerage was a poor trade.
The Taliban are no longer a guerrilla band. They control a state apparatus and domestic revenues that can sustain coercion even in isolation. Bombs are unlikely to coerce a fiscally solvent movement that has so far prized internal cohesion. Moreover, Taliban forces hit back strongly along stretches of the Durand Line, overrunning several Pakistani posts, seizing light arms and uniforms, and later displaying them in cities as trophies.
Who desires this war?
This confrontation is unnecessary and not authored by Afghans and Pakistanis. Its choreography looks subcontracted—escalation to re-establish indispensability to outside capitals while squeezing Kabul back under an old paradigm. Against that backdrop, Pakistan’s powerful army chief, Field Marshal Asim Munir, mounted an unusual US outreach this year, including a White House lunch with US President Trump in June and a second meeting alongside Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif in late September.
The optics underscored how Afghan pressure and US courtship ran on parallel tracks, with Pakistan again casting itself as the indispensable interlocutor.
History offers lessons. When ISI chief General Faiz Hameed visited Kabul in September 2021, it was more than optics. Under Taliban mediation, Islamabad initiated talks with the TTP, leading to a month-long ceasefire on 9 November 2021, which collapsed when the TTP publicly terminated the truce. The episode demonstrated two points: Pakistan is capable of engaging in dialogue when it chooses, and a coercion-first approach without a solid political path only pushes all sides back towards violence. Responding to that pattern at a higher intensity will only increase the costs.
Language is deepening the spiral. Over the past few weeks, state-aligned messaging and statements from prominent clerics in Pakistan have increasingly branded the Taliban’s associates as “fitna” or “khawarij”, sometimes pairing those labels with claims of “India-sponsored fitna”. When the pulpit uses language typical of the parade ground, de-escalation seems heretical, and verification appears as capitulation. If the Doha window is to hold, the moralising frame must give way to a technical one: hotlines that work, incidents logged and investigated, and public narratives that stop turning neighbours into theological enemies.
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Realignment in motion
Diplomacy continued to advance smoothly in India while fighting persisted in Afghanistan. India hosted Taliban Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi in the same week that Pakistan launched its bombing campaign in Afghanistan. External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar, during his meeting with Muttaqi, pledged to upgrade the Kabul mission to a full embassy without recognising the Taliban. This move towards clear normalisation by stages is a victory for the Taliban and a significant step in India-Afghanistan relations.
On 3 July, Russia became the first country to formally recognise the Taliban government, widening Kabul’s external options and narrowing Islamabad’s veto. Coercion that once aimed to confine Afghanistan’s choices is now accelerating its diversification away from Pakistan.
Into this landscape, Trump’s public push to “get Bagram back” emerged. On 18 September, he said that the US wants to regain control of Afghanistan’s main air base because of its strategic location “near China”. US allies and regional states expressed scepticism, noting that such a return could be seen as a re-invasion and require significant forces and air defences. Analysts in Washington also warned that it would be a destabilising move. Kabul has already stated that Bagram is not on offer.
If any gambit were attempted, Pakistan would inevitably be cast, and cast itself, as a facilitator, increasing Afghan suspicions that the border pressure campaign is driven more by outside agendas rather than counterterrorism measures against TTP.
Amid this new realignment, Islamic State – Khorasan Province (ISIS-K) thrives on disorder. Kabul now publicly alleges that ISIS-K leader Sana Ullah Ghafari, also known as Shahab al-Muhajir, has training camps in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan provinces. They also blame ISIS-K for the attacks in Iran’s Kerman and Moscow’s Crocus City Hall—atrocities that were planned from Pakistani “centres” and have demanded handovers. Islamabad, however, rejects the charge. Whatever the forensic truth, the strategic point remains: each Kabul–Islamabad clash widens ISIS-K’s operating space by consuming exactly the cross-border bandwidth needed to contain it. The immediate value of the ceasefire is that it starves ISIS-K of chaos.
The region we keep torching
South Asia is the least economically integrated region on Earth. Intra-regional trade stagnates at around five to six per cent, compared to roughly 25 per cent in ASEAN and over 60 per cent in the European Union (EU). The World Bank has long estimated that South Asia trades about $23 billion with itself, against a feasible potential of at least $67 billion if non-tariff barriers were removed.
Every time Torkham or Chaman closes, Afghan food and fuel prices rise within days, while Pakistani exporters, truckers, and border markets suffer immediate losses. The true measure of progress in Doha isn’t the noise along the border but the number of trucks passing through monitored gates. If corridors remain hostage to the next air raid, the region will continue burdening the poor for the sake of elite theatrics.
The opportunity cost is stark. A stable corridor from Gwadar to Tashkent would knit Central Asian demand into Indian Ocean routes, giving Afghanistan and Pakistan shared incentives to police, rather than politicise, their territories. Instead, closures boost risk premiums, raise insurance and transportation costs, and hand profits back to smugglers.
Also read: America imagines Asim Munir is the cure to jihadism. He is the disease
The off-ramp: give peace politics a chance
Pakistan’s use of military force will not bend the Taliban, which sustained a two-decade insurgency against the world’s most capable militaries and now controls a state apparatus with its own revenues. The only workable exit is a political and verifiable process. The Qatar–Türkiye track offers exactly that—a neutral table to broker discrete, reciprocal steps as well as a time-bound, third-party verification regime that logs incidents, certifies compliance, and exposes spoilers on either side. If implemented correctly, this approach will reduce mistrust, allow Torkham and Chaman crossings to reopen, and make further escalation economically costly.
This is also the moment to test Imran Khan’s peace posture. Whatever one thinks of his domestic travails, he consistently argued for direct talks with the Afghan Taliban and a regional order anchored in connectivity and trade. In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where casualties are increasing and the threat of ethnicisation is greatest, a mandate for dialogue and trade is sensible, not permissive. It should be judged by observable de-escalation and tangible trade recovery, not by slogans.
The bottom line is unchanged. This is not the Pakistani people’s war, and it was not initiated by Afghans seeking conflict with their neighbour. It is a collision engineered by a narrow circle and amplified by outside calculations. If it continues, no one will be spared from Karachi to Kabul. The Pakistan-Taliban ceasefire after the talks in Doha is more than just a pause; it tests whether leaders opt for a meaningful dialogue over protracted conflict. Lock in the truce, keep the gates open, and start reclaiming tens of billions in foregone regional trade — or accept the slow Yemen-isation of the frontier, a forever loss with no victors, and a region that grows poorer together.
Farid Mamundzay is the former ambassador of Afghanistan to India. His X handle is @FMamundzay. Views are personal.
(Edited by Saptak Datta)