Kings, clerics, nationalists, communists: Every kind of regime in Afghanistan has ended up in conflict with Pakistan. Facing attacks from Tehreek-e-Taliban terrorists, Pakistan went to war last week, using combat jets and drones. The fragile ceasefire brokered by Qatar and Turkey won’t end the problem, though. Ethnicity, ideology, economics and territorial issues have fated the two countries to endless war.
New Delhi: This week, Pakistani negotiators met with representatives of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan in a desperate effort to hammer out peace along their borders. For years now, Pakistan has been seeing escalating violence targeting its military forces in the borderlands with Afghanistan. The army’s failure to protect itself undermines Field Marshal Asim Munir’s claims to be a successful military leader who can protect the country.
So he struck back in Afghanistan using combat jets, drones and missiles. The problem, though, is far too complex to be fixed by bombs and bullets. Welcome to this week’s edition of ThePrint Explorer.
I’m Praveen Swamy, a contributing editor at ThePrint. And I’m going to be taking you through some of the complexities about why Pakistan and Afghanistan always seem to end up at war no matter who is ruling the two countries.
From the airstrips at Miranshah, it was just a short flight for the Pakistan Army’s planes.
North-north-east, almost in a straight-long along the Pai-Mohammad Ridge. Then the pilots of the No. 14 Squadron would have made the sharp descent down towards the small village of Mughal Ghai on what they’d been told was a jihadist base.
For weeks, there had been mounting attacks on Pakistani Frontier Constabulary troops posted along the border between the two countries. 23 people died in the aerial attack. We don’t know their names.
We do know the year, though, and that was 1948. Pakistan is still launching aircraft across the border. Across the mountains that divide Afghanistan and Pakistan; history seems to have never really ended.
It only pauses in between wars. Like in the past, the new Pakistan Air Force strikes have created rage in Afghanistan. Though Pakistan insists they’ve only attacked Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) bases, many of the casualties have been women and children. In one case, cricket players from a local club.
The two sides agreed to an immediate ceasefire, but that last ceasefire was disrupted by a suicide attack on Pakistani troops and retaliatory airstrikes. Islamabad had hoped its not-so-secret support for the Afghan Taliban after 9/11 would solve its own jihadi problem. And the fall of Kabul in 2021, the withdrawal of American forces, was greeted as a national victory.
But instead of ending the TTP threat, the Pakistan Army just this year has lost a record number of troops in counter-insurgency operations. The basic problem isn’t too difficult to understand. The Tehreek-e-Taliban wants mini-states in the territories belonging to their tribes or communities, governed by the Sharia, which is another way of saying not by Pakistani law.
And they want an end to border fences running around a controversial 19th century frontier called the Durand Line, which divide their communities. Pakistan is potentially willing to concede these political demands, but only if it can maintain hegemony over the region. And that isn’t something the TTP is willing to live with.
So below the conflict runs some very complex issues to do with tribe, land, identity and nationhood.
The making of the border
The frontier, and remember the word frontier is not the same as the word border, because that’s going to be important in the story as we go on, was carved out by British cartographers in 1893 and named after the diplomat Mortimer Durand. It was meant to be a line of order and stability, stopping southward expansion by Russia.
Instead it’s become a kind of wound, slicing through tribes, families and entire histories. For more than a century, it has shaped an unbroken story of mistrust, proxy conflict and uneasy coexistence between Kabul and Islamabad. When Pakistan was born in 1947, Afghanistan was the only country to oppose its admission to the United Nations.
Kabul argued that the Durand Line, imposed by colonial fear, had lapsed with the British Raj’s demise. The line, Afghans said, was never theirs to control. It split the Pashtun heartland, half in Pakistan and half in Afghanistan, and no independent Afghan government could accept that.
A loya jirga or tribal gathering in 1949 even repudiated the boundary altogether. That wildly popular rejection would define Pakistan’s western anxieties. This newborn state, of course, already faced India in the east, was fighting a war in Kashmir, and suddenly thought itself under threat from the west.
From 1948 through the early 1960s, Afghanistan armed and encouraged tribal uprisings in the borderlands. There were firefights in Waziristan, airstrikes by Pakistan on ethnic Pashtun Lashkars and bitter diplomatic exchanges. In 1960, Afghan forces actually mobilised to support a secessionist bid by the Nawab of Dir.
Pakistani troops responded to that secessionist rising with napalm and air power. Hundreds of people died. What emerged from that war, though, was another cold war and an enduring conviction in Rawalpindi that Kabul could never be trusted.
By 1961, Afghanistan’s Prime Minister Mohammad Daoud Khan had closed the border. Pakistan retaliated by cutting off trade. Landlocked Afghanistan’s economy collapsed within months.
When King Zahir Shah dismissed his cousin Daoud two years later, the crisis abated with a little bit of diplomatic give and take. And Afghanistan maintained a very strict neutrality during Pakistan’s wars with India in 1965 and 1971. Those years of calm convinced Pakistani planners of one thing.
Survival required a quiet western flank while the army faced India in the east. You’ll see a lot of talk in Pakistani literature about strategic depth. The idea that the Pakistan army could retreat into Afghanistan while facing battlefield reverses with India. But that wasn’t the real story at all. They just needed a quiet, stable border. This equilibrium, though, was a very brief one.
Today marks the 51st anniversary of the “white coup” orchestrated by Mohammad Daoud Khan against the monarchy in Afghanistan.
On July 17, 1973, Mohammad Daoud, the cousin of then-King Mohammad Zahir Shah, seized power in Kabul through a coup with the support of the military,… pic.twitter.com/04x9GFu4UJ
— Amu TV (@AmuTelevision) July 16, 2024
In 1973, Daoud Khan returned to rule Afghanistan after a brief hiatus. This time as the strongman who overthrew the monarchy with communist support. He revived the dream of ‘Greater Pashtunistan’ and offered sanctuary to Baloch rebels who were fighting Islamabad separately.
The spectre of an Indo-Afghan alliance loomed large in Pakistan’s mind. Daoud even hinted that India would “come to Afghanistan’s” rescue in an outright war in Pakistan. There’s very little evidence that anyone had in fact held out such a promise.
But by 1974, Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto ordered his generals to answer in kind. Major General Nasirullah Babar began arming Afghan Islamists, men who would later become international names. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Burhanuddin Rabbani, Ahmad Shah Massoud, to name just three.
Years before the Soviet invasion happened, Pakistan had discovered a new instrument of power. The manipulation of Afghanistan’s internal wars to create a jihadist attack on the state. That moment, not 1979, was the real beginning of Pakistan’s modern Afghan policy.
Islamabad had learnt that instability across the border could be managed and could even be useful. The blowback though came quickly. After Daoud’s assassination and the communist takeover in 1978, Afghanistan slid into chaos.
Pakistan’s intelligence service, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, nurtured the jihadist factions that fought the Soviet Union and later each other. The CIA paid the bills, but Pakistan called the shots about who was to get weapons and resources. When the Taliban rose in the mid-1990s, they emerged as Rawalpindi’s long-awaited answer.
A disciplined Pashtun-led order that would keep India out and the border quiet, the country stable. But the idea of strategic depth, which was controlling Kabul to protect Pakistan, came with a pretty heavy cost. Afghanistan’s whether royalist, republican or Islamist have always viewed Pakistan as a meddling power seeking to turn their country into a vassal state.
India, by contrast, has been seen as a partner in sovereignty, a friendship rooted as much in shared suspicion of Pakistan as in any real ideological or cultural bond. The triangle hardened into a pattern or a habit. Islamabad sought control, Kabul resisted, Delhi watched and invested.
Also Read: Why ceasefire at key Pak-Afghan border crossing on Durand Line is unlikely to last long
The border barrier
In recent years, that old geography of suspicion has been remade into barbed wire and steel. Along the 2,600 km of the Durand Line, Pakistan erected a fence, a vast double-layered barrier studded with sensors, cameras and patrol posts, much like what India has erected along its border with Pakistan and with Bangladesh. Islamabad casts it as a defence against terrorism and illegal movement.
To Afghans, though, it is a knife through the heart of people. The fence runs not just through mountains, but through homes, pastures, graveyards. In many villages, brothers wake up on different sides of the border today.
Families can only wave out to each other over coils of steel. Weddings, funerals and tribal jirgas that once crossed the frontier now require visas, bribes to the local military or long detours through official checkpoints. In Khost and Paktia, locals tell stories of villages like Kharsin split in half when Pakistani troops drove the fence through its centre despite pleas from the residents.
Nangarhar elders tell stories about marriages that once linked Bajaur and Peshawar to their valleys. Now, the women who have married there may be see their families once every few years, if that. Afghan officials, even Taliban commanders today, accuse Pakistan of quietly encouraging beyond the old Durand Line, shifting fences kilometres inside Afghan territory while Kabul was preoccupied fighting the Taliban.
The result has been periodic firefights between border guards and more dangerously, the deepening of Afghan resistance towards what they see as the theft of their land and dignity by Islamabad.
For Islamabad though, the fence is equally important. It is a statement of sovereignty, a way to transform a porous, ill-defined colonial era frontier into a hard border. Islamabad also thinks that it is sealing off the jihadist networks that once served it but have now turned their guns towards their homeland.
The irony is unmistakable. The very areas that Pakistan once used to project influence are now sources of insecurity. Groups like the TTP, sheltered in Afghanistan after the Taliban’s return to power in 2021, have revived Islamabad’s old nightmare. A hostile Kabul that offers sanctuary to insurgents and terrorists. The wheels come one full circle.
The costs of division
For ordinary Afghans, the costs go beyond politics. The economies of towns like Spin Boldak and Chaman, twin towns that long functioned as a single market, have withered. Traders who once just crossed the local street daily now face visa queues and inspection posts.
Merchants in Parachinar or Khost complain that goods rot before reaching buyers. Families that relied on border trade for generations find themselves cut off from both sides. To Afghan for Pakistan, to Pakistani for Kabul.
When Islamabad imposed visa rules at Chaman and Angur Adda in late 2023, protests erupted along the border. For months, traders kept the crossing shut, demanding the return of a world that Pakistan wants to demolish. There are even darker allegations too of what some Taliban officials call population theft, that Pakistan has issued its own identity cards and SIM cards to Afghans in the border districts, blurring nationality for those who live along the Durand Line.
In places like Spin Boldak, Khozabulz, Shamalzi, locals say Pakistani officials have been encouraging them to register as Pakistani citizens, something the Taliban see as the quiet demographic annexation of a people whom the fence has already divided. Islamabad flatly denies this, but many Afghans think it’s true and believe the territory is being redrawn without their consent. Thus in Kabul, Taliban leaders now echo the language once used by monarchs and republicans and the Islamic Emirate before them.
Qari Fasihuddin Fitrat, the Taliban Chief of Army Staff, not too long ago accused Pakistan of building the fence inside Afghan soil and warned that the Emirate will not allow encroachment.
Others within the Taliban speak of the need to map the border anew and have been consulting century-old survey charts to prove that Pakistan has seized dozens of Afghan villages. Yet even as they issue threats and maybe resort to violence, the Taliban know they rely on Pakistan for trade routes.
It is a relationship neither side can afford, yet neither side can escape. The strategic calculus today remains much as it was in 1947.
For Pakistan, Afghanistan must be friendly or at least neutral, never aligned with India.
For Afghanistan, Pakistan must be kept at an arm’s length, a necessary neighbour but a dangerous one. Geography, the mountainous terrain, the vast area ensure that neither side can truly prevail militarily. Every attempt to impose from the Durand Line to the modern fence only underlines how artificial the finality is.
To the people living along the border, as I said, it’s not a line but a scar. It throbs, hurts whenever politics turns violent. Under no law, under no religion, one villager in Paktika told a researcher from the Afghan Analyst Network, is it right to split families and set up a barrier between brothers? You’ll find that sentiment being echoed from Spinboldak to Bajor.
They see the fence not as security but as betrayal. And so the story returns where it began, to a natural state of war, not always fought with bullets but with maps, fences and memory. Each generation has been inheriting the unfinished business of the Durand Line.
Is there another way? Probably. One example might be India’s border with Nepal, which is pretty much open, free to trade and has deep cultural relationships which have sustained political crisis. As long as those mountains stand and as long as politics seeks to command what geography binds, however, peace will remain provisional.
The frontier will remain what it’s always been, a bloody battlefield which has no ending. Where do the jihadis take all this?
Also Read: Train hijack by Baloch insurgents in Pakistan holds critical lesson—railways can drive geopolitics
The jihadi endgame
When the Taliban swept into Kabul in August 2021, Pakistan’s political and military establishment celebrated what it thought was a strategic triumph that would change everything forever. Islamabad had long argued that the Afghan Taliban and the Tehreek-e-Taliban, the TTP, were distinct entities and officials insisted the Afghan movement’s return to power would curb cross-border terrorism and deprive the TTP of sanctuary.
Yet the story that’s unfolded is the opposite. The Taliban’s victory in Afghanistan has re-energised the TTP and reopened the war inside Pakistan. The story of the border and a divided people should help us understand why the two Talibans run so closely together.
They share not only ideology but the same networks of madrasas and more important, kinship. During the long insurgency against the United States and NATO forces, thousands of Pakistani fighters crossed the border to fight under the Afghan Taliban’s command who were, after all, their relatives. The TTP itself drew legitimacy from that jihad, presenting its war in Pakistan as part of the same holy struggle.
Within hours of the Taliban entering Kabul, the TTP was the first to declare victory. Its leader Mufti Noorwali Mehsud, who Pakistan has now been trying to bomb, pledged renewed allegiance to the Taliban’s Amir, Hibatullah Akhundzada, and promised to help ensure the stability of the new Islamic Emirate. To the TTP, the Taliban’s success was proof that patience, unity and faith could defeat Pakistan.
Now, Mehsud has told his followers the same formula is being applied at home. The euphoria of those days was quickly matched by real material military gains. The collapse of the Afghan Republic led to the release of hundreds of imprisoned jihadists, including senior TTP commanders who’d been long imprisoned by the US and Afghan forces.
Among them was Maulvi Fakir Muhammad Bajori, the movement’s founding deputy chief, who soon resurfaced in Kunar province addressing cheering fighters. ‘Our struggle in Pakistan will continue,’ was the first thing he said. The Taliban now found themselves without a role, the Pakistani Taliban that is, in the new government in Kabul.
Afghan nationalism, wary of outside influence, made their full integration impossible. They were after all kinsmen, but kinsmen from the other side, with their own lands. For many, joining the TTP became the logical next step.
The end of one war thus provided manpower for another. The TTP’s consolidation in North Waziristan is perhaps the most strategically significant shift. Long dominated by Hafiz Gul Bahadur’s faction, which maintained ties with Al-Qaeda and the Haqqani network, the district had resisted TTP control for years.
Since late 2020, however, nine local groups, using the Ustad Aleem Khan network, a former deputy of Gul Bahadur, have pledged allegiance to the TTP and Noorwali Mahsood. North Waziristan, once the epicentre of the global jihad that looked outward, is again becoming the heartland of Pakistan’s domestic insurgency. Peace talks between the TTP and Islamabad, brokered in Kabul in 2022, briefly raised Islamabad’s hope of some accommodation.
But the negotiations actually revealed the TTP’s true ambitions. Its demands were not about prisoner releases or some cash, but the restoration of the tribal area’s autonomous status and the full implementation of Sharia. In effect, a reversal of Pakistan’s constitutional authority in its northwest.
The talks predictably collapsed and violence resumed. For Afghanistan’s Taliban, the dilemma is just as stark. The new Islamic Emirate might know its better off without a frontal conflict with Pakistan.
It cannot support the TTP without inviting diplomatic isolation and retaliation from Islamabad. Yet it can’t restrain its own cadre from aiding their Pakistani brethren, brethren who moreover sacrificed their lives when they were needed. To the young foot soldiers who spent their lives fighting a foreign occupation, the idea of jihad ending at a strange colonial border is incomprehensible.
The two Taliban’s fates remain entwined in a cycle that began decades ago in the refugee camps of Pakistan during the jihad against the Soviet Union. The two Talibans mirror each other, one governing a war-torn state, the other waging war against one. There is no end in sight to this problem, not in Doha, nor in the months and years to come.
Once again, I’m Praveen Swamy. Thank you for watching this episode of ThePrint Explorer.
(Edited by Tony Rai)
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