Turan Research Center

For the first time in their tumultuous and fraught relations spanning nearly eight decades, Pakistan and Afghanistan are locked in a simmering war. The two predominantly Sunni Muslim neighbors are stuck in a political and military stalemate. Both are unlikely to de-escalate or score an outright military victory. The United States and Israel’s war with neighboring Iran occupies international attention, and the Middle Eastern Muslim nations potentially interested in mediation between Kabul and Islamabad. This has further pushed both sides to appear to have given up on diplomacy and instead are settling scores on the battlefield.

Escalating Fighting

Following deadly attacks on security forces in the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province in late February, Pakistan’s Defense Minister Khwaja Asif declared an “open war” against the Afghan Taliban government because Islamabad’s “patience has reached its limit.” Since then, Pakistani military jets have targeted alleged hideouts of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), also known as the Pakistani Taliban and the Taliban government’s purported installations across Afghanistan.

Under Operation Ghazab Lil-haq (Arabic for Wrath for Righteousness), Pakistan’s much larger and modern military has employed conventional tactics such as airstrikes, artillery barrages, and infantry maneuvers to pressure the Taliban government. Islamabad claimed to have killed more than 650 Taliban soldiers and destroyed hundreds of Taliban posts, command centers, ammunition depots, military vehicles, and installations.

Pakistan’s hardline approach to the Afghan Taliban comes from the country’s most powerful man, Field Marshal Asim Munir. The 56-year-old mercurial general heads the powerful military and is the de facto ruler of the country, which military dictators have governed for most of its history. According to politicians and officials in Islamabad, mounting pressure from the elite officer corps of the army prompted Munir to pressure the Taliban through military strikes. Last year, relentless attacks by the TTP led to the rising casualty rates among the security forces, including the officers leading troops in the field. Army officers are the constituency central to Munir’s power and the army’s institutional dominance. “Peace could only prevail between both sides if the Afghan Taliban renounced their support for terrorism and terrorist organizations,” Munir told soldiers and officers on March 4.

In retaliation, the Taliban has employed asymmetric warfare. Under Operation Rad Al-Zulum (Arabic for Rejection of Cruelty), its forces claim to have engaged and overrun Pakistani border posts in surprise attacks. Kabul has even attempted to target military installations deep inside Pakistan with suicide drones. “If Kabul is attacked, Islamabad too will be attacked,” said Mawlawi Mohammad Yaqub Mujahid, the Taliban Defense Minister and son of the Islamist movement’s founder, Mullah Mohammad Omar. In the same interview, the Taliban leader said that they are ready to fight against Pakistan for a decade.

The TTP and some smaller Pakistani Taliban factions have also announced an increase in their attacks on Pakistani security forces. There has been a visible uptick in the attacks in the restive districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where civilians sustained casualties in attacks claimed by the Pakistani Taliban. The mountainous region forms nearly half of Pakistan’s more than 2,500 kilometers (1600 miles) long border with Afghanistan. TTP’s revival has harmed civilians caught between its push for overwhelming the government’s authority and the military’s strong-arm tactics to suppress its expanding insurgency. The TTP has partly financed its insurgency through extortion. Surrendered Taliban, small factions of pro-state militants who are often TTP turncoats, have enjoyed impunity and traumatized locals for decades.

Civilian Suffering

Overall, civilians, most of them members of various Pashtun tribes that straddle the 19th-century Durand Line, as the contested border between the two neighbors is known, are paying a heavy price for the war. Some Pakistani airstrikes have killed unarmed civilians.

According to the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), a Pakistani airstrike on March 16 reportedly killed and injured dozens of patients seeking treatment for drug addiction in Omid Addiction Treatment Hospital.  While the Taliban authorities claimed that the airstrike killed more than 400 people, a BBC corresponded in Kabul said at least 100 people were killed based on hospital records and healthcare staff in the Afghan capital. Pakistan claimed it had targeted the Taliban’s military infrastructure. But the airstrike was condemned or questioned by internationally. Before this airstrike UNAMA said at least 75 civilians were killed, and 193 were injured in Afghanistan since the outbreak of the hostilities. It said most of the victims were women and children who “continue to pay the price for the latest escalation in cross-border violence.”

In the eastern Afghan province of Nangarhar, at least 17 members of a single family were killed in an airstrike on February 22. On March 15, a mortar shell allegedly fired from Afghanistan killed four brothers in Bajaur, a northern district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

According to the Norwegian Refugee Committee, an aid group, since late February, fighting has displaced more than 115,000 people in eastern Afghanistan since late February. In Pakistan, too, some border communities are affected by the cross-border shelling. In harsh campaigns since October 2023, Pakistan and Iran have pushed back over 5.4 million Afghan refugees and migrants back into their country. “The speed and scale of these returns have pushed Afghanistan deeper into crisis,” said UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency. Casualties and displacement are likely to mount as the fighting goes on.

Since October, the complete closure of all the border crossings between Afghanistan and Pakistan has devastated the fragile economy of their borderlands. While landlocked Afghanistan has historically relied on Pakistan’s southern seaport of Karachi for imports, Islamabad is now paying a heavy toll for cutting trade ties with Kabul. It has lost a sizeable market of about 40 million people in the neighboring country for its agricultural, food, pharmaceutical, and consumer industries. As the dominant partner in the estimated $3 billion annual bilateral trade, Pakistan is set to lose a significant chunk of its international trade and export earnings.

Why Allies Turned Into Enemies

Pakistan was the first foreign power to ally with the Afghan Taliban after its emergence in the southern Afghan province of Kandahar in late 1994. It recognized the Taliban government after its ragtag forces overran Kabul with considerable Pakistani covert support in September 1996. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates soon followed. Islamabad became the principal foreign backer of the Taliban’s internationally isolated pariah government. Accounts from a quarter century ago have extensively documented the Pakistani military’s controlling influence over one of the world’s most enigmatic jihadist organizations.

But their alliance, based on their own exigencies, developed deep fissures after the 9/11 2001 attacks in New York and Washington. Taliban leaders turned deeply resentful of Islamabad’s alliance with the United States. They blamed it for facilitating the US-led toppling of their government in late 2001. Yet the persecution of Taliban leaders and their exclusion from the new political system in Afghanistan helped Islamabad to maintain its alliance with the Taliban alive by sheltering its leaders and foot soldiers. As part of its covert policy of double-dealing, Islamabad reaped the benefits of becoming a front-line ally of Washington. Yet at the same time, it helped the Taliban challenge, undermine, and eventually topple the Western-backed Afghan government and the US-led Global War on Terrorism in Afghanistan.

As they ran a deadly insurgency from safe havens in Pakistan across Afghanistan, Islamabad’s tactics gave the Taliban rank and file strong reasons to develop suspicion or even outright hostility towards it. Several key Taliban leaders, including Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansur, the successor to Mullah Mohammad Omar, were either killed in Pakistan or captured, handed over to the US, or incarcerated for years. This suspicion may have prompted the Taliban to insist on opening its political office to Qatar in 2013, away from Pakistani control.

In Doha, the Taliban negotiated a withdrawal agreement with Washington in February 2020, which paved the way for its triumphant return to power in Afghanistan in August 2021. By then, Islamabad, however, had no real leverage over the Islamist movement, which had transformed into a sophisticated political and military organization during the nearly two decades of insurgency. Still, some Pakistani officials, politicians, and public figures celebrated the Taliban’s return to power as a major geopolitical victory. Former Prime Minister Imran Khan praised the Taliban’s return to Kabul as breaking “the chains of slavery”.

Pakistan’s security tzars, however, knew the reality of their wanning influence and rushed to Kabul to win the Taliban’s support for a settlement with the TTP. Thousands of the group’s fighters had fought for the Taliban, shared the same ideology, and had even pledged allegiance to its leaders. During two decades of the Taliban insurgency, the TTP leaders and fighters had developed camaraderie with the Afghan Taliban. While Pakistani generals basked in the illusion that they still had some lingering influence over the Taliban, the Islamist group systematically paved the way to exploit Islamabad’s vulnerabilities.

The TTP successfully manipulated Islamabad’s keenness on reconciling the group through talks brokered by the Taliban government. While it agreed to engage in a ceasefire, its fighters returned to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in force. They brought back a blueprint of the Taliban’s successful insurgency against the US-led military occupation in Afghanistan. Instead of returning to terrorist tactics targeting civilians, they raised substantial resources through extortion. They focused their kinetic effort on targeting Pakistani security forces. The TTP also benefited from the stockpiles of arms left behind by the US military and the Afghan forces it had propped up. While the Taliban leaders consistently told their Pakistani counterparts to resolve the TTP as an internal security issue, a sizeable number of Afghans joined the TTP’s fighting formations. This signaled to Islamabad that its erstwhile Afghan allies have now turned into its deadly enemies.

This resulted in each subsequent year after 2021 becoming more deadly for Pakistani forces in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Rising violence in the province magnified the impact of a two-decade-old separatist insurgency in the southwestern Balochistan Province, where a secular ethnonationalist Baloch separatist insurgency has persisted despite a quarter-century of Islamabad's heavy-handed crackdown. Last year was the deadliest in a decade. Security forces members comprised over 40 percent of the more than 1,000 terrorism related fatalities.

Winners And Losers

Islamabad appears keen on pressing its advantage over the Taliban in conventional warfare. Yet, its airstrikes in southern and eastern Afghanistan have failed to either pressure the Taliban to give up support for the TTP or substantially weaken the Taliban's stranglehold over power in Afghanistan. It is not clear whether Islamabad has the political will or financial muscle to launch a prolonged military campaign aimed at forcing the Taliban to comply with its demands or even cause a collapse of its four-year-old rule.

Islamabad’s outreach to anti-Taliban Afghan factions and personalities has not gathered enough momentum to pose a meaningful political threat to the Taliban rule. There is no visible Western or regional appetite for a civil war among Afghans to weaken or replace the Taliban rule. Recent visits by Pakistani Islamist and jihadist leaders have not delivered any visible breakthrough in easing the tensions between Islamabad and Kabul.

The Taliban, however, has gained much from standing up to its erstwhile ally, Pakistan’s powerful military. It has united factions within the Taliban who were increasingly at odds over hardline polices such as the draconian ban on women’s education, social restrictions, and other governance issues. The Taliban has now successfully positioned itself as an enemy of Islamabad. This has won it popular support from many Afghans, both inside the country and among the global Afghan diaspora, who harbor strong grievances against Islamabad either because of how they were treated when they lived there or over its destructive policies during the various phases of war in the country.

For some Afghans, this has changed the Taliban’s status as nothing more than Pakistan’s proxies. This has also positioned the Taliban to champion Afghan nationalism and its irredentist claims over parts of Pakistan. In the words of Afghan political analyst Mushtaq Rahim, “Confronting Pakistan has proved a major political boon for the Taliban; it will only entrench their power in Afghanistan.” The Taliban’s deep ideological ingress, personal ties, and understanding of the Pakistani state and society make them a more formidable adversary for Islamabad compared to secular pro-Western governments preceding their return to power in the twenty-first century or even the royalist, communist, and Islamist Afghan governments during the twentieth century.

In a major reversal of Islamabad’s fortunes in Afghanistan, its confrontation with the Taliban has pushed the Islamist group into an alliance with Pakistan's archenemy India. "It is another attempt by Pakistan to externalize its internal failures,” said Randhir Jaiswal, a spokesman for India’s External Affairs Ministry, after Pakistani airstrikes in eastern Afghanistan on February 22. “India reiterates its support for Afghanistan's sovereignty, territorial integrity, and independence." For decades, New Delhi has accused Islamabad of using Islamist militants as an instrument of irregular warfare against its much larger forces. Kabul’s continuing hostilities now might enable New Delhi to undermine Islamabad through a covert military alliance with the Taliban.

Pakistan’s long-time strategic ally against India, China, is set to lose the most because of its war with Afghanistan. Beijing has viewed the Taliban’s return to power as an opportunity to protect its borders from Islamist militants, boost its regional influence, and carve out a stake in exploiting Afghanistan's vast mineral resources and trade potential. But the war between the two neighbors has undermined and even threatened Chinese interests.

In a sign that Beijing has not given up on reconciling Kabul and Islamabad, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi called his Afghan counterpart, Mawlawi Amir Khan Muttaqi, on March 13 to urge a quick ceasefire and dialogue. “Afghanistan and Pakistan are inseparable brothers and neighbors that cannot be moved away from each other,” a statement by the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs quoted Wang Yi as saying. “Issues between the two countries can only be resolved through dialogue.”

But it is not clear whether Beijing is willing to invest some real diplomatic capital in engaging its two neighbors in a dialogue to resolve their bilateral issues. In the absence of such arbitration, Islamabad and Kabul are likely to remain entangled in an unwinnable war.

Abubakar Siddique is a journalist, author, and researcher specializing in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the broader geopolitical landscape of South and Central Asia and the Middle East. He is known for his rigorous reporting and analysis on conflict, militancy, diplomacy, regional rivalries, and society. His expertise is reflected in his 2014 book, The Pashtun Question: The Unresolved Key to the Future of Pakistan and Afghanistan.