Opinion Why Pakistan has repeatedly attacked Afghanistan in last two years

Since 2022, Pakistan has carried out at least three rounds of air strikes on Afghan territory, most recently in December 2024. There have also been multiple skirmishes on either side of the Durand Line, the Pak-Afghan border that the Taliban do not recognise.

Pakistan had welcomed the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in 2021. As the Americans hastily withdrew, then Prime Minister Imran Khan triumphantly declared that the Afghans had “broken the shackles of slavery”. So what went wrong?

Pakistan had nurtured the Taliban.

The Pakistanis had been the chief patrons of the Taliban, and before them the Afghan mujahideen, since the 1980s.

Encouraged and funded by the United States and Saudi Arabia, the regime in Islamabad and Rawalpindi had helped prop up the Islamist fighters against the Red Army during the Soviet-Afghan War of 1979-89.

Pakistan had its ideological considerations: it had historically opposed socialism, which it saw as anti-Islam. It also had its insecurities and geopolitical considerations: it was vying with India for influence in Afghanistan, and was convinced that a pro-Pakistan Islamic regime in Afghanistan would add to its “strategic depth”.

Once the Soviets left, the various mujahideen entered a bloody civil war, which ended with the Taliban taking power over three-fourths of Afghanistan in 1996.

And who were the Taliban?

The Taliban, literally “students” [of the faith], were established in 1994 by an ultra-conservative cleric by the name of Mullah Omar.

Omar and many other Taliban members had previously fought for mujahideen factions supported by Pakistan. Many Taliban members had received religious education in Pakistani seminaries, most famously, the Darul Uloom Haqqania near Peshawar, of which both Omar and Jalaluddin Haqqani, the founder of the Taliban’s military wing, were alumni.

From the beginning, the Pakistanis helped the Taliban with money, patronage, and inspiration. In a range of ways, the Taliban were a creation of Pakistan and its Army.

How did the US get involved with the Taliban?

In 2001, after the September 11 attacks in New York, the US launched its War on Terror, and invaded Afghanistan. The Taliban, who were hosting Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders, were ousted from power. But they could never be truly eliminated, as Washington had aimed to.

So for nearly two decades, Taliban fighters fought a sustained war against the US and its allies. Pakistan played a double game with the Americans, pretending to help the War on Terror, while continuing to patronise the Taliban.

It took a while for Washington to turn the screws on Islamabad to clamp down on terror, and it was successful only to an extent. The Taliban found sanctuary inside Pakistan, as well as ideological and financial support from a section of the Establishment.

This eventually precluded the Americans from achieving complete victory, and by 2021, after the almost 2,500 personnel were killed and at least 20,000 more injured, the US had had enough.

The Taliban controlled much of Afghanistan within weeks of the American withdrawal on August 30, 2021.

Taliban victory was a triumph for Pak.

In September 2021, days after the Taliban had regained control of Kabul, then ISI chief Gen Faiz Hameed was photographed enjoying a cup of tea in the Serena Hotel with Taliban officials, and assuring a journalist present that “all will be fine”.

Former Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran had previously told The Indian Express that the Pakistani establishment believed a Taliban regime in Kabul would effectively be “a client state” to Pakistan, and provide it with much desirable strategic depth against India — a thinking reminiscent of Gen Zia-ul-Haq’s motivations to support Islamist resistance against the Soviets in the 1980s.

Also, the Pakistanis believed that the Afghan Taliban would help rein in the Pakistani Taliban (Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan or TTP), which has long been one of Pakistan’s most significant security challenges.

And who are the Pak Taliban?

Set up by Baitullah Mehsud in 2007, the TTP’s stated goal is to establish a strict Islamist state in Pakistan, on the lines of what is currently in place in Afghanistan.

To this end, it has carried out a number of deadly terror attacks, including the massacre of 132 school children in Peshawar in 2014.

While the TTP and the Taliban are officially separate organisations, they share ideological, ethnic, and geographical linkages. The TTP draws much of its recruits from the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK) province bordering Afghanistan, and has long sought sanctuary against Pakistan action on the other side of the Durand Line.

So what went wrong and how?

Islamabad expected that once in power, its long-time protege, the Afghan Taliban, would help crack down on the TTP. But this did not happen.

“Far from providing strategic depth to Pakistan against India, Taliban-ruled Afghanistan has become a serious security vulnerability… Regions bordering Afghanistan have witnessed a spate of attacks on both civilians and military personnel,” Saran said.

For the Afghan Taliban, the TTP is an “internal matter” for Pakistan, and as such, there is no interest in Kabul to clamp down on its activities. This, the Taliban government believes, will not be received well domestically at a time when Kabul is ratcheting up nationalistic rhetoric to gather wider support in the Afghan society.

Also, according to some readings of the situation, the Taliban would much rather deal with the TTP than groups like the Islamic State – Khorasan Province (ISIS-K), which might fill in the void that will be left if the TTP is dismantled.

What now, and what next?

Since 2022, Pakistan has not only launched military attacks on Afghan soil, it has also pulled other levers to bend the Taliban regime to its will. It has disrupted trade with land-locked Afghanistan, most of which flows through Pakistan, and also sent back thousands of Afghan refugees, even those who have lived in Pakistan for decades.

The Taliban government lacks the resources, a modern and organised military, or any meaningful international partnership to take Pakistan on. As such, Pakistan can continue to bomb and attack Afghanistan with impunity, with little pushback from any quarters.

What the Taliban can do — and had successfully done against the US for two decades — is to raise the costs of the conflict for Pakistan. According to reporting by Al Jazeera, more than 950 Pakistanis, including security personnel and civilians, had been killed in this low-intensity-conflict in 2024 alone.

The Pakistani military, on the other hand, claims to have killed 900 “terrorists”, according to an article in Voice of America.

The fighting has brought to the fore growing resentment in KPK against the Pakistani Establishment, something that is further exacerbated by the continued imprisonment of Imran Khan, the province’s most popular leader. Imran and his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party (PTI) was initially propped by the Establishment to co-opt Pashtun nationalism, but he eventually fell out of favour with the Army.

The Taliban regime has also upped its diplomatic game. Unlike in 1996-2001, when the Taliban government in Kabul was an international pariah, with only Pakistan, the Saudis, and the UAE extending recognition, this time around they have courted a number of countries in Central and West Asia, as well as India, China, and Russia.