This is published in collaboration with Himal Southasian, a regional magazine of politics and culture.
On the night of 16 March, powerful explosions rocked Kabul. Pakistan said it had “successfully carried out precision airstrikes” targeting “Afghan Taliban regime terrorism-sponsoring military installations in Kabul and Nangarhar”. Attaullah Tarar, Pakistan’s minister for information and broadcasting, also said that the strikes targeted infrastructure belonging to “terror proxies”, including the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) – the Pakistani Taliban.
Across the border, it was a different story. Taliban spokespersons said the strike hit a drug rehabilitation centre; the toll in lives is still unclear. The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) said 143 people were killed and 119 wounded in the attack. The Taliban’s deputy spokesperson, Hamdullah Fitrat, has said the toll was far higher, with around 400 reportedly dead and 250 wounded.
This latest attack adds to the growing human and humanitarian toll of what Pakistan, in late February, declared to be an “open war” on Afghanistan. Cross-border strikes have displaced thousands of families and killed or wounded uncounted numbers of civilians along the countries’ shared frontier. Meanwhile, Pakistan has continued its brutal drive to deport Afghan refugees, many of whom have lived in the country for decades and have little or nothing to go back to in Afghanistan.
Since the Taliban returned to power in Kabul more than four years ago, military confrontations between the two neighbours have become a regular occurrence. The central point of contention is Pakistan’s accusation that the Afghan Taliban are providing sanctuary to TTP militants inside Afghanistan, allowing them to organise in safety and launch attacks against Pakistani targets. Pakistan has seen a brutal spike in TTP attacks in recent years.
During failed peace talks between Pakistan and Afghanistan in Istanbul in November 2025, and even during previous rounds of negotiations, Islamabad has continued to demand that the Afghan Taliban take military action against the TTP. The Taliban rejected the demand, insisting that no TTP militants operate from Afghan territory. Members of the Taliban delegation revealed that Pakistan also asked for a religious fatwa declaring war inside Pakistan impermissible.
Under pressure, the Taliban gathered mullahs in Kabul in December. The clerics issued a fatwa stating that Afghans were not permitted to participate in armed conflict outside Afghanistan. This was apparently designed to accommodate Pakistani concerns, but it fell far short of Islamabad’s actual demands. The ruling applied only to Afghans and did not directly address Pakistani militants.
With the war, Pakistan appears to believe that its military might, which is far greater than Afghanistan’s, will force the Taliban to bend. But this calculation ignores a fundamental reality: the Taliban thrive in armed conflict. Rather than weakening the regime in Kabul, Pakistan’s aggression is fueling Afghan nationalist sentiment and allowing the Taliban to cast themselves as defenders of the nation, effectively granting them a level of popular legitimacy they have long struggled to secure.
The Taliban are also fundamentally unable to meet Islamabad’s demands, since these strike at the very core of their identity. For the Taliban to act militarily against the TTP, it would mean turning their weapons against their ideological allies and trampling their own fundamental principles, on behalf of a state whose constitution they regard as un-Islamic.
In 2001, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the Taliban refused to hand over Osama bin Laden to the United States or confront al-Qaeda, even at the cost of losing their first emirate when the United States subsequently invaded Afghanistan. In light of this history, it is very unlikely that the Taliban will ever concede to pressure from Pakistan, even if the costs are immense. And while Pakistan might have the upper hand in conventional military strength, the Taliban have their own strategies of violence, which can exact a bloody cost in Pakistani lives.
From the moment Pakistan was created in 1947, its relationship with Afghanistan was marked by disagreement. The most immediate issue, and the most lasting one, was the Durand Line that separates the countries, with Afghan rulers arguing that this was “imposed” by a colonial power and that Afghanistan signed the agreement behind it with British India, not Pakistan.
At the United Nations, Afghanistan’s representative declared that the Pashtun-majority Northwest Frontier Province, which lies along the Durand Line, should not automatically become part of Pakistan. In September 1947, Afghanistan signalled its territorial claim to the area by voting against Pakistan’s admission to the UN. This diplomatic gambit heralded a relationship of animosity that has shaped the subsequent history between the two countries.
For Pakistan, Afghanistan’s refusal to recognise the Durand Line represents a direct threat to its territorial integrity. Islamabad saw Kabul’s support for Pashtun nationalism as interference in its internal affairs, and feared that Afghanistan, often aligned with India, was attempting to destabilise Pakistan’s western frontier.
Pakistan responded with a mix of economic and military pressure. From 1947 into the early 1950s, it disrupted Afghanistan’s access to the port of Karachi, intermittently cutting off its main trade route with the rest of the world. In June 1949, Pakistani aircraft bombed the village of Moghulgai, in Afghanistan’s Paktika province, during a spike in border tensions; at the time, Pakistan claimed the bombing was inadvertent. The next month, Afghanistan’s parliament announced its intention to nullify all border agreements signed between Afghanistan’s rulers and British India, including the Durand Line agreement. Of course, Pakistan rejected the Afghan parliament’s declaration.
Over the years, nationalist governments in Afghanistan promoted the idea of Pashtunistan, a political project that variously meant an independent Pashtun state, greater autonomy for Pashtuns in Pakistan, or, in its strongest manifestation, folding the Pashtun and Baloch areas of Pakistan into Afghanistan. Under Mohammad Daoud Khan, the prime minister in the 1950s and early 1960s, this policy became central to Afghan foreign policy, as it did again after 1973, when Daoud seized the presidency in a coup. Kabul funded Pashtun activists and even celebrated an official Pashtunistan Day.
After April 1978, when Daoud’s regime was overthrown in a coup by the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, the new regime was also enthusiastic about pursuing the right to self-determination for Pashtuns on the other side of the border. No doubt, India also egged on successive Afghan governments in its territorial dispute with Pakistan.
Yet the Pashtun movement never became the existential threat that Islamabad feared. Secular Pashtun nationalists in Pakistan largely pursued their demands through constitutional politics. Even when facing repression and imprisonment, they participated in elections and entered parliament rather than launching an armed insurgency. Kabul’s efforts to turn Pashtun nationalism into a destabilising force in Pakistan failed.
Meanwhile, Pakistan gradually developed its own strategic plan: undermining Afghan governments by lending support to Islamist groups opposing them. Beginning in the mid-1970s, Pakistan started cultivating Islamist militants as a counterweight. In 1975, Pakistani intelligence trained a small group of Afghans who launched an uprising against Daoud. The rebellion failed, but its key organisers, including the guerilla fighters Ahmad Shah Massoud and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, would later become major figures in the Afghan-Soviet War.
Following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, Islamist militant networks flourished in Pakistani madrasas along the Afghan border, facilitated by Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence and backed by American and Arab funding. The Taliban movement would eventually emerge from this seedbed.
Over the years, Pakistan saw the Afghan Taliban as instruments in its quest for “strategic depth” – in essence, an Afghanistan under its control to act as a buffer and a bulwark in Pakistan’s conflict against India. This was key to Pakistan’s support for the Taliban during the Afghan-Soviet war and beyond. Many high-ranking officials in Pakistan celebrated when the Taliban first seized power in Kabul in 1996, and again in 2021, when they returned to power at the end of the United States’s occupation of Afghanistan. But what Pakistan thought was a strategic triumph quickly turned into a strategic liability: instead of obeying Pakistan’s wishes, the Taliban refused to crack down on the TTP even as the group grew in strength and escalated its attacks on Pakistan.
Today, the legacy of Pakistan’s policy is devastation for Afghanistan, which has spent decades suffering war and extremist theocracy, and a strategic quagmire for Pakistan, one far more dangerous than anything it ever imagined. Compared to Afghanistan’s previous regimes, the Taliban represent a fundamentally different challenge: they reject the legitimacy of the Pakistani state and its constitution, which they view as incompatible with their own interpretation of Islamic law. The TTP has formally pledged allegiance to the Taliban’s supreme leader, using for him the title of Amir al-Mu’minin – Commander of the Faithful – with implications of extraterritorial allegiance.
This ideological alignment gives the TTP both the political ammunition and religious justification for a prolonged insurgency against Pakistan. Unlike the Pashtun nationalist movements of the past, the TTP does not rely solely on Pashtun identity. Its message appeals to Talibanised Islamist militants across Pakistan, which helps expand its potential support base far beyond the Pashtun belt. It is telling that the TTP has found common cause with militants in Balochistan, where Pakistan is battling a long-standing insurgency.
Moreover, the Afghan Taliban does not recognise the Durand Line. In a recent interview, the Taliban’s defence minister, Mohammad Yaqoob Mujahid, stated, “Pakistan wants the hypothetical Durand Line to be recognised as a border. This is a historical issue that neither the current government nor previous governments have resolved. Since this issue remains unresolved, it should not become a cause for escalating tensions.” Under the Taliban, all major Afghan media outlets have been referring to the border between the two countries as the “hypothetical Durand Line,” indicating that the Taliban intends to walk the path of previous Afghan governments in making claims on territory under Pakistan’s control.
According to the UN Security Council, more than 20 Islamist militant groups are currently operating in Afghanistan, including the TTP, al-Qaeda and the Islamic State Khorasan Province. In February 2026, the Russian foreign ministry stated that as many as 23,000 Islamist militants are present in Afghanistan, posing a serious threat to regional security. Afghanistan does not have conventional forces to counter Pakistan’s airstrikes and incursions, but it has this instead. Meanwhile, the Taliban’s victory over the United States and its allied forces in 2021 has provided militant groups across the region with a powerful ideological narrative: that jihadist armed struggle can defeat global powers and establish an Islamic state. This has emboldened Islamist militants within Pakistan’s borders, and Pakistan’s declaration of war against the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan will spur them on further against their enemy.
If Islamabad continues its “open war”, the Taliban could abandon all diplomatic niceties and openly support the TTP, unleashing even more insurgent violence against Pakistan. Meanwhile, Pakistan’s current domestic policies risk making the situation even worse. Islamabad’s mass deportation campaign against Afghan refugees is forcing hundreds of thousands of people back to a country facing one of the world’s largest humanitarian crises. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, more than one million refugees had been returned to Afghanistan from Pakistan as of December 2025. The deportations have deepened and reinforced anti-Pakistan sentiment among ordinary Afghans, pushing many of them closer to the Taliban.
Amid all of this, there are no easy solutions for Islamabad. For decades, Afghanistan has suffered from the monster that Pakistan helped create under the foolish belief it could be controlled. Now Pakistan itself has to face the demon.
Hamayon Rastgar is a writer and researcher who works as a senior editor at Zan Times.
