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When the Taliban took control of Kabul in 2021, Pakistan’s then-prime minister Imran Khan lauded Afghanistan for breaking “the shackles of slavery”. Khan’s spymaster Faiz Hameed was photographed drinking tea with leaders of the Islamist militant group in a Kabul hotel.
But with violence surging to a nine-year high, Islamabad’s hope that the new regime would prove a more co-operative ally than their US-backed predecessor has been replaced by concern about security.
More than 2,500 civilians, security personnel and militants were killed by terror attacks in Pakistan in 2024, a 66 per cent increase from 2023, according to the Islamabad-based Centre for Research and Security Studies, many of them killed by militant groups based in Afghanistan.
Asim Munir, Pakistan’s chief of army staff, called Afghanistan a “brotherly neighbour” on Tuesday in Peshawar, the capital of the border province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, but called on the Taliban to crack down on cross-border militancy.
“Pakistan has always wanted better relations with Afghanistan,” he said, according to the state broadcaster. “The only difference . . . is the presence of [the Pakistani Taliban] and the spread of terrorism . . . and it will remain so until they remove this issue.”
Islamabad had hoped that supporting the Afghan Taliban through its two-decade insurgency — including with shelter, weapons, financing and medical aid — would buy it leverage and security along their shared 2,600km border after Nato-led forces departed.
“Pakistan is losing patience with the Afghan Taliban which refuses to take action against” Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), also known as the Pakistani Taliban, said Asif Durrani, Pakistan’s former special representative for Afghanistan, who left the role in September.
“They’ve done nothing but act like ostriches with their heads in the sand when we show them proof that terrorism is emanating from their borders.”
The TTP has historic links to the regime in Kabul and al-Qaeda but operates independently.
Increasing attacks by the group, which seeks to impose its brand of hardline sharia law in Pakistan’s tribal borderlands, have shaken foreign investors’ faith in Islamabad. Chinese workers have also been targeted by separatist militants, drawing outrage from Chinese officials and threatening Beijing’s $60bn in Belt and Road Initiative projects in the country.
A UN Security Council report in July 2024 estimated that at least 6,000 TTP fighters currently operate out of Afghanistan. The group’s resurgence, fuelled in part by advanced weapons left behind by Nato’s withdrawal and the release of hundreds of fighters from Afghan prisons, has erased much of Pakistan’s hard-fought progress to defeat it before 2021, analysts said.
Pakistan has tried to pressure the Taliban to rein in the TTP, deporting more than 800,000 Afghan refugees, and instituted border closures, restricting the landlocked country’s access to Pakistan’s ports. Islamabad has also launched air strikes against hide-outs in Afghanistan that Pakistani security officials allege house TTP fighters.
“[Pakistan has] adopted a military approach towards TTP, but that has not succeeded,” said Suhail Shaheen, a Taliban spokesperson, who said the attacks were being carried out by groups based in tribal areas inside Pakistan. “It is up to [Islamabad] to reconsider their approach and adopt a more realistic approach aimed at resolving the issue internally.”
The regime in Kabul has relocated a small number of TTP fighters and their families to western Afghanistan, away from the Pakistan border.
But analysts worry that the Afghan Taliban is neither capable nor willing to go as far as Pakistan would like. For the TTP, the Taliban have “dug their heels”, said Ibraheem Bahiss, an analyst at the International Crisis Group.
“The government does not want to risk sparking a war with a powerful group it shares deep ties with, especially with the risk that some TTP fighters may defect to IS-KP,” he added, referring to the Afghanistan-based Isis splinter group.
This comes as the Taliban is seeking to repair ties with India, diversifying its economic partners as relations with Pakistan have frayed.
Vikram Misri, India’s top foreign ministry bureaucrat, met Mawlawi Amir Khan Muttaqi, Afghanistan’s acting foreign minister, in Dubai last week and promised to deepen trade through an Iranian port.
Islamabad made a “strategic miscalculation” by betting that the Afghan Taliban would turn on the TTP, its ideological ally, said Maleeha Lodhi, a former Pakistani ambassador to the US and the UN.
Economic interdependence and religious and ethnic ties between Pakistan and Afghanistan mean “neither side can afford a breakdown in relations”, she said. “But this level of cross-border violence can’t go on.”
Data visualisation by Haohsiang Ko and cartography by Aditi Bhandari
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