The Author
In August 2021, as the last American military transports taxied down the runways of Kabul, the mood in Islamabad was one of quiet, strategic vindication. Decades of complex geopolitical manoeuvring appeared to have culminated in a historic triumph: a friendly, ideologically aligned regime finally sat in Kabul, promising an end to cross-border hostility. Yet, just a few years later, that optimism has evaporated into the smoke of cross-border airstrikes, artillery duels, and the bitter rhetoric of open conflict. The devolution of Pakistan-Afghanistan relations from fraternal backing into mutual existential dread offers a masterclass in how proximity, mismatched expectations, and the unyielding realities of state sovereignty can turn historical alliances into active warfare.
The rapid descent from strategic optimism to what Pakistan’s defence establishment has openly termed a state of “open war” highlights a spectacular miscalculation. Islamabad’s historical foreign policy doctrine sought “strategic depth”—the security of a reliable, friendly government on its western frontier to avoid a two-front security dilemma.
When the Afghan Taliban recaptured Kabul, Pakistan expected a compliant partner that would secure the shared border. Instead, by late 2025 and early 2026, the relationship fractured completely. Following a devastating wave of cross-border terrorism, Pakistan launched Operation Ghazab lil-Haq (Wrath for the Truth), executing highly coordinated airstrikes targeting militant strongholds deep inside Afghanistan, including urban centers like Kabul and Kandahar. The Afghan Taliban responded with heavy artillery ground assaults along the border and cross-border drone incursions. The illusion of a peaceful western frontier died on the altar of hard security realities.
To understand how easily peace crumbled, one must look at the structural fault lines that no amount of shared religious ideology could bridge. Chief among these is the Durand Line, the 1,600-mile colonial-era boundary drawn by the British in 1893.
No Afghan government—whether monarchist, communist, democratic, or Islamist—has ever formally recognized the Durand Line as a permanent international border. It cuts directly through the Pashtun tribal belt, dividing families and clans. When Pakistan began heavily fortifying and fencing this porous border, it triggered immediate resistance. For the Afghan Taliban, the fence is an illegitimate barrier slicing through their ancestral homeland; for Pakistan, it is an existential necessity to assert Westphalian sovereignty and control cross-border movement.
The primary engine driving this hostility is the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), or the Pakistani Taliban. The TTP’s explicit goal is to overthrow the Pakistani state and establish an Islamic emirate modelled exactly after the one in Kabul.
Pakistan’s post-2021 strategy rested on a flawed assumption: that the Afghan Taliban would crack down on the TTP as a favour to their former patron. Instead, the opposite occurred. Following the Western withdrawal, hundreds of TTP fighters were released from Afghan prisons, and the group found safe haven under Kabul’s passive, if not active, tolerance.
The TTP fought alongside the Afghan Taliban against NATO for decades. Betraying them under Pakistani pressure would destroy Kabul’s internal jihadi legitimacy and cause defections to more radical outfits like ISKP (Islamic State Khorasan Province).
In 2025 alone, TTP attacks martyred over 600 military personnel and nearly 600 Pakistani civilians. Treating the hosts of these attackers as “allies” became politically and militarily impossible.
International mediation—including a brief ceasefire brokered by Qatar and Turkey in late 2025, and subsequent talks mediated by Saudi Arabia—failed because they only provided temporary band-aids to structural wounds.
The peace efforts are trapped in an unresolvable loop: Pakistan refuses to halt its kinetic operations until Kabul expels or extradites TTP leadership. Kabul refuses to take action against its ideological brothers while its airspace is violated and its border regions are bombed. Regional powers like China have attempted to step in to protect their economic investments (such as the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor), but even Beijing’s immense diplomatic weight has failed to break the deadlock.
The tragic trajectory of Pakistan-Afghanistan relations demonstrates that shared ideology is an unstable foundation for international statecraft. When the euphoria of the 2021 victory faded, it exposed the raw, unresolved realities of border disputes, ethnic nationalism, and clashing state interests.
As long as Kabul prioritizes ideological solidarity with cross-border proxies over state-to-state diplomacy, and as long as Islamabad relies on kinetic containment without addressing the root geopolitical vulnerabilities, relations will remain hostile. The backdrop of failed peace efforts serves as a stark reminder: in the theatre of geopolitics, yesterday’s strategic depth can easily become tomorrow’s open war.( Opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of WNAM).
