Desperate Depths

Pakistan’s reckless airstrikes in Afghanistan betray its growing insecurity as India’s quiet courtship of the Taliban exposes the bankruptcy of Islamabad’s old Afghan policy.

For decades, Pakistan fancied itself as the gatekeeper of Afghanistan - a self-styled ‘strategic depth’ against India and an indispensable interlocutor for the West. But as Pakistani jets thundered over Kabul on Thursday night, targeting the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), it was not strength but desperation that echoed in the skies. The timing of the assault coincided with Taliban foreign minister Amir Khan Muttaqi’s maiden visit to India. It revealed how thoroughly Pakistan’s Afghan policy has unravelled, leaving Islamabad encircled by the very monsters it once midwifed.

Reports suggest the strikes were aimed at killing Noor Wali Mehsud, the TTP chief who has led the group since 2018. Mehsud, who cast Pakistan’s post-9/11 alliance with America as an act of apostasy, has since become Islamabad’s most implacable foe. The TTP’s relentless attacks, like the ambush on October 8 that killed 11 Pakistani soldiers, have transformed Pakistan’s western frontier into a bleeding wound. For years, Islamabad sheltered the Afghan Taliban even as it hunted the Pakistani version of the same movement. That schizophrenic policy has come home to roost.

Dangerous escalation

The airstrikes mark a dangerous escalation in what has become an undeclared border war. Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers, long regarded as Pakistan’s ideological protégés, now accuse their former patrons of violating sovereignty and aiding the Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP), a mutual enemy.

Pakistan’s defence minister, Khawaja Asif, thundered in parliament that Islamabad was “paying the price of sixty years of hospitality to six million Afghan refugees with our blood.” The rhetoric conveniently omits who invited the serpent into the tent. Since the 1980s, Pakistan’s generals have used Islamist militancy as a tool of foreign policy. The Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) cultivated the mujahideen to fight the Soviets, later midwifed the Taliban, and turned a blind eye to al-Qaeda fugitives. It also engineered jihadist outfits against India, from Lashkar-e-Taiba to Jaish-e-Mohammed. The state became so entangled in the jihadist web that it could neither dismantle it nor escape from it.

The Taliban’s victory in 2021 briefly seemed to vindicate Pakistan’s long game. As American troops withdrew in disarray, Islamabad celebrated the return of its clients to Kabul. But the rejoicing was short-lived. The Taliban, now masters of their own house, proved unwilling to act as Pakistan’s proxies. They refused to curb the TTP or hand over its leaders. Instead, they asserted Afghan independence in rhetoric and diplomacy, most notably by courting India. That is the deeper sting in Islamabad’s latest tantrum.

Strategic overture

Muttaqi’s visit to New Delhi this week, where he met Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar and National Security Adviser Ajit Doval, marks the highest-level contact between India and the Taliban since 2021. India, which lost billions in infrastructure projects after the fall of the previous Afghan government, has moved cautiously by offering humanitarian aid, reopening a technical mission in Kabul and quietly exploring security cooperation. The Taliban’s condemnation of a recent terror attack in Pahalgam, which killed 26 people, further signals a pragmatic recalibration. In this new diplomatic choreography, Pakistan is the odd man out.

Islamabad’s strategic paranoia is understandable but self-inflicted. For years, it viewed Afghanistan not as a neighbour but as a backyard to be controlled through pliant rulers and extremist proxies. That imperial delusion is now collapsing under its own contradictions.

Domestically, Pakistan is in disarray as its economy teeters on bankruptcy and its frontier regions seethe with insurgency.

The fallout of the airstrikes bombing will not be contained by borders. Afghanistan may retaliate through proxies or by loosening restraints on the TTP. That could drag both countries deeper into a cycle of insurgency and reprisal, with civilians as the inevitable victims.

The irony is bitter but deserved. For decades, Pakistan believed it could manipulate jihadists, control Afghanistan and outmanoeuvre India. Today it is reaping the whirlwind of its own duplicity.