Islamabad, Pakistan – When Pakistan’s foreign minister, Ishaq Dar, visited Kabul in April and met his Afghan Taliban counterpart, Amir Khan Muttaqi, analysts viewed the occasion as marking a reset of relations amid the increasing hostilities between the two former allies.
Subsequent meetings between the two in May and August, brokered by China, reinforced that sentiment.
But a deadly weekend of clashes along the countries’ porous border has put those diplomatic overtures on hold. Islamabad says it killed more than 200 Taliban fighters; the Taliban government says 58 Pakistani soldiers were killed. The death toll on both sides underscores how fragile the détente earlier in the year was.
Pakistan, which has been grappling with a dramatic surge in attacks – especially in the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, where dozens of military personnel have died – accuses the Taliban of giving sanctuary to armed groups that launch cross-border attacks.
The Taliban denies those charges. But on Thursday night, Kabul was rocked by explosions and gunfire. Pakistan neither confirmed nor denied involvement, but the Taliban government said Pakistan had been behind the attacks in Kabul and in an eastern Afghan province, and promised retaliation.
Fighting flared again on Saturday night. Pakistan acknowledged that the clashes left at least 23 of its soldiers dead and another 29 injured, and said its forces had taken control of more than 21 posts on Afghan territory. Kabul has not confirmed the Taliban’s casualty figures.
That immediate military escalation has passed, but the clashes have evoked parallels with Pakistan’s tense new equation with its eastern neighbour, India, after New Delhi blamed Islamabad for the killing of 26 civilians in Indian-administered Kashmir in April.
Like the Taliban’s position on anti-Pakistan armed groups ostensibly operating from Afghan soil, Islamabad, too, rejected any link with the attackers in Indian-administered Kashmir. But just as Islamabad has long accused the Taliban of sheltering groups that attack Pakistan, India has, for decades, alleged that Pakistan supports and sponsors “terrorist” groups that target its territory.
Now, some analysts say, Pakistan is trying to establish a “new normal” with the Taliban, by making clear that future attacks on its soil could invite retribution inside Afghanistan. The stance mirrors a position India’s Narendra Modi government took against Pakistan in April, and that Islamabad protested against at the time.
India launched strikes inside Pakistani territory in May, resulting in a four-day-long conflict, with both sides using missiles, drones and artillery to attack each other.
This shifting landscape between Pakistan and Afghanistan suggests, analysts say, that while the fighting over the weekend might have eased, tensions are likely to simmer in the coming weeks, and a lasting breakthrough remains elusive.
Trigger behind the border clashes
Out of the various armed groups reportedly operating from Afghanistan, Pakistani authorities regard the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) as the biggest threat. The TTP emerged in 2007 amid the United States-led, so-called “war on terror”, and has for years waged an armed campaign against Islamabad.
It seeks to implement strict Islamic law, has demanded the release of imprisoned members, and calls for a reversal of the merger of Pakistan’s former tribal areas with the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.
The TTP is independent of Afghanistan’s Taliban, but the two groups are ideologically aligned.
Islamabad blames Kabul for allowing sanctuary for the TTP, as well as other groups such as the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) and Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP).
TTP attacks have increased sharply since the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan in August 2021, and numbers highlight the increasing trend.
“Our data show that the TTP engaged in at least 600 attacks against, or clashes with, security forces in the past year alone. Its activity in 2025 so far already exceeds that seen in all of 2024,” a recent report by the US-based Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED) project said.
In the last few days, several attacks have killed more than two dozen Pakistani soldiers, including officers, with the latest such incident on October 8.
Regional powers – including China, Iran and Russia – have repeatedly urged the Taliban to eliminate the TTP and other armed groups operating from Afghanistan. That call was renewed at the Moscow Format consultation in early October, which was also attended by Muttaqi, the Taliban foreign minister.
Abdul Basit, a scholar of militancy and a research fellow at Singapore’s S Rajaratnam School of International Studies, said he expects more diplomacy in the coming days, led by countries that have strong ties with both the Taliban and Pakistan, such as Gulf nations or China.
“I think it is plausible that Islamabad and Kabul will hold another round of meetings in some third country to re-engage in dialogue, but I believe that tensions will continue to simmer, sometimes going up or sometimes going down. We certainly cannot rule out another round of hostilities at the border,” he told Al Jazeera.
Seema Ilahi Baloch, a former Pakistani ambassador who has been involved in informal Pakistan-Afghanistan talks in the past, said that Islamabad had so far failed to persuade the Taliban to prevent Afghanistan from being used as a base for attacks against Pakistan.
“Both sides must realise that such conflicts undermine bilateral cooperation and negatively impact regional stability,” she said. “China, which has influence in both Pakistan and Afghanistan, can be the interlocutor to mend fences between the two through diplomacy,” she added.
Islamabad’s new normal?
Still, analysts say it is becoming increasingly difficult for Pakistan’s officials to ignore the mounting death toll in the country from attacks that Islamabad alleges have originated in Afghanistan.
The Centre for Research and Security Studies (CRSS), an Islamabad-based think tank, put the number of deaths of Pakistan’s security personnel at more than 2,400 in the first three quarters of this year, which is on track to become the deadliest year in a decade.
Basit said that Islamabad is trying to define a new normal in which any attack believed to have originated in Afghanistan – whether by the TTP or another group – will carry a cost for Kabul.
“Any attack which emanates from Afghanistan will be responded [to] with [the] same ferocity on their territory, with Pakistan implying that Afghan Taliban are facilitating such attacks in Pakistan, and thus are legitimate targets,” he said.
Basit acknowledged that Pakistan’s new approach appears similar to what New Delhi adopted against Islamabad after the April attack in Indian-administered Kashmir, but said there was a key difference. Regardless of the casualties on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border during the past weekend’s clashes, the military asymmetry between the two sides is significant, unlike the scenario between India and Pakistan.
He pointed to Pakistan’s ability to hit back against India’s attacks in May: Pakistan was able to shoot down several Indian jets in the process. The Taliban, however, though battle-hardened fighters who have a long history of repelling foreign powers, do not have the equipment and training that Pakistan’s professional army does. “There is a difference,” Basit said.
Aamer Raza, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Peshawar, said there was a growing feeling within Pakistani policy circles that patience with Afghanistan was wearing thin in the Pakistani establishment.
“Although some engagement is inevitable, major breakthroughs shouldn’t immediately be expected. With Pakistan’s clear superiority in air and projectile warfare, even in the last clashes, it could have inflicted greater damage on Afghanistan, but it largely refrained,” he told Al Jazeera.
After the weekend clashes, Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, for the first time, also questioned the legitimacy of the Taliban government itself, even though Islamabad was the movement’s chief patron for a quarter of a century.
Pakistan demanded “concrete and verifiable actions against these terrorist elements by the Taliban regime” and urged a more inclusive government. “We also hope that one day, the Afghan people would be emancipated, and they would be governed by a true representative government,” the statement read.
Baloch, the diplomat, downplayed that language, suggesting that Islamabad was merely calling for elections in Afghanistan.
Basit, however, argued that the wording was significant. “This language of the statement also hints that Pakistan might be open to the idea of throwing its support behind anti-Taliban groups if the current regime continues to ignore Pakistan’s legitimate security concerns,” he said.
The New Delhi factor
The weekend’s clashes also coincided with Muttaqi’s first visit to India. He is, in fact, the first senior Taliban leader to travel to New Delhi since the group took control of Afghanistan four years ago.
Muttaqi received a temporary United Nations-sanctions exemption to travel for a week, from October 9 to 16, and met Indian Minister of External Affairs S Jaishankar.
Kabul’s moves towards New Delhi also represent the culmination of months of diplomacy that Pakistan has watched closely.
From the mid-1990s until a few years ago, India viewed the Taliban as a proxy for Pakistan’s intelligence agencies, and accused the group and its allies of deadly attacks on its diplomatic missions in Afghanistan.
But since the group returned to power in Afghanistan, and amid rising Taliban-Pakistan tensions, India has engaged in a series of outreach efforts with Kabul’s new leaders, leading to Muttaqi’s visit.
Islamabad continues to allege that New Delhi is fomenting trouble in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan provinces, and that some groups are funded or supported by New Delhi from Afghan territory, charges that India has consistently rejected.
Now, with tensions on both its western and eastern fronts, Islamabad needs to stay cautious, said Baloch, the former ambassador.
“No country can afford to open war fronts on all its borders, and that goes for Pakistan also,” she said.
Meanwhile, some analysts have questioned Pakistan’s posture of neither accepting responsibility for last Thursday’s explosions in Afghanistan, nor denying a role.
This could damage Pakistan’s credibility if groups based in Afghanistan attack Pakistan again, suggested Fahad Nabeel, who leads the Islamabad-based research consultancy Geopolitical Insights.
“The main question will be why Pakistani officials did not claim responsibility for the past alleged strikes [in Afghanistan, in response to attacks in Pakistan]. If Pakistan merely uses the terrorism-threat narrative, critics will ask why it did not take such actions in the past decade,” Nabeel told Al Jazeera.
However, Nabeel said that he did not see major parallels between India’s response to the April attack and Pakistan’s recent approach towards the Taliban. “The only commonalities,” he said, lay in both India and Pakistan accusing its neighbours, Pakistan and Afghanistan, of not doing enough to stop UN-sanctioned individuals and groups from using their soil to attack others.
Singapore-based Basit said that Pakistan’s air strikes during Muttaqi’s visit were likely intended to send a message: that “Islamabad will not hesitate to use force if it perceives collusion between Kabul and New Delhi to undermine Pakistani security”.
However, like Baloch, Basit also acknowledged the limits of that posture. “No country can afford a two-front war,” he said.
Basit also said that bigger questions about Islamabad’s approach remained unanswered.
“What really is the end game here?” he asked.
“Are these strikes going to change the calculus of [the] Afghan Taliban to pushing them into action against the TTP, or will it drive them to forge a closer nexus with [the] TTP?” he asked.
“When you use force, you are using it to achieve [a] certain goal, and the question is, what does Pakistan want to achieve with these air strikes?”
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