Afghanistan and Pakistan appear headed toward a new military escalation amid deadly attacks on both sides of the border and mounting frustration in Islamabad over Indian outreach to the Taliban.
Kabul accused Pakistan of launching airstrikes on eastern Afghanistan on Tuesday that killed at least 10 people, including nine children, and vowed to retaliate. Pakistan denied responsibility for the attack.
The Taliban-run Afghan government believes the strikes were retribution for an attack on the headquarters of a Pakistani paramilitary force in Peshawar on Monday that killed at least three personnel. Pakistan blamed Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP, a militant group that has pledged allegiance to the Afghan Taliban leader.
Similar tensions last month led to a week of cross-border clashes.
Pakistan has accused both its archrival, India, and the Taliban of supporting the TTP. New Delhi and Kabul reject the claim. But their deepening ties have prompted fears in Islamabad that its neighbors are plotting against it.
“We are deeply concerned about this alignment,” a senior Pakistani Foreign Ministry official said. He spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly.
India has courted the isolated Taliban regime publicly with gestures that have included hosting Afghan Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi for a week in October.
New Delhi has stopped short of officially recognizing the Taliban-run government, a step only Russia has taken. But it has upgraded its mission in Kabul to an embassy, launched a joint chamber of commerce, and agreed to establish airfreight corridors between Afghanistan and India.
“Afghanistan has long been a battleground for India and Pakistan influence,” said Michael Kugelman, a senior fellow at the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada. “With Pakistan now on the defensive, given its crisis in ties with the Taliban, India sees an opportunity.”
For India, analysts say, the Taliban could become a useful partner. New Delhi’s outreach to the repressive regime, condemned internationally for its draconian restrictions on women and others, stems from the recognition that it “has few other friends” in the region, said Happymon Jacob, founder of the Council for Strategic and Defense Research, based in the Indian capital.
“If we can have a relationship with North Korea, I see no reason why there should be no relationship with the Taliban,” Jacob said.
The Taliban have welcomed the warming ties as a much-needed economic boost. After months of disruption on the border with Pakistan, long Afghanistan’s primary trading partner, the regime is urging merchants to explore new routes.
The Taliban have expanded trade with their western neighbor, Iran, and with the Central Asian nations to their north.
Officials in Pakistan say the Taliban’s economic dilemma is of their own making. Defense Minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif called the regime “a ragtag group” that Islamabad is “completely writing off.”
“There will be no greater idiocy than trusting them,” he told Geo televisions last week.
A suicide bombing in Islamabad this month killed 12 people, the deadliest attack in the country’s heartland in almost a decade. Pakistani officials blamed the TTP but also implicated the Afghan Taliban and India. They did not produce evidence for the two governments’ involvement.
For many Pakistani officials, the TTP’s expanding insurgency in northwestern Pakistan might feel personal. Pakistan helped to create the Taliban in the aftermath of the Afghan-Soviet War in the 1990s by arming and sheltering the militants. After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the United States pressured Islamabad to distance itself from the regime and led a coalition to oust it.
But when U.S. forces left Afghanistan in 2021 and the Taliban retook power, then-Prime Minister Imran Khan welcomed their return. The Afghans, he said, had removed the “shackles of slavery.”
But the Taliban have not met Pakistan’s hopes. TTP attacks surged, and the Afghan Taliban refrained from stepping in, Pakistani officials say. Islamabad accuses the Taliban of sheltering TTP and allowing the group to launch attacks on Pakistan from Afghan territory.
The brunt of the estrangement has been borne by ordinary Afghans. Pakistan has ordered more than 1 million Afghans to leave the country over the past three years to pressure the Taliban to rein in the TTP.
After the recent harvest season in Afghanistan, farmers’ vegetables, fruits and other perishables rotted at closed border crossings.
“It hurts both sides,” said Khan Jan Alokozai, an Afghan trader.
Cement exports from Pakistan to Afghanistan have also ground to a halt, he said, imperiling Pakistani jobs, as well. But traders in Pakistan believe that Afghanistan stands to lose much more and will have little choice than to begin cracking down on the TPP. Afghan merchants rely on Pakistan’s deepwater ports on the Arabian Sea for exports and imports. Circumventing the country can add weeks of transit time, said Shahid Hussain, a Pakistani trader.
“There is no or only very little impact on the Pakistani industries,” Hussain said.
Afghan officials view Iran’s Persian Gulf ports as possible alternatives, but Hussain cautioned that similar efforts under the former U.S.-backed Afghan government were not economically viable.
Meanwhile, a switch to airfreight with India could hinge on the Taliban regime’s ability to expand the country’s aging fleet of planes.
In an incident that might bode ill for the Taliban’s aspirations, the national carrier Ariana Afghan Airlines only narrowly escaped disaster in Delhi this past weekend when one of its planes landed on the wrong runway, several Indian newspapers reported, citing Indian officials.
India’s Directorate General of Civil Aviation and the Afghan Transportation and Aviation Ministry did not respond to requests for comment. The Afghan carrier is banned from many countries’ airspaces over safety concerns.
Haq Nawaz Khan, Supriya Kumar and Shaiq Hussain contributed to this report.
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