During a report in Pakistan in 2001, I went to the Afghan embassy in Islamabad several times to listen to the Taliban representative’s harangues against the Americans, who were bombing Afghanistan in retaliation for 9/11. Pakistan was one of the three countries that had recognized the Islamic Emirate founded by Mullah Omar, which had a terrible reputation from the beginning for being so fundamentalist that it banned girls from going to school, and with an even worse reputation since the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York for harboring Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda.
When George W. Bush told General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s strongman, that there was no other option but to side with the United States, there was no shortage of news saying that the Pakistanis’ traditional alliance with their Afghan neighbors was broken. However, there was nothing traditional about this alliance. Pakistan has supported the Taliban since the 1990s to maintain influence in Afghanistan, just as throughout the 1980s it served as a rearguard for mujaedin groups fighting against the communist regime in Kabul and its Soviet allies. With India as an enemy to the east, it has always been a priority for Pakistan to have a friendly regime on its western border. This is called strategic depth, something very important for a country that has fought three wars with India since both countries were born in 1947 from the division of the Raj, British India.
Since the Taliban returned to power in Kabul in 2021, it seemed that Pakistan had regained its friendly regime, as if a return to the supposed traditional alliance between the two neighboring countries. Furthermore, in the two decades of attempts to democratize Afghanistan promoted by the United States, India had managed to gain some influence in power circles in Kabul, especially during the presidency of Ashraf Ghani.
Pakistani troops have now bombed the so-called Pakistani Taliban inside Afghan territory. And there were exchanges of fire between fighters from the Taliban regime and Pakistani soldiers, generating a serious crisis, which did not escalate further thanks to the mediation of Türkiye and Qatar. There should be a meeting in Istanbul this week, following another in Doha, between representatives of the two countries. At issue is above all the demand for Afghanistan to prevent the Pakistani Taliban from using the neighboring country for terrorist attacks on Pakistan. It will be a difficult requirement to have an immediate effective response, and for several reasons: first of all because they are Pastunes tribes who live on both sides of the border, and on top of that a border impossible to monitor 100%; secondly because it is not clear that the Taliban who rule in Kabul, now led by Hibatullah Akhunzada, even if they have the capacity to expel the Pakistani Taliban, with whom they share ideology, have the desire to do so, even if they try to maintain some distance from them for common sense reasons.
Let us return to the much-mentioned traditional alliance between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Which is not a historical reality, on the contrary. At most it is an intermittent reality. In 1947, when Pakistan joined the UN, the only country that voted against it was Afghanistan, then a monarchy led by King Zaher Shah. At issue is the border, the porous border, inhabited in a large part by the Pastune and Baluche ethnic groups on one side and the other. A border also known as the Durand Line, a legacy of the colonial era.
Durand is the surname of the British diplomat, Sir Mortimer Durand, who negotiated in 1893 with Emir Abdur Rahman Khan over 2,500 kilometers of border between the Raj and Afghanistan. It is a line that runs from Iran to the western tip of China, and which reminds us that Afghanistan remained independent because of resistance to invaders but also to serve as a buffer between the British and Russian empires in Central Asia. This year, the Taliban regime once again said that it does not recognize the Durand Line, which certainly did not please Islamabad. Nor would Islamabad have been pleased with the visit this month of the deputy head of Afghan diplomacy to India.
We will see if the meeting in Istanbul will bring something to the Pakistanis’ liking or if the clash between the neighbors is here to stay.
Deputy Director of Diário de Notícias