After Imran Khan, is Pakistan America's enforcer in Afghanistan?

Last October, escalating tensions between Afghanistan and Pakistan erupted into a brief but fierce war. Despite underlying problems dating back to Pakistan’s creation, the most recent flareup was rooted in the Taliban seizing power in Afghanistan in 2021.

Since this takeover, and the US-orchestrated ouster of ex-PM Imran Khan shortly thereafter, tensions have been building. Kabul accused Islamabad of giving sanctuary to Daesh (ISKP) and excoriated Pakistan’s routine bombing of Afghan villages and repeated violations of its airspace, allegedly in tandem with Washington. Islamabad said Afghanistan has been sheltering the banned Pakistani Taliban, as the resurgent group's attacks inside Pakistan continue to rise.

The temperature online was even higher. People on both sides behaved like the war was inevitable. Afghans call Pakistan a US vassal and an artificial state, likening it to Israel. Pakistanis fire back that they have hosted millions of Afghan refugees for decades, that their patience has ended, and that Afghanistan needs to be taught a lesson.

The irony is hard to ignore. Pakistan faces the same accusations it has long thrown at India. India accuses Pakistan of harbouring militants, denying it, and responding with a disproportionate show of force, against civilian targets. Now Pakistan is doing the very same to Afghanistan. It is the same old script, only with the actors swapped.

In 2021, after twenty years of US occupation and the Taliban suddenly back in power, the sighs of relief in Islamabad could almost be heard. This was supposed to be Pakistan’s moment.

Even Khawaja Muhammad Asif, then in opposition and current defence minister, called the Doha Agreement a victory over US arrogance. The US may have had worldly power, but was defeated, Asif said, by divine support that the Taliban possessed. Though, Asif has unsurprisingly since apologised for his remarks.

Then there was the Pakistani intelligence chief Faiz Hameed strolling through a Kabul hotel lobby shortly after the takeover. He showed no concern, and his demeanour suggested that the sudden changes were planned by Pakistan as he reassured reporters that everything would be ‘okay’. It seemed everything had fallen into place. Its proxy returned to power, and Pakistan’s influence was back.

So what went wrong? Beneath the surface, the relationship was always rocky. During the US occupation, Pakistan had maintained a watchful eye over the Taliban. It chose to overlook some events, but intervened at other junctures when its interests were threatened, which fuelled resentment amongst Taliban leaders under US attack.

The handing over of Mullah Zaeef to US custody in 2001, the deaths of officials in custody, like ex-Minister of Defence Obaidullah Akhund, the disappearance of other figures like Ustad Yasir, and the detention of commanders like the now deputy prime minister Mullah Baradar, who had begun peace talks with the US on his own terms, added fuel to the fire.

Then came the blowback. The gambit crippled Pakistan. Society grew polarised, and the formation of the Pakistani Taliban in 2007 worsened security. After the Taliban’s 2021 takeover, Pakistan’s democratically-elected prime minister Imran Khan attempted a Kabul-mediated deal with the TTP to bring peace to Pakistan’s tribal belt: devastated by insurgency and Pakistan’s complicity in Washington’s drone war.

Khan’s vision wasn’t to materialise; he was ousted in 2022 in a US-orchestrated coup with the complicity of Pakistan’s military. Even Hameed, once smirking in a Taliban-conquered Kabul, fell afoul and was imprisoned. The saying goes that every country has a military, but in Pakistan, its military has a country. Little has changed since.

Pakistan’s crisis of legitimacy has only deepened. A controversial 27th Constitutional Amendment has granted Army Chief Asim Munir, Donald Trump’s ‘favourite field marshal’, lifelong constitutional immunity, whilst creating the curated and powerful post of Chief of Defence Forces (CDF). The move almost backfired; Munir’s promotion was approved after the government missed the notification deadline amidst swirling rumours of political intrigue.

The delay briefly left Pakistan in the unprecedented but ironic limbo of being a country wherein the military is supreme, but its legally mandated top military post laid momentarily vacant.

Furthermore, waning US influence after its defeat in Afghanistan has left Islamabad scrambling for relevance, which it has sought to revive through military alliances with Saudi Arabia, offering troops to a supposed International Stabilisation Force for Gaza. Most recently, Pakistan also joined Trump’s ‘Board of Peace’, likely leaving the door open to potential normalisation with Israel.

Pakistan’s military junta has seemingly decided it could regain its lost regional relevance by problematising Afghanistan and offering it as a sacrificial lamb to whichever bidder it can attract. Declassified documents under the US’ Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) revealed Pakistan actively lobbying the Trump administration to partner up and ‘retrieve’ leftover US ‘military weapons and equipment’ from Afghanistan.

A tense ceasefire remains in place between the two countries, but the war of words continues and key crossings between them remain closed. Afghanistan, almost unthinkably, seems to hold the upper hand. The closure of the Torkham crossing may hurt Afghanistan in the short term, but is attempting to diversify its trade with Central Asia and strengthen its new air corridor with India.

A historically fractured Afghan society has unified against Pakistan's reviled military, whilst Pakistan's domestic fissures have only deepened as its military has come under scrutiny. In its complicity with the US, the junta has forfeited the religious legitimacy it once enjoyed, leading Islamabad to make extraordinary and repeated pleas for an Afghan fatwa to rebuke the TTP on its behalf.

Pakistan’s tried, tested and failed recipe of supporting opposition to Kabul is being resuscitated. Crucially, the international image Pakistan had once successfully projected, of being an enigmatic and mysterious Taliban-whisperer, remains in tatters.

Yet like the Durand Line itself, the bloodlines between these two countries run far deeper than a colonial boundary. Without a political reset and the threat of militants, airstrikes or US involvement hanging over them, Pakistan and Afghanistan risk sliding into a conflict that neither can afford.

Currently, Pakistan’s military is reportedly gearing up for another operation that is displacing thousands of civilians in the Tirah valley, adjacent to Afghanistan.

If Afghanistan’s defiant and bloody history teaches anything, it is that these battles never produce victors. They only leave the region with more loss, more grief and more broken foundations to rebuild once again.

Ahmed-Waleed Kakar is the founder of The Afghan Eye, an independent media platform specialising in Afghanistan.

Follow Ahmed on X: @awsanzar

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