Afghanistan Peace CampaignA cease-fire announced by Afghanistan and Pakistan on Sunday has brought respite from the worst flare-up of tensions between the neighboring countries in years.
For nearly two weeks, Afghanistan and Pakistan exchanged military attacks that killed dozens of people, injured hundreds and threatened to turn into full-on conflict.
After meeting in Doha on Saturday under the mediation of Qatar and Turkey, Afghanistan and Pakistan vowed to de-escalate and to meet again later this month. “Terrorism from Afghanistan on Pakistan’s soil will be stopped immediately,” Pakistan’s minister of defense, Khawaja Asif, said on social media on Sunday.
“Neither country will undertake any hostile actions against the other,” Zabiullah Mujahid, the spokesman for the Afghan Taliban, wrote on X. There was no joint statement.
Despite the lull, Pakistan has a resilient Taliban problem, analysts and former diplomats say, and the quagmire remains nearly impossible to resolve without strong measures that neither side has been willing to take so far.
The underlying dispute revolves around relentless attacks in Pakistan by a terrorist group, Tehrik-i-Taliban. Pakistan complains that the Afghan Taliban government is harboring the group and making no effort to halt its activities.
The latest crisis began this month when two explosions rocked central Kabul and an airstrike hit a market in eastern Afghanistan, just days after 11 Pakistani soldiers died in a T.T.P. attack. Afghanistan blamed the strikes on Pakistan, a claim Pakistan neither confirmed nor denied, and the Taliban government responded with cross-border raids that killed at least 23 Pakistani soldiers.
Pakistan retaliated last Wednesday with attacks across the border and airstrikes in Kabul and Kandahar, Afghanistan’s two largest cities. The airstrikes were aimed at militant groups like the Pakistani Taliban, a Pakistani military official said on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t allowed to publicly discuss the tensions. Hours after the attacks, the two countries entered an initial 48-hour cease-fire to defuse the tensions.
But shortly after that cease-fire expired on Friday, Pakistan carried out additional airstrikes that Afghanistan said killed several cricket players. Pakistan denied killing civilians and said militants had been targeted.
“There appears to be a new normal where every militant attack on Pakistani security forces is now being met with retaliation from Pakistan in Afghanistan,” said Michael Kugelman, a senior fellow at the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada. “Pakistan lost patience and concluded that enough is enough.”
Pakistan helped create the Taliban in the early 1990s and celebrated the group’s return to power in Afghanistan in 2021. But relations have soured in more recent years as Pakistan’s attempts to engage with Afghanistan over the Pakistani Taliban yielded few results.
That is because the Afghan Taliban don’t see the T.T.P. as a terrorist group — rather, as an entity so closely connected to their identity that trying to eliminate or curtail it would threaten their own foundations.
The T.T.P. provided recruits to the Afghan Taliban during the 20-year war against U.S. and NATO forces. Its first leader in the 2000s was part of the Haqqani network, which carried out suicide attacks during the war and whose leader is now Afghanistan’s interior minister. The group also has sworn allegiance to Afghanistan’s leader, Sheikh Haibatullah Akhundzada. A Taliban crackdown on the T.T.P. would risk sending its fighters into the arms of the Islamic State, whose militants have attacked the Taliban government, analysts say.
“The Taliban could at least disarm the T.T.P., but they won’t because they are best cousins,” said Asif Durrani, Pakistan’s former special representative for Afghanistan. “Pakistan has now realized that it had a misplaced perception about the Taliban and their potential role to stabilize things in Afghanistan, and with Pakistan.”
Pakistan has not recognized the Taliban as Afghanistan’s legitimate authority, and its government said at the height of the crisis last week that it hoped that “one day the people of Afghanistan will be free and live under a truly representative and popular government.”
Afghanistan has never recognized the border with Pakistan, arguing that the line, created by the British Empire, arbitrarily splits communities.
The first attacks in Kabul and eastern Afghanistan earlier this month occurred as Afghanistan’s foreign minister was visiting India, Pakistan’s archnemesis, to strengthen relations between the two countries.
Pakistan has accused India of backing armed groups in Afghanistan to destabilize it. In recent months it has improved relations with the Trump administration, while earlier this year Russia became the first country to recognize the Taliban as Afghanistan’s legitimate authority. China shares a border with both Pakistan and Afghanistan and has tried to mediate, but a trilateral meeting in Kabul this summer failed to produce a joint agreement on security issues. Turkey, which maintains strong relations between both Pakistan’s government and the Taliban, has recently taken on a more prominent role in the mediation efforts.
“There is too much distrust between the two, and too many external actors now, for this to be resolved in a perennial way,” said Iftikhar Firdous, an expert on armed groups with The Khorasan Diary, a Pakistan-based research group.
Afghanistan’s and Pakistan’s populations share deep ethnic and linguistic ties (Pashto), as well as religious ones (both are predominantly Sunni). The Afghan economy, battered by multiple crises, relies heavily on Pakistan, which absorbs 40 percent of Afghan exports.
Mr. Mujahid, the spokesman for the Taliban government in Afghanistan, said shortly after the cease-fire was announced on Sunday that Afghanistan would commit to not supporting groups that carry out attacks on the Pakistani government.
But the Afghan Taliban most likely lack the willingness or the capacity to contain the Pakistani Taliban, according to Mr. Durrani and three other current or former diplomats from Afghanistan and Western nations.
“There’s a pattern of the Afghan Taliban not moving against the T.T.P. — not expelling them, not using military force against them or not compelling them to do certain things,” said Mr. Kugelman, the analyst at the Asia Pacific Foundation. “And that is because the Taliban never turns on its closest militant allies.”
Both governments are scheduled to meet again in Istanbul on Saturday to formalize an agreement.