essay on pak afghan relations

Pakistan-Afghanistan Relations

6 Pages Posted: 31 May 2024

Fatima Idrees

Independent

Date Written: April 25, 2024

The relationship between Pakistan and Afghanistan, two neighboring South Asian countries, has been marked by a complex history of tensions and cooperation. This paper delves into the multifaceted dynamics of their bilateral relations, examining key historical events, contemporary issues, and efforts towards reconciliation. The border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, known as the Durand Line, has been a contentious issue since its demarcation in 1896. Afghanistan's refusal to recognize the legitimacy of this border has been a recurring source of friction between the two nations, leading to strained relations. Afghanistan's opposition to Pakistan's admission to the United Nations and its support for armed secessionist movements within Pakistan further exacerbated bilateral tensions. The involvement of external actors, including the Soviet Union and the United States, added complexity to the regional dynamics, with both countries vying for influence in Afghanistan. The war on terrorism brought new challenges to Pakistan-Afghanistan relations, with accusations of cross-border terrorism and support for militant groups being leveled against each other. The presence of Afghan refugees in Pakistan added another layer of complexity to the relationship, as the issue of repatriation and integration remained unresolved. Despite these challenges, both countries have made efforts to improve their relations in recent years. Initiatives such as the Afghan-Pak Transit Trade Agreement (APTTA) aim to enhance bilateral trade and connectivity, while defense cooperation and intelligence sharing seek to address common security concerns. Moreover, social and cultural bonds between the people of Pakistan and Afghanistan, especially in the western regions, serve as a foundation for potential reconciliation efforts. While significant hurdles remain, ongoing diplomatic initiatives offer hope for the gradual normalization of relations between the two countries.

Keywords: Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bilateral relations, Durand Line, Terrorism, Refugees, Diplomacy, Trade, Reconciliation.

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Why Pakistan-Afghanistan Tensions Are Soaring

T ensions between neighbors Pakistan and Afghanistan are running high as the Pakistani Defense Minister Khawaja Asif said this week that his country plans to continue launching cross-border attacks as part of a new military operation to curb terrorism. The comments mark a notable shift for Pakistani officials who, until now, had only admitted to one such cross-border strike in March. 

“We won’t serve them with cake and pastries. If attacked, we’ll attack back,” Asif told the BBC.

Pakistan has experienced a surge in violence since the Pakistani Taliban, or Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP), a close ally of the Afghan Taliban, unilaterally ended a ceasefire with Islamabad in November 2022. Last year alone, more than 700 attacks killed nearly 1,000 people .

The Pakistani government accuses the Afghan Taliban of providing a safe haven to the TTP. In recent years, Islamabad has made various attempts to contain the TTP, including talks , erecting a border fence between Pakistan and Afghanistan, and applying pressure on the Afghan government to stop assisting the militant group. This included the expulsion of over 500,000 Afghan refugees last October, with a second phase to expel another 800,000 commencing earlier this month.

Yet experts tell TIME that Pakistan has little power to stem the violence that overwhelmingly afflicts its two border regions with Afghanistan. That’s because Islamabad can no longer leverage the wartime support it offered the Taliban during the U.S. war in Afghanistan to help rein in the TTP. “Pakistan finds itself in a predicament largely of its own making—the Taliban leadership that it supported throughout much of the 20-year insurgency in Afghanistan is now sheltering militant groups targeting Islamabad,” says Joshua White, a professor in international affairs at Johns Hopkins University.

Read More: Why Pakistan Fails to Stop Jihadi Attacks

What’s driving tensions between the former allies?

While relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan have been fraught in recent years, two underlying tension points—the border and cross-border violence—have been longstanding.

“No Afghan government, including the current Taliban regime, has recognized the [official] border since Pakistan's independence,” says Michael Kugelman, the director of the South Asia Institute at the Wilson Center. “And each side has long accused the other of sheltering terrorists that carry out attacks in the other country.”

The colonial-era Durand Line, which stretches over 1,640 miles, officially separates Pakistan from Afghanistan. Afghanistan has never recognized the border but the Taliban has come out more strongly on the issue, and numerous skirmishes have erupted between Taliban fighters and Pakistani soldiers putting up border fencing, leading to the closures of border crossings. “Border tensions have sharpened because the Taliban have been especially aggressive in asserting their position,” Kugelman says.

The border cuts through tribal areas dominated by the Pashtuns, the largest ethnic group in the border regions of both countries. Pakistan has vowed to complete the barbed-wire fencing along the internationally recognized border, which the Taliban says separates families.

With the war in Afghanistan no longer at play, the Taliban does not need to depend on Pakistan for sanctuaries and other wartime support. Instead, it seeks more legitimacy back at home, where many Afghans have long distrusted the Pakistani government. “By lashing out at Pakistan, the Taliban hopes to buy some goodwill from the Afghan public,” Kugelman says.

Will tensions ease soon?

Despite the tensions, the two countries are engaged in regular diplomacy. During recent talks hosted by the U.N. in Doha, Pakistan's special envoy to Afghanistan met with the Taliban, while Ishaq Dar, Pakistan’s Foreign Minister, has said that his office plans to visit to Kabul in the coming months. “Make no mistake, Afghanistan has not been ignored by this government,” Dar said.

Read More: Afghanistan, One Year On From U.S. Withdrawal

But border tensions are “too contentious and complex to resolve anytime soon,” Kugelman says. Tensions may soar further if Pakistan’s new military operation leads to more frequent and sustained force at the disputed border.

Pakistan government sources who spoke to the BBC have suggested that the country’s new military operation directly stems from pressure from China. Many Chinese nationals are working on China-Pakistan Economic Corridor projects in Pakistan as part of the Belt and Road initiative. In March, five Chinese engineers in the northwest of the country were killed when a suicide bomber, who Pakistan alleged was an Afghan national, rammed a vehicle into their convoy.

At the same time, Beijing has ample leverage over the Taliban due to China’s capacity to invest in sanction-hit Afghanistan. “If Beijing, dangling that incentive of investment assistance, is able to convince the Taliban to curb militancy, both domestically focused in Afghanistan and cross-border in Pakistan, that would help both China and Pakistan,” Kugelman says.

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Write to Astha Rajvanshi at [email protected]

Pluralism, Fundamental Rights, Regional Peace

Afghanistan Essays

The afghanistan essays | pak-afghan trade relations: looking ahead.

Date: March 19, 2018

This 2018 short-essay series by the Jinnah Institute (JI) reflects a range of Pakistani thought leadership on Afghanistan and it’s complex history with Islamabad. With the region in the current crosshairs of a seemingly intractable conflict, these essays attempt to spur old and new thinking on the history of Pakistan’s relationship with Afghanistan and existing challenges. The essays cover a range of subject matter on Afghanistan-Pakistan including efforts for peace and reconciliation, threats to security, the broader geopolitical dynamic, and the role of civil society and economy.

This essay titled ‘Pak-Afghan Trade Relations: Looking Ahead’ explains the sharp decline in the volume of bilateral trade between Pakistan and Afghanistan from over $2.5 billion in 2015 to $500 million in the first half of 2018. It argues that efforts to transform historic and geographic proximity into economic synergies should compel Afghanistan and Pakistan to not only maintain, but also expand trade and transit cooperation.

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Pakistan-Afghan Taliban relations face mounting challenges

Vinay Kaura

Tensions between Islamabad and Kabul continue to rise. While Pakistan has made efforts to smooth over the growing rift, reopening a key border  crossing at Spin Boldak-Chaman closed following cross-border gunfire that killed a Pakistani security guard on Nov. 13 and sending its minister of state for foreign affairs on an official visit to the Afghan capital at the end of November, there are clear signs that Pakistan’s leverage with the Afghan Taliban seems to be slipping fast.                                                                 

Underlying tensions

Clashes along the disputed Afghanistan-Pakistan border have been a recurring problem. Since the Taliban took over Afghanistan in August 2021, the frequency of such clashes has only increased. Until recently, Pakistan has downplayed the border clashes, calling for a diplomatic resolution to the problem, but the issue of unrest in Pakistan’s Pashtun belt has become too big to be brushed aside.

Following an incident between Taliban soldiers and Pakistani border guards on Nov. 19 near Dand Patan in the Afghan province of Paktia, Pakistan’s federal minister for overseas Pakistanis and human resource development, Sajid Hussain Turi, wrote on Twitter that, “Afghanistan’s violation of Pakistan’s Kurram border at Kharlachi and Borki and targeting the civilian population is condemnable.”

Even with a seemingly pro-Islamabad regime in Kabul led by the Afghan Taliban, the underlying issues between the two countries remain difficult to resolve. Kabul’s consistent refusal to accept the Durand Line as the international border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, which has triggered the recent clashes  between their security forces, remains a key driver of tensions, undermining trust and provoking enmity. Moreover, the new Afghan rulers are grappling with numerous governance challenges in terms of international recognition, humanitarian aid, basic healthcare, women’s education, and infrastructure development, as well as countering the terrorism threat from ISIS-Khorasan Province (ISKP).

The Afghan Taliban’s military victory in Afghanistan has had an inspirational effect on those who seek to impose sharia law in Pakistan. The Pakistani state has ample reason to be concerned about blowback from the Afghan Taliban across the Durand Line. Pakistan’s practice of supporting jihadist forces is now coming back to haunt it by stirring up religious fervor among a large section of its own population. The ideological connection that has helped Pakistan control the Taliban in Afghanistan has also paved the way for growing Islamist radicalization in Pakistan itself. Islamist and jihadist forces are now invoking Islam not so much in opposition to India, as they have traditionally done, but more to pressure the Pakistani government to assert the country’s Islamic character.

A changing relationship

The Taliban were groomed to be a valuable strategic asset for Pakistan’s security establishment in its anti-India policies. But now that they are in control of Afghanistan, the Afghan Taliban gain little from keeping India at bay, especially as the latter can provide  much-needed financing  for reconstruction and development. In other words, India-Taliban relations are, if not improving, at least becoming less overtly hostile in terms of both rhetoric and action. While Pakistan is the major beneficiary of a Taliban-led regime in Kabul, it should not be forgotten that the Taliban were brought to the negotiating table by regional powers including Russia, China, and Qatar as well. The Taliban are now sending signals that they may be less amenable to receiving instructions from Pakistan.

Pakistan’s unpopularity in Afghanistan has made the Taliban cautious about avoiding being seen as Islamabad’s puppet. Afghanistan’s loss in a  cricket match held in September 2022  exposed deep-rooted animosity between the two peoples, leading to ugly scenes on the ground as disappointed Afghan fans threw plastic chairs at their Pakistani counterparts, as well as heated fights on social media. Pakistani supporters termed the whole Afghan nation as namak haram (“traitor”), implying that Afghans living in Pakistan for decades as refugees are thankless and ungrateful, while many Afghans countered by lambasting all Pakistanis as “terrorists.”

Predominantly Pashtun, the Taliban movements in both Afghanistan and Pakistan have some roots in Pashtun nationalism that are often overlooked by those who attempt to situate the Afghan Taliban’s success with reference to Islamist extremism rather than ethnicity. Though it suits Pakistan’s security establishment to instrumentalize the Islamic factor in the Taliban’s worldview since Pashtun nationalism has been a chronic headache for Islamabad, the Taliban movement has used both of these identities to advance its aims depending upon the situation.

The Pakistani Taliban

Greatly emboldened by the Afghan Taliban’s rise to power, the Pakistani Taliban, or  Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP), have declared  the former as their role model and launched an escalating terror campaign inside Pakistan from its base in North Waziristan. On Nov. 28, the group ended its five-month-long ceasefire  with the government, and on Nov. 30 a suicide bomber from the TTP blew himself up near a police truck in the restive Balochistan Province, killing at least three and injuring 28 others, including 20 security personnel. Claiming responsibility for the attack, the TTP justified it as retaliation for the killing of one of its senior commanders, Abdul Wali, also known as Omar Khalid Khorasani, in Afghanistan in August. Now that the TTP has officially ended its ceasefire, it is expected to carry out lethal attacks in areas where it has maintained networks. The end of the controversial ceasefire also comes at a time of transition for Pakistan’s military, with Gen. Asim Munir Ahmed succeeding Gen. Qamar Javed Bajwa as Army chief of staff. It remains to be seen what Munir’s policy will be regarding peace talks with the TTP.

Following the upsurge in Islamist militancy in tribal areas, Pakistan’s security forces are facing direct attacks from the TTP, leading the government to complain about terrorist safe havens in Afghanistan. Indeed, the alliance between the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban seems stronger than ever and there are signs of integration across the Durand Line. Not ready to accept Pakistan’s border-fencing activities, which are viewed as “one-sided,” “illegitimate,” and an attempt to change the status quo ante, Taliban fighters are reportedly removing the barbed-wire fence at many places along the Durand Line. According to one Pakistani think-tank , the county has seen a 50% spike in terrorist attacks since the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan, underlining the fast-deteriorating security situation. Pakistan’s borderlands are  witnessing an alarming increase  in the number of extortions, kidnappings for ransom, and other forms of racketeering. Wealthy residents and local lawmakers alike are being blackmailed to pay extortion money to the TTP, which enjoy freedom of action in Afghanistan. There has been a significant rise in the TTP’s extortion activities in Karachi  in the past few months.

While the Pakistani leadership was confident that the Afghan Taliban would help it to control the TTP, the latter have not acted against their ideological counterparts in Pakistan. In his address to the United Nations General Assembly in September 2022, Pakistan’s prime minister,  Shehbaz Sharif, noted  that Pakistan shared global concerns about “the threat posed by the major terrorist groups operating from Afghanistan, especially Islamic State, ISIL-K and TTP, as well as al-Qaeda, ETIM, and IMU.” Pakistan’s foreign minister,  Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, also echoed  Shehbaz’s words recently when he supported international calls for the Taliban to demonstrate practical progress in preventing global terrorist groups from threatening Pakistan from their Afghan sanctuaries.

Washington’s role

Since American dependence on Pakistan has almost disappeared after the U.S. military exit from Afghanistan, Pakistan now faces multiple challenges in protecting its strategic interests in Afghanistan. Pakistan is no longer a front-line state in the U.S. fight against terrorism. Although Islamabad has made energetic diplomatic efforts to minimize the dissonance and incongruities in its relationship with the United States since August 2021, the task is not an easy one given Washington’s historical difficulties deciding whether Pakistan is an indispensable partner or an avoidable hindrance in the search for solutions to Western security dilemmas in Afghanistan. The U.S. special representative for Afghanistan, Thomas West, has  ruled out any possibility  of Pakistan playing a role in facilitating dialogue between Washington and Kabul, and stated American resolve to engage pragmatically with the Afghan Taliban on its own. When asked about the need to use Pakistani airspace for conducting special operations inside Afghanistan, he stressed America’s intent to reorganize its “capabilities.”

It makes sense for the U.S. to continue to engage directly with the Taliban regime given Pakistan’s long history of manipulating Afghan political and ethnic fault-lines. Islamabad’s unwavering support of the Haqqani Network within the Afghan Taliban needs to be seen in this context as the latter is notorious for its Islamist extremism. That is why  there are voices calling for  the Western world to “focus on empowering the nationalist elements of the Taliban to outmaneuver the extremists backed by Pakistan.” This is clearly a call to revive Pashtun nationalism in Afghanistan, which has steadily given way to the language of militant Islam with the Taliban’s rise.

Islamabad and Kabul

Though Pakistan’s military and civilian leaders now claim that they have given up the notion of “strategic depth” — whereby Pakistan sought to establish indirect control over Afghanistan in the event of a military offensive by India — there are many doubts about Islamabad’s ultimate aims in Afghanistan. More than a year after the Taliban’s takeover, a former Pakistani  diplomat has argued  that Pakistan should “assure the Afghans that we have no strategic depth designs in their country or any intention of interfering in their internal affairs.” A Pakistani analyst  has also urged his government  to “realize that the Taliban in government is not the same Taliban that they dealt with in the past. The relationship cannot continue to be one of a patron and client as forceful and coercive measures taken by Pakistan against the Taliban have failed to generate the impacts Pakistan desired.”

Regardless of how serious one thinks the crisis in bilateral ties is, it is clear is that despite multiple friction points, both sides are aware of the consequences of a further deterioration in relations. Although Pakistan has avoided granting diplomatic recognition to the Taliban — as Foreign Minister Bhutto put it , his country does “not want to take a solo flight” and defy the global consensus on the issue — Islamabad is in favor of giving the Afghan regime more political space. Pakistan’s ambitious plans to create a transcontinental trade network with Central Asian republics cannot materialize without the Afghan Taliban’s support. On the other side, the spokesperson for the Taliban has expressed “sorrow” over the cross-border firing incident while reassuring Pakistan that Afghan soil would not be used for militant attacks in Pakistan. The issue once again returned to the fore on Dec. 1, however, following a suicide bombing in southwestern Pakistan. Islamabad pinned responsibility for the attack on Pakistani Taliban fighters based in Afghanistan, with Interior Minister Rana Sanaullah Khan saying that, if proven, the TTP’s involvement “should be a matter of concern for the Taliban."

Pakistan remains ambivalent about Islamist extremists, and its misguided Afghan policies will continue to stoke Islamist radicalism at home and challenge the state’s authority. Pakistan cannot make lasting peace with Afghanistan, even under the Afghan Taliban, as long as it continues to focus on a utopian Islamic vision by pursuing military adventures in Afghanistan and Kashmir predicated on jihad. Therefore, a sweeping restructuring of Pakistan’s two mutually conflicting identities — as a revisionist state on Kashmir and a status-quo country in relation to Afghanistan — becomes less of a radical idea and more of a blueprint for how to stave off further crises.

In the aftermath of the collapse of the Ghani government in Kabul last year, there was widespread jubilation in Pakistan. Both the security establishment and conservative segments of the population were pleased to see Western forces leave Afghanistan. But recent events have laid bare the unpleasant spillover effects of a Taliban-led regime. Reeling from multiple crises at home, including a sharp economic downturn, political instability over the confrontation between the powerful army and former Prime Minister Imran Khan, and the continuing impact of massive flooding earlier this year, Islamabad’s shaky relationship with the Afghan Taliban makes the situation tremendously perilous for Pakistan.

Vinay Kaura, PhD, is a Non-Resident Scholar with MEI’s Afghanistan & Pakistan Program, an Assistant Professor in the Department of International Affairs and Security Studies at the Sardar Patel University of Police, Security, and Criminal Justice in Rajasthan, India, and the Deputy Director at the Center for Peace and Conflict Studies. 

Photo by BANARAS KHAN/AFP via Getty Images

The Middle East Institute (MEI) is an independent, non-partisan, non-for-profit, educational organization. It does not engage in advocacy and its scholars’ opinions are their own. MEI welcomes financial donations, but retains sole editorial control over its work and its publications reflect only the authors’ views. For a listing of MEI donors, please click here .

Pakistan-Afghanistan relations

Pitfalls and the way forward

Rethinking Afghanistan-Pakistan Relations

The relationship between Afghanistan and Pakistan has always been difficult. This has been true since the time of the founding of Pakistan, when Afghanistan at first had voted against admitting Pakistan as a member of the United Nations. The contested Durand line, drawn up by the British colonial power, has remained an ongoing point of conflict, since Pakistan considers it its international border, while Afghanistan does not recognize it. In the last decades, the relationship between both countries has remained complicated and was often characterized by political confrontation. While Pakistan's assistance in the struggle against the Soviet occupation was often appreciated, what has been perceived as "meddling in Afghan affairs" by many Afghans has created difficulties and resentment. A strong anti-Pakistani sentiment has developed in Afghanistan as a result. On the other hand, Pakistan has traditionally accused Afghanistan to cooperate with India against Pakistan, and of allowing anti-Pakistani militants operate from Afghan territory. Despite having much in common, the bilateral relationship of both countries, therefore, has often been marred by disputes. At the same time, the Durand Line, besides being a symbol of both colonial arrogance and Pakistan-Afghan enmity, also implied commonality. It was so contested exactly because the Pashtuns living on both sides of the border feel a shared history, a shared culture, and family and tribal relationships, which to many made the border feel artificial. Commonality and enmity at this point flowed from the same source. 

Pitfalls and the way forward / Huma Baqai and Nausheen Wasi (Eds.). - Islamabad : Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung Pakistan Office, 2021 . - 241 Seiten = 3 MB, PDF-File. - Electronic ed.: Islamabad : FES, 2021 ISBN 978-969-9675-30-0 http://library.fes.de/pdf-files/bueros/pakistan/18346.pdf

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Afghanistan-Pakistan Border Dispute Heats Up

Taliban’s repudiation of Pakistan’s position on the Durand Line challenges a pillar of Pakistan’s security policy.

By: Asfandyar Mir, Ph.D. ;  Ambassador Richard Olson;   Andrew Watkins

Publication Type: Analysis

In at least two incidents in late December and early January, Afghan Taliban soldiers intervened to block an ongoing Pakistani project to erect fencing along the shared border between Afghanistan and Pakistan — the demarcation of which prior Afghan governments have never accepted. Despite attempts to resolve the issue diplomatically, and the Taliban’s dependence on Pakistan as a bridge to the international community, both sides remain at odds over the fence. USIP’s Richard Olson, Asfandyar Mir and Andrew Watkins assess the implications of this border dispute for Afghanistan and Pakistan’s bilateral relationship and the region at large. 

Does the Taliban have an established position on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, or is this a new stance on their part? How much of a sticking point might this issue prove to be in future bilateral relations?

Olson: It was perhaps inevitable that despite the Taliban’s historic reliance on Pakistan for support, there would be a break with Islamabad over the question of the Durand Line border between the two countries. The Taliban asserts a right to free movement of peoples across the colonial era frontier, consistent with the position of not recognizing the line as an international boundary it took in the 1990s. All Afghan governments since 1947 have taken similar positions on this dispute. The issue may be further complicated by the fact that — apart from the issue of recognition — Pakistan demarcates the Durand Line differently from Afghanistan, and thus portions of the Pakistani fence may lie within what Afghanistan (and most of the international community, including the United States) would consider Afghan territory.

Pakistan has downplayed the clashes on the line, publicly calling for a diplomatic resolution to the issue, thus also recalling its own position of the 1990s. But for Islamabad, the question of unrest in its own Pashtun territories looms much larger now than it did three decades ago, since the former Federally Administered Tribal Areas have been a source of terrorism and instability throughout this century. Kabul’s allowing of a de facto safe haven for the Pakistani Taliban (Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan; TTP) is already a large irritant in the bilateral relationship . If Islamabad perceives that the Afghan Taliban has moved beyond asserting a traditional position on the Durand Line to actually supporting a revanchist movement to reclaim lost Pashtun lands, the relationship may well break. Already Islamabad is ascribing the TTP’s renewed strength to Indian machinations , so the regional implications of this conflict are potentially large.

How much of an impact has Pakistan’s border fencing project had on its internal security? How does the Pakistani military now view the situation on its western border following the Taliban takeover, and how does this fence fit into its security priorities?

Mir: Pakistan’s fencing of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border has been a central project of Pakistani Army Chief Gen. Qamar Bajwa’s security policy for the country’s western frontier. Given Pakistan’s fiscal constraints, it has been very costly for Pakistan in material terms. There are reports that Pakistan has spent nearly $532 million on the project. Pakistan appears to have had two major political goals with the fencing effort: to control cross-border movement of goods and people across what has long been a porous border, as well as to offer a demarcation fait accompli on a border which has been rejected by prior Afghan governments. While the movement of illicit goods hasn’t slowed down, the movement of civilians and migrants appears to have become largely restricted to declared border crossings.

The demarcation fait accompli objective is important. When done bilaterally, demarcation of borders involving one or more post-colonial states tends to be generally contentious and drawn out. And diplomatic negotiations over borders involving territorial claims and disputes tend to be especially difficult and take a very long time. But Pakistan was able to work around that by unilaterally pursuing the demarcation and marking it on the ground with a fence mostly unchallenged — a major diplomatic gain.

Amid this backdrop, the Taliban’s repudiation of Pakistan’s position on the border and actual physical effort to dismantle the fence at multiple points is more than an invocation of a historical claim. It is a tangible challenge to a pillar of Pakistan’s recent security policy — more serious than the rhetorical challenges of the former Afghan government under presidents Ashraf Ghani and Hamid Karzai. It also casts doubt on a long-standing Pakistani strategic thesis that the Taliban’s Islamist and relatively pro-Pakistan political project — which served as a basis for Pakistan’s support to the Taliban during the U.S. presence in Afghanistan — will keep a lid on their irredentist nationalist aspirations.

Pakistani policy makers appear to be realizing that the Taliban will walk the talk of jihad and chew the gum of border nationalism at the same time. Will this compel a rethink in Pakistan’s policy toward the Taliban? Not immediately. But if the Taliban ramp up their challenge against the border, Pakistan might seek to influence the Taliban’s internal politics more aggressively.

How has the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan and establishment of itself as a de facto government, rather than insurgent challenger, changed its overall stance toward borders or its relations with neighbors?

Watkins:The actions of Taliban forces along the border with Pakistan should be assessed in tandem with other recent Taliban skirmishes along the borders with Turkmenistan and Iran (and a handful of tense situations with Tajikistan as well). Though both Taliban and neighboring country officials have downplayed these incidents and they are not similarly rooted in a border controversy as live or hot as that of the Durand Line, the Taliban seems to have experienced a rough learning curve when it comes to border security.

It is possible, in the case of tensions with Pakistan, that the Taliban’s leadership perceives some political benefit to a strong nationalist stance — even more so than with other neighboring countries, given widespread Afghan perceptions of the Taliban’s close relationship with Islamabad, or put more bluntly, accusations that they serve as Pakistan’s proxy.

But close monitoring of Taliban forces’ behavior along the border with Pakistan also suggests some degree of command-and-control difficulty. More than once since their takeover of the country last August, individual Taliban stationed at major border crossings have carried out ostensibly isolated acts, including cross-border exchanges of fire but also petty vandalism and harassment, that have been swiftly disavowed by official spokesmen. Most of these incidents suggest a hostility toward Pakistan among the group’s rank and file, one that higher levels of Taliban command appear able to respond to, but not preempt entirely. These dynamics are not the drivers of geopolitical tensions between Islamabad and Kabul’s new government, but they may serve to trigger episodes of conflict.

What other impacts has the fencing effort had on trade, transit or social connections between the two countries? How has the economic and humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan impacted out-migration to Pakistan or created other cross-border pressures, and how are the Taliban and Pakistan seeking to manage this?

Watkins: Scholars and specialists who monitor human and narcotics trafficking out of Afghanistan have reported that smuggling has continued at a rapid pace, even outpacing previous years since August. As Pakistan has continued to finalize its fencing of the border, this illicit flow of people and goods has become geographically centralized in Afghanistan’s southwestern region, where Nimroz Province borders both Pakistan and Iran.

In terms of human displacement, this has amounted to hundreds of thousands of Afghans crossing the border into Pakistan in the latter half of 2021, making an indirect trip to Iran and often then onward to Turkey and intended European destinations — with hundreds of thousands more anticipated to cross in 2022. In a sharp break from historical precedent, which saw Pakistan host millions of Afghan refugees over the last four decades, relatively few of those Afghans fleeing have attempted to settle in Pakistan. Aside from the few remaining openings in Pakistan’s border fence, Islamabad has maintained strict limitations on civilian traffic back and forth across the border since August, intended to forestall any mass human displacement into the towns and cities of its border region. Though observers have predicted that tensions would sharpen between the Taliban and Pakistan over the Durand Line, for all the reasons elucidated here, the two actors did manage to stabilize the flow of commercial and humanitarian border traffic in relatively swift and efficient fashion after the Taliban’s sudden August takeover. While major disruptions to supply chains remain, by September the two largest border crossings had reestablished at least some two-way commercial traffic — and the Taliban have since touted selective statistics suggesting that some exports have even increased to Pakistan since their takeover.

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Pakistan’s TTP Challenge and Afghanistan-Pakistan Relations 

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The Taliban have proved unresponsive to Pakistan’s security concerns, resulting in mounting tensions between the two.

Days ahead of Pakistan’s crucial, though highly controversial, national and provincial elections on February 8, over 30 terrorists stormed the Chodwan police station in Dera Ismail Khan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) in the early hours of February 5, killing 10 security forces . Terror attacks in Pakistan have increased both in number and intensity since the return of the Afghan Taliban in Afghanistan. 2023 recorded a 69 percent increase in terror attacks, killing 974 people and wounding 1,351.   

The latest attacks came against the backdrop of the Pakistan chief of army staff’s recent statement, in which he warned that the Pakistani forces were prepared to protect every citizen against enemies of Pakistan. Speaking to students gathered from across the country on January 24, General Asim Munir made it clear who those enemies are: “When it comes to the safety and security of every single Pakistani, the whole of Afghanistan can be damned .” Bringing up the history of the rather strained relations between the two countries, Munir highlighted the fact that Afghanistan had opposed Pakistan’s United Nations membership after its formation in the late 1940s.  

Pakistan and Afghanistan have generally had unfriendly relations, barring the brief period when the Afghan Taliban ruled Afghanistan from 1996-2001. One of the main disputes has been the border between two countries, the Durand Line, leading to other issues like smuggling due to the free movement of the people living across the border and meddling in each other’s internal affairs. The porous border between Pakistan and Afghanistan remains pertinent today, as, according to Pakistan, terrorists use the border to enter Pakistan to carry out subversive activities. 

The issue of terrorism has sown the seeds of mistrust and anger between the two countries. After the return of the Taliban to Afghanistan in August 2021, Islamabad had expected that security in Pakistan would improve; that has not happened. The Taliban, who were seen as puppets of the Pakistan Army, have denied the allegation that the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), often called the Pakistani Taliban, is operating from Afghan territory and said that Pakistan’s security was “ not our responsibility .” 

Following their removal from power in 2001, the Afghan Taliban were supported by Islamabad in their fight against U.S.-led foreign and local troops in Afghanistan. Apart from the view that a pro-Pakistan Afghan Taliban regime in Kabul would be helpful in containing security threats emerging from the eastern border, Pakistani officials hoped that the Afghan Taliban might be flexible about accepting the Durand Line as a permanent border. However, since the Afghan Taliban’s return to Afghanistan, not only have the Taliban refused to accept the Durand Line, but terror attacks have increased in Pakistan. 

The upsurge in terror attacks in Pakistan is linked with the space that anti-Pakistan forces, like the TTP and others, have in Afghanistan after the Taliban’s return to power in the country. Pakistan has raised the issue with the Taliban, but the latter do not appear to be willing to act against the TTP. Finally, in October 2023 Islamabad decided to expel “illegal Afghan nationals” staying in Pakistan. The authorities claimed that some of these “illegal migrants” were found involved in the recent terror attacks.    

The decision was controversial as well as miscalculated. It damaged the goodwill that some Afghans had for Pakistan and is unlikely to resolve the problem of terrorism. It is possible that some Afghan refugees might have been involved in terror attacks, as Pakistan provided some evidence for that. But it seems impossible to address the issue by acting against over a million Afghan refugees, as the continuation of terror attacks has underlined. This is more problematic given the stated claim of Islamabad that terrorists enter Pakistan by crossing the porous Durand Line. It appears that the decision to expel the Afghan refugees was a tactic to pressure the Taliban to be mindful of Pakistan’s security concerns. 

On their side, however, the Taliban are dealing with food scarcity and the economic crisis under international sanctions. Taking care of the Afghans returning from Pakistan would increase the challenge. The Taliban reacted strongly, therefore, by calling Pakistan’s decision “ unacceptable .” 

The Taliban have maintained the position that under their watch no one is allowed to use Afghan territory against any other country. At the same time, they also said that they had arrested some TTP members . Furthermore, when the chief of the Jamaat Ulema-e-Islami (JUI-F) Maulana Fazlur Rehman visited Afghanistan on the Taliban’s invitation, to find a possible common ground to mitigate the tension between the two countries, apart from meeting the Taliban officials, Rehman also met the TTP chief Noor Wali Mehsud and Hafiz Gul Bahadur. This validated Islamabad’s claim that the TTP is present in Afghanistan, and, more importantly, proved the TPP leadership is in contact with the Afghan Taliban, the meeting was possible only because of that.    

In addition to the long-standing problem of cross-border terrorism, new issues are cropping up as both countries try to secure their national interests. One recent example is the rhetorical attacks the two countries lodged against each other over the issue of water sharing of their common rivers. In December 2023, the interim interior minister of Balochistan, Jan Achakzai, called Kabul’s proposal to construct the Gambiri Dam on the Kunar River a “hostile act against Pakistan.” 

Dam construction on common rivers like the Kabul River has also invoked skepticism in the past. Islamabad claims that these projects would decrease water flow to the lower riparian areas in Pakistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province particularly. Furthermore, any external investment in dam construction, from India particularly, is likely to be seen with skepticism, like the Shahtoot Dam on the Kabul River, which invoked a reaction from Islamabad.  

In this situation, two neighboring countries are continuing to pursue their national interests with a “zero-sum” mindset amid the existing environment of mistrust. Pakistan, along with China, Iran, and Russia, was planning to convey concerns over the issue of terrorism to the Taliban. Islamabad hoped that presenting a united front with key neighbors would convince the Taliban to take action on these shared concerns.

However, the Taliban artfully convened a multinational conference, titled “Afghanistan’s Regional Cooperation Initiative,” in Kabul on January 29 and invited other countries, including India, Turkey, Indonesia and the Central Asian countries. The Taliban’s goal was reportedly to “ counter the move ” from Pakistan, China, Russia, and Iran to pressure the Taliban on terrorism.

The Taliban are likely to expand their options by inviting other countries to invest in Afghanistan, guaranteeing them, in return, that the Afghan territory would not be used against the interests of these countries. In this way, they can to a great extent defuse the pressure coming from Pakistan. 

Islamabad has been left frustrated because of the Taliban’s change in the approach toward Pakistan’s concerns. From their side, Afghanistan may not be able to act against the TTP – or may even want them as leverage against Pakistan to force the latter to be mindful of their concerns.  

The tensions between Islamabad and Kabul will rise if the TTP continues to carry out attacks inside Pakistan, leading to more complications. The recent upsurge in attacks has created serious threats in Pakistan, even forcing the caretaker government in Balochistan to ban public gatherings and rallies ahead of the country’s elections on February 8. 

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An eminent historian looks to the present and the future as the U.S. withdraws from the longest war in its history. He sees the danger of an escalating conflict between India and Pakistan - two nuclear powers that could threaten world peace.

A t six o’clock in the morning of February 26, 2010, Major Mitali Madhumita was awakened by the ringing of her mobile phone. Mitali, a 35-year-old Indian army officer from Orissa, had been in Kabul less than a year. Fluent in Dari, the most widely spoken language in Afghanistan, she was there to teach English to the first women officer cadets to be recruited to the Afghan National Army.

It was a sensitive posting, not so much because of gender issues as political ones: India’s regional rival, Pakistan, was extremely touchy about India providing military assistance to the government in Afghanistan and had made it very clear that it regarded the presence of any Indian troops or military trainers there as an unacceptable provocation. For this reason everyone on the small Indian army English Language Training Team, including Mitali, and all the Indian army doctors and nurses staffing the new Indira Gandhi Kabul Children’s Hospital, had been sent to Afghanistan unarmed, and in civilian dress. They were being put up not in an army barracks, or at the Indian Embassy, but in a series of small, discreet guest houses dotted around the city’s diplomatic quarter.

I was the only one of my team who came back alive.

Newly graduated soldiers from the Afghan National Army (ANA) attend a graduation ceremony in Kabul September 23, 2010. Afghanistan's army got its first female officers in decades on Thursday when 29 women graduated in a class of new recruits. REUTERS/Ahmad Masood

The phone call was from a girlfriend of Mitali’s who worked for Air India at Kabul airport. Breathless, she said she had just heard that two of the Indian guest houses, the Park and the Hamid, were under attack by militants. As the only woman on her team, Mitali had been staying in separate lodgings about two miles away from the rest of her colleagues, who were all in the Hamid. Within seconds, Mitali was pulling on her clothes, along with the hijab she was required to wear, and running, alone and unarmed, through the empty morning streets of Kabul toward the Hamid.

“I just thought they might need my help,” she told me recently in New Delhi.

As she dashed past the Indian Embassy, Mitali was recognized by one of the guards from diplomatic security who shouted to her to stop. The area around the guest houses was mayhem, he told her. She should not go on alone. She must return immediately to her lodgings and stay there.

“I don’t require your permission to rescue my colleagues,” Mitali shouted back, and kept on running. When she passed the presidential compound, she was stopped again, this time at gunpoint, by an Afghan army security check post. Five minutes later she had charmed one of the guards into giving her a lift in his jeep. Soon they could hear bursts of automatic weapons, single shots from rifles and loud grenade blasts.

Site of the militants' attack on Indian guest houses in Kabul February 26, 2010. At least 18 people were killed and 36 wounded in the Taliban-affiliated attacks in Kabul. REUTERS/Shamil Zhumatov

“As we neared the area under attack I jumped out of the jeep and ran straight into the ruins of what had been the Hamid guesthouse. It was first light, but because of all the dust and smoke, visibility was very low and it was difficult to see anything. The front portion of the guesthouse was completely destroyed—there was just a huge crater. Everything had been reduced to rubble. A car bomb had rammed the front gate and leveled the front of the compound. Three militants then appeared and began firing at anyone still alive. I just said, ‘Oh my God,’ and ran inside.

“I found my way in the smoke to the area at the back where my colleagues had been staying. Here the walls were standing but it was open to the sky—the blast had completely removed the roof, which was lying in chunks all over the floor. There was cross-firing going on all around me, and the militants were throwing Chinese incendiary grenades. Afghan troops had taken up positions at the top of the Park Residence across the road and were firing back. I couldn’t see the militants, but they were hiding somewhere around me.

“As quietly as I could, I called for my colleagues and went to where their rooms had been, but I couldn’t find them anywhere. I searched through the debris and before long started pulling out bodies. A man loomed out of the gloom and I shouted to him to identify himself. But he wasn’t a terrorist—he was the information officer from our embassy and he began helping me. Together we managed to get several injured people out of the rubble and into safety.

“Then we heard a terrible blast. We later learned that Major Jyotin Singh had tackled a suicide bomber, and by holding him from behind had prevented him entering the Park Residence. The bomber was forced to blow himself up outside. Jyotin had saved the lives of all the medical team inside.

“But the only one of my colleagues who hadn’t been killed on the spot, Major Nitesh Roy, died of his 40% burns in hospital three days later. I was the only one of my team who came back alive.”

Military personnel stand in front of Kabul City Centre shopping mall after the bomb blast in Kabul on February 26, 2010. REUTERS/Shamil Zhumatov

In all 18 people were killed in the attack that morning, nine of them Indians, and 36 were wounded. Among the dead found beneath the debris was the assistant consul general from the new Indian consulate in Kandahar. This consulate was a particular bugbear of the Pakistanis, who accused it of being a base for RAW—the Research and Analysis Wing, India’s external intelligence agency. The Pakistanis believed RAW was funding, arming and encouraging the insurgency in Baluchistan, the province that has been waging a separatist struggle ever since it was incorporated into the new nation of Pakistan in 1947.

Pakistan made no public comment on the attack, other than to refuse permission for the planes carrying the dead bodies back to India to cross its airspace.

It was not difficult to figure out the motive for the attack. The operation was soon traced by both Afghan and U.S. intelligence to a joint mission by the Pakistani-controlled Haqqani network, a Taliban-affiliated insurgent group under the leadership of Jalaluddin Haqqani, and the Pakistan-based anti-Indian militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba (Army of the Righteous), which carried out the November 2008 assault on the Taj Hotel and other targets in Mumbai. Both the Haqqani network and Lashkar-e-Taiba are believed to take orders from the ISI—Inter-Services Intelligence, which is closely linked to the military.

Afghan protesters set fire to a Pakistan flag during a demonstration against recent border clashes between Afghanistan and Pakistan, in Kunar province, May 14, 2013. REUTERS/Parwiz

Afghan protesters set fire to a Pakistan flag during a demonstration against recent border clashes between Afghanistan and Pakistan, in Kunar province May 14, 2013. REUTERS/Parwiz

T he February 2010 attack on the Indian guest houses was a rare overt act of hostility in the long covert struggle India and Pakistan have been waging on and off for more than sixty years over their competing influence in Afghanistan. But it was not the only such act. In fact it was the third in less than three years.

Fifteen months before, on October 8, 2009, a massive car bomb had been set off outside the Indian embassy in Kabul killing 17 people and wounding 63. Most of the dead were ordinary Afghans caught walking near the target. A few Indian security personnel were wounded, but blast walls built following a much deadlier bombing the previous year which killed 40 and wounded more than 100—also thought to have been sponsored by Pakistan—deflected the force of the explosion, so that physical damage to the embassy was limited to some of the doors and windows being blown out. In the case of the 2009 attack, American officials went public with details from phone intercepts which they said revealed the involvement of the ISI.

The hostility between India and Pakistan lies at the heart of the current war in Afghanistan.

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The hostility between India and Pakistan lies at the heart of the current war in Afghanistan. Most observers in the West view the Afghanistan conflict as a battle between the U.S. and the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) on one hand, and al-Qaida and the Taliban on the other. In reality this has long since ceased to be the case. Instead our troops are now caught up in a complex war shaped by two pre-existing and overlapping conflicts: one local and internal, the other regional.

Within Afghanistan, the war is viewed primarily as a Pashtun rebellion against President Hamid Karzai’s regime, which has empowered three other ethnic groups—the Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras of the north—to a degree that the Pashtuns resent. For example, the Tajiks, who constitute only 27% of the Afghan population, still make up 70% of the officers in the Afghan army.

Although Karzai himself is a Pashtun, many of his fellow tribesmen view his presence as mere window-dressing for a U.S.-devised realignment of long-established power relations in the country, dating back to 2001 when the U.S. toppled the overwhelmingly Pashtun Taliban.

The Pashtuns had held sway in Afghan politics ever since the state assumed its current boundaries in the 1860s. By aligning with the Tajiks of the northern provinces against the Pashtuns of the south, the U.S. saw itself making common cause with the forces of secularism against militant Islam; but it was unwittingly taking sides in a complex civil war that has been going on since the 1970s—and that had roots going back much further than that. To this day, because the Pashtuns feel dominated by their ancestral enemies, many support or at least feel some residual sympathies for the Taliban.

There is also an age-old Pashtun-on-Pashtun element to the conflict. It pits Taliban from the Ishaqzai tribe, parts of the Nurzais, Achakzais, and most of the Ghilzais, especially the Hotak and Tokhi Ghilzais, against the more “establishment” Durrani Pashtun tribes: the Barakzais, Popalzais and Alikozais.

Beyond this indigenous conflict looms the much more dangerous hostility between the two regional powers—both armed with nuclear weapons: India and Pakistan. Their rivalry is particularly flammable as they vie for influence over Afghanistan. Compared to that prolonged and deadly contest, the U.S. and ISAF are playing little more than a bit part—and they, unlike the Indians and Pakistanis, are heading for the exit.

July 1999: U.S. President Bill Clinton (r) shakes hands with Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif outside Blair House following their talks on de-escalating tensions between Pakistan and India over Kashmir in Washington July 4. REUTERS

Since the Partition of the Subcontinent in 1947, India and Pakistan have fought three wars—the most recent in 1971—and they seemed on the verge of going nuclear against each other during a crisis in 1999, when Pakistani troops crossed a ceasefire line and occupied 500 square miles of Indian Kashmir, including a Himalayan border post near the town of Kargil. As tensions rose, the Pakistanis took ominous steps with their nuclear arsenal. President Bill Clinton mediated a solution. In intense negotiations at Blair House in Washington over the Fourth of July weekend, Clinton persuaded Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to order a pullback of his country’s forces to the Pakistani side of the line. That concession cost Nawaz his job and, very nearly, his life. The army commander, Pervez Musharraf, mounted a coup and sentenced Nawaz to death. Clinton intervened and Nawaz was exiled to Saudi Arabia.

It is easy to understand why Pakistan might feel insecure. India’s population (1.2 billion) and its economy (GDP of $1.4 trillion) are about eight times the size of Pakistan’s (180 million Pakistanis generating an annual GDP of only $210 billion). During the period of India’s greatest growth, which lasted from 2006 to 2010, there were four years during which the annual increase in the Indian economy was almost equal to the entire Pakistani economy.

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In the eyes of the world, never has the contrast between the two countries appeared so stark as it is now: one is widely perceived as the next great superpower, famous for its software geniuses, its Bollywood babes, its fast-growing economy and super-rich magnates; the other written off as a failed state, a world center of Islamic radicalism, the hiding place of Osama bin Laden, and the only ally of the U.S. whose airspace Washington has been ready to violate and whose villages it regularly bombs. However unfair this stereotyping may be, it’s not surprising that many Pakistanis see their massive neighbor as threatening the very existence of their state.

In December 1971, Pakistani and Indian forces clashed in Khulna, in what is now Bangladesh. The battle was the last major engagement fought on the eastern front of the third war between India and Pakistan. In this photo, Indian soldiers walk past a destroyed Indian tank. CORBIS/Dave Kennerly

To defend themselves, Pakistani planners long ago developed a doctrine of “strategic depth.” The idea had its origins in the debacle of 1971, when, in less than two weeks, India crushingly defeated Pakistan in their third war. That conflict ended with East Pakistan, which had risen up against West Pakistan, becoming the independent state of Bangladesh. According to the Pakistanis’ narrative, the dismemberment of their country—which they blame on India—made it all the more important to develop and maintain friendly relations with Afghanistan, in large measure in order to have a secure refuge in the case of a future war with India. The porous border offers a route by which Pakistani leaders, troops and other assets, including its nuclear weapons, could retreat to the northwest in the case of an Indian invasion.

For the idea to work, it is essential that the Afghan government be a close ally of Pakistan, and willing to help fight India. When the Taliban were in power, they were seen as the perfect partner for the Pakistani military. Although widely viewed in the West as medieval if not barbaric, the Taliban regime was valued in Pakistan as fiercely anti-India and therefore deserving Pakistani arms and assistance.

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The current president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai has been the dominant political figure there since the U.S.-led overthrow of the Taliban regime in 2001. An ethnic Pashtun, he is a member of the Popalzai tribe. He has lived, worked and studied in both India and Pakistan. His second presidential term ends in 2014, and he has said that he will step aside.

After the Taliban were ousted by the U.S. after 9/11, a major strategic shift occurred: the government of Afghanistan became an ally of India’s, thus fulfilling the Pakistanis’ worst fear. The president of post-Taliban Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, hated Pakistan with a passion, in part because he believed that the ISI had helped assassinate his father in 1999. At the same time he felt a strong emotional bond with India, where he had gone to university in the Himalayan city of Simla, once the summer capital of British India. When I interviewed Karzai in Kabul in early March, he spoke warmly of his days in Simla, calling them some of the happiest of his life, and he was moved almost to tears as he recalled the sound of monsoon rain hitting the tin roof of his student lodgings and the sight of the beautiful cloud formations drifting before his windows. He also expressed his love of Indian food and even admitted to liking Bollywood films. Karzai views India as democratic, stable and relatively rich, the perfect partner for Afghanistan, a “best friend” as he frequently calls it.

With Karzai in office, India seized the opportunity to increase its political and economic influence in Afghanistan, re-opening its embassy in Kabul, opening four regional consulates, and providing substantial reconstruction assistance totaling around $1.5 billion, with an additional $500 million promised within the next few years.

For the Pakistani military, the existential threat posed by India has taken precedence over all other geopolitical and economic goals.

An Afghan soldier searches a Pashtun voter at the polling station during parliamentary elections in Spin Boldak near the Afghan/Pakistan border September 18, 2005. REUTERS/Saeed Ali Achakzai MK/TC

That said, India’s presence is still, even now, quite modest. According to Indian diplomatic sources, there are actually fewer than 3,600 Indians in Afghanistan, almost all of them businessmen and contract workers in the agriculture, telecommunications, manufacturing and mining sectors. There are only 10 Indian diplomatic officers, compared to nearly 140 in the UK embassy and 1,200 in the U.S. embassy. But the Pakistani military, which effectively controls Pakistan’s foreign policy, remains paranoid about even this small an Indian presence in what they regard as their strategic Afghan backyard—much as the British used to be about Russians in Afghanistan during the days of the Great Game.

For the Pakistani military, the existential threat posed by India has taken precedence over all other geopolitical and economic goals. The fear of being squeezed in an Indian nutcracker is so great that it has led the ISI to take steps that put Pakistan’s own internal security at risk, as well as Pakistan’s relationship with its main strategic ally, the U.S. For much of the last decade the ISI has sought to restore the Taliban to power so that it can oust Karzai and his Indian friends.

In a nation whose government has often been run by the military, and whose foreign policy has been seen as carried out by the ISI, General Kayani has held the leadership of both institutions. Currently chief of staff of the army, a position he has held since 2007, Kayani reversed Musharraf's policy of staffing military officers in the government's civilian posts. Forbes magazine ranked him the 28th most powerful person in the world in 2012.

To achieve this goal, the Pakistani military has relied on “asymmetric warfare”— using jihadi fighters for its own ends. This strategy goes back over 30 years. Since the early 1980s, the ISI has consciously and consistently funded and incubated a variety of Islamic extremist groups. Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid calculates that there are currently more than 40 such extremist groups operating in Pakistan, most of whom have strong links with the ISI as well as the local Islamic political parties.

Pakistani generals have long viewed the jihadis as a cost-effective and easily-deniable means of controlling events in Afghanistan—something they briefly achieved with the Taliban capture of Kabul in 1996. By the same means, the Pakistanis have kept much of the Indian army bogged down in Kashmir ever since the separatist insurgency broke out in 1990. The generals like using jihadis because they help foster a sense of nationalism based on the twin prongs of hatred for India and the bonding power of Islamic identity.

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It is unclear how many Pakistanis still endorse this strategy and how many are having second thoughts. There are clearly those in the army who are now alarmed at the amount of sectarian and political violence the jihadis have brought to Pakistan. But that view is contested by some in both the army and the ISI who continue to believe that the jihadis are a more practical defense against Indian hegemony than even nuclear weapons. For them, support for carefully chosen jihadis in Afghanistan is a vital survival strategy well worth the risk. General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the commander-in-chief of the Pakistani army, was once in this camp. As he put it in a speech in 2001, “Strategically, we cannot have an Afghan army on our western border which has an Indian mindset and capabilities to take on Pakistan.” How far he has now changed his position remains a matter of debate.

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Pakistan-watchers are unanimous that, while Kayani is mindful of the Taliban threat in his own country, his burning obsession is still India’s presence in Afghanistan. As I was told by a senior British diplomat in Islamabad, "At the moment, Afghanistan is all [Kayani] thinks about and all he wants to talk about. It’s all he gets briefed about and it’s his primary focus of attention. There is an Indo-Pak proxy war, and it’s going on right now.”

Partition in India. September 1947. Moslems waiting to leave for Pakistan as they seek protected transport to Dot Purana Qila, an ancient fort in Pakistan, where many refugees had gathered. Getty Images

Partition in India. September 1947. Muslims waiting to leave for Pakistan as they seek protected transport to Dot Purana Qila, an ancient fort in Pakistan, where many refugees had gathered REUTERS/Parwiz

T he origins of the Indian-Pakistani rivalry in Afghanistan date back to Partition in 1947.

As the British walked away from their Indian Empire in the aftermath of the Second World War, they divided up their former colony between Hindu-majority India and overwhelmingly Muslim Pakistan. It was in that context that Kashmir became a thorn in the side of both countries. The fate of what had been, under the Raj, the princely state of Kashmir, became an anomaly of Partition. With its large Muslim majority, Kashmir was an obvious candidate to join Pakistan. But the pro-Indian sympathies of both its Hindu maharajah and its pre-eminent Muslim politician, Sheikh Abdullah, as well as the Kashmiri origins of India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, led to the state’s remaining part of India, which Pakistan has always regarded as unacceptable.

Mutual antipathy to Pakistan quickly brought India and Afghanistan together as natural allies

It was in Kashmir in 1947 that Pakistan first used irregular tribal fighters to try to get its way, sending Pashtun tribesmen over the border to march toward Srinagar, Kashmir’s capital city. Along the way they looted and killed and, among other atrocities, raped and murdered several European nuns they found in a hospital and a convent. With covert British assistance in the form of an airlift involving British transport planes, Indian troops eventually drove back the Pashtun tribesmen. By the terms of a ceasefire signed on January 1, 1949, Kashmir was effectively divided between India and Pakistan. The two countries would go on to fight another war over Kashmir in 1965, and it has remained a cause of conflict ever since.

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It was not just India that got off to a bad start with the new nation of Pakistan. Afghanistan also had an uneasy relationship with the Land of the Pure (“Pak” means “pure”). Afghanistan alone opposed Pakistani membership in the UN in 1947. As with India, borders and territory were in dispute. Afghan leaders had never accepted the Durand line that the British drew in 1893 and, after Partition, Afghanistan was not about to recognize that line as its border with Pakistan. The Afghan king, Zahir Shah, was especially keen to regain Peshawar, in a valley at the eastern end of the Khyber Pass, which had once been the summer capital of the Afghan empire. It had been in British hands since 1845, and was now to become part of Pakistan. To this day most Afghans look on Peshawar as a lost Afghan city.

1947: Lord Mountbatten (center, hands on table), the British viceroy of India, meets with various leaders to devise a plan to partition India into two nations. Jawaharlal Nehru sits to his right, and M.A. Jinnah to his left. CORBIS/Bettmann

Mutual antipathy to Pakistan quickly brought India and Afghanistan together as natural allies and in 1950 the two signed a friendship treaty. In the years that followed, India and Afghanistan both attempted to destabilize Pakistan, giving aid and shelter to discontented Pashtun and Baluchi nationalists. In 1961 Pakistan and Afghanistan went so far as to close their borders and break off diplomatic relations with each other.

It was only the pressure of growing Soviet influence in Afghanistan in the 1970s that forced the Afghan government to improve its relations with Pakistan. President Daoud Khan reached out to Pakistan in 1977 as a counter-balance to the Soviets, and began talks with Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto with a view to settling their border disputes. In April 1978, however, Daoud was overthrown in a Soviet-backed leftist coup, after which India was able to regain its pre-eminent place in Kabul. Throughout the 1980s India expanded its influence in Afghanistan, contributing to an ambitious series of development projects—building manufacturing plants and hydroelectric facilities, as well as supervising numerous irrigation initiatives.

Pakistan meanwhile began to arm the mujahedin, the Islamic radicals—some, like Osama bin Laden, from outside the country—who fought the Soviet occupation. Their recruitment was always controlled by the ISI, but was originally also funded by the Saudis and the CIA.

Afghan western-backed mujahedin resistance fighters man an anti-aircraft position in Kunar valley in the eastern province of Kunar sometime in the 1980s. These forces help topple Kabul's Moscow-backed regime and drove the Soviet army back after ten years of occupation. AFP/Getty Images

Pakistan also began sending the jihadis into Indian Kashmir during the 1980s. As Hamid Gul—the ultra-hardline former director of the ISI during that period—once explained to me: “If they [the ISI] encourage the Kashmiris, it's understandable. The Kashmiri people have risen up in accordance with the UN charter, and it is the national purpose of Pakistan to help liberate them. If the jihadis go out and contain India, tying down their army on their own soil, for a legitimate cause, why should we not support them?" Next to him in his Islamabad living room as he spoke lay a large piece of the Berlin Wall presented to him “by the people of Berlin” for "delivering the first blow" to the Soviet Empire through his use of jihadis in the ’80s.

In an attempt to limit Pakistan’s influence after the fall of the pro-Soviet Afghan regime in 1989, India began its support of the Northern Alliance under the command of Ahmad Shah Massoud, a Tajik leader who also had assistance from Iran and Russia. India continued to supply Massoud with high-altitude warfare equipment, defense advisors, and helicopter parts and technicians after the rise of the Pakistan-sponsored Taliban.

The period of Taliban rule, from 1994-2001, was the high point of Pakistan’s influence in Afghanistan. India, which did not recognize the regime, was forced to close its embassy and all its consulates and, with ISI encouragement, Afghanistan quickly became the base for a whole spectrum of anti-Indian groups, including Lashkar-e-Taiba, which, in 2008, would execute the deadly assault on Mumbai.

As the Taliban, supported by regular Pakistan troops, pushed the Northern Alliance into ever smaller corners of Afghanistan toward the end of the ‘90s, India as well as Iran continued to send supplies to the increasingly beleaguered Massoud forces. In 2001 India built a hospital at their airbase in Tajikistan so that there would be a place to which they could ferry wounded Tajik soldiers for treatment.

Lt. General R.K. Sawhney, the Indian commander who oversaw this program of assistance to the Northern Alliance, recalled to me vividly and with sadness the day the hospital received its first casualty. It was Ahmad Shah Massoud himself, assassinated by two suicide bombers posing as cameramen.

The date was September 9, 2001.

An outpouring of thousands in the heart of the Panjshir to bury Ahmad Shah Massoud, the "Lion of Panjshir," who was officially declared dead from wounds suffered in a suicide bomb attack on September 9, 2001 by two men posing as Arab journalists. REUTERS

An MQ-1B Predator from the 46th Expeditionary Reconnaissance Squadron takes off from Balad Air Base in Iraq, June 12, 2008. REUTERS/U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Julianne Showalter

I n Pakistan General Pervez Musharraf, the army commander who had overthrown and replaced Nawaz in the military coup of 1999, was quickly pressured by American threats into allying himself unambiguously with the U.S. "We were on the verge of being declared a terrorist state,” he later wrote in his memoirs. “In that situation," he added—revealing his overarching strategic priority—"what would have happened to the Kashmir cause?"

Musharraf’s support for the U.S. reversed a decade of Pakistani foreign policy. He embraced President George W. Bush’s “Global War on Terror,” publicly broke relations with the Taliban, and called for the arrest of members of al-Qaida. By 2007, according to his own estimate, 672 of them had been rounded up in Pakistan, 369 of whom were then handed over to the U.S. This saved Pakistan from being bombed “back to the stone age” by America—a threat Musharraf attributes to Richard Armitage, Bush’s deputy secretary of state (Armitage denies using those words).

...only months after 9/11, the ISI was providing refuge to the entire Taliban leadership...

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The reversal of policy came at a great price to Pakistani influence in Afghanistan. And it happened when India’s influence was at an all-time high, thanks largely to Hamid Karzai’s ascension to power shortly after 9/11.

October 2001: U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell (l) and Pakistan President General Pervez Musharraf during a joint news conference in Islamabad. Musharraf backed the U.S.-led military action against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. REUTERS/John McConnico

In the years afterward, India made wise use of its opportunity to forge a close partnership with Afghanistan. The aid and reconstruction program it set in motion during the 1980s was so generous that it quickly established India as the single largest donor in the country. It was also carefully thought out, praised as one of the best planned and targeted aid efforts by any country.

India has built roads linking Afghanistan with Iran so that Afghanistan’s trade can reach the Persian Gulf at the port of Chabahar, thus freeing it of the need to rely on the Pakistani port of Karachi. India has donated or helped to build electrical power plants, health facilities for children and amputees, 400 buses and 200 minibuses, and a fleet of aircraft for Ariana Afghan Airlines. India has also been involved in constructing power lines, digging wells, running sanitation projects and using solar energy to light up villages, while Indian telecommunications personnel have built digitized telecommunications networks in 11 provinces. One thousand Afghan students a year have been offered scholarships to Indian universities. India has also played a key role in the construction of a new Afghan parliament in Kabul at a cost of $25 million.

An Ariana Afghan Airlines pilot waves on the plane's arrival at New Delhi International Airport. With India's assistance, the Afghan airline was nursed back to health after years of negligence under the Taliban, and re-launched its international service in 2002. REUTERS

All this led to India becoming enormously popular in Afghanistan: an ABC/BBC poll in 2009 showed 74% of Afghans viewing India favorably, while only 8% had a positive view of Pakistan.

Although pressure from the U.S. dissuaded India from sending troops into Afghanistan or providing military supplies, Pakistanis are still deeply disturbed by signs of India’s growing influence in the region, especially because many have come to believe India is using its Afghan consulates to foment insurgency in Baluchistan. A former Indian consul general in Kandahar privately admitted to me that he had met with Baluchi leaders at his consulate there, but he claims his ambassador gave him strict instructions not to aid them in any way against Pakistan. Still, he hinted to me that RAW personnel were present among the staff at the Kandahar and Jalalabad consulates.

It is hardly surprising that India keeps intelligence personnel in these sensitive postings, but there is no hard evidence that RAW or any other Indian agency is taking reciprocal action against the Pakistanis in response to their covert war against Indian interests in Afghanistan. U.S. intelligence agencies have followed up all the leads provided by the Pakistanis on this matter and have not found any evidence that India is actively aiding Baluchi separatists in the way Pakistan alleges.

President Musharraf’s post-9/11 about-face with respect to the Taliban was short-lived.

Nevertheless, as a result of the lingering suspicions among his colleagues in the Pakistani military and ISI, President Musharraf’s post-9/11 about-face with respect to the Taliban was short-lived. Despite his public promises to the contrary, from 2002 on, the ISI actively supported the Taliban. Furthermore, the speed with which the U.S. lost interest in Afghanistan after its successful invasion in 2001 convinced the Pakistani army that the U.S. was not serious about a long-term commitment to Karzai’s regime. This gave the Pakistanis hope that once American attention turned elsewhere, the Taliban could, once again, be used to reinstall a pro-Pakistani regime in Afghanistan.

Taliban militants pose for a picture after joining the Afghan government's reconciliation and reintegration program, in Herat March 14, 2010. Thirty Taliban militants joined the program, which remains an integral part of Afghan President Hamid Karzai's efforts to achieve a peace settlement. REUTERS/Mohammad Shioab

So it was that, only months after 9/11, the ISI was providing refuge to the entire Taliban leadership after it fled from Afghanistan. Mullah Omar was kept in an ISI safe house in Quetta, the provincial capital of Baluchistan, while his militia was lodged in Pashtunabad, a sprawling Quetta suburb. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the leader of the jihadist and Pakistan-backed Islamic Party, or Hezb-e-Islami, was lured back from exile in Iran and allowed to operate freely outside Peshawar, while Jalaluddin Haqqani, one of the most violent of the Taliban commanders, was allowed sanctuary by the ISI in North Waziristan. When he fell ill, he is said to have received treatment in Pakistani hospitals.

In order to keep contact with such groups beyond the radar of Western intelligence, the ISI created a new clandestine organization, staffed by former ISI trainers and retired Pashtun officers from the army, who armed, trained and supported the Taliban in camps around Quetta. By 2004, Pakistani army trucks were seen delivering Taliban fighters to the Afghan border and retrieving them a few days later; wireless monitoring at the U.S. base at Bagram picked up Taliban commanders arranging with Pakistani army officers at the border for safe passage as they came in and out of Afghanistan. By 2005 the Taliban, with covert Pakistani support, were launching a full-scale assault on NATO troops in Afghanistan.

In 2006, supporters of a nationalist Pakistani political party chant anti-George W. Bush slogans during a rally in Karachi. President Bush said that he was convinced of President Musharraf's commitment to the war on terrorism despite ongoing militancy in Pakistan and the presence of Al-Qaeda. REUTERS/Zahid Hussein

Since then the Taliban have proved remarkably successful in southern Afghanistan, their stronghold. By 2006 the Taliban had come to have a presence in over 70% of Pashtun areas, and in many districts of the rural south were able to resume collecting taxes, enforcing Sharia law and dispensing their usual rough justice. Every month their sphere of influence has increased. According to a 2009 Pentagon report, Karzai’s government had control of only 29 out of 121 key strategic districts across Afghanistan. In 2011, there were 12,244 Taliban attacks in Afghanistan, a fivefold increase since 2006.

Yet if Pakistan’s proxies proved unexpectedly successful on the battlefield, it could also be said that by his skillful manipulation of his neighbors, Karzai has enjoyed some surprising successes on the political front. In June, 2010, much to the alarm of India—and the U.S.—Karzai decided to attempt negotiations with the Taliban. In preparation for this, Karzai removed his strongly pro-Indian and deeply anti-Pakistani security chief, Amrulla Saleh, a tough, bright Tajik who had risen to prominence as a protégé of Massoud and was viewed by the Taliban and their backers in the ISI as their fiercest enemy. As Bruce Riedel, then President Barack Obama’s AfPak adviser (and now a senior fellow at Brookings), said when the news broke: “Karzai’s decision to sack Saleh has worried me more than any other development, because it means that Karzai is already planning for a post-American Afghanistan.”

Manmohan Singh is the 13th and current prime minister of India, a position he has held since 2004. A Sikh—the first to hold India's premiership—Singh was born in what is now Pakistan. After Partition, his family relocated to Amritsar, in India. He is an economist by training, and has been a leader in India's economic globalization.

For a while it looked as if the rapprochement with Pakistan might bear fruit. The head of the ISI, Lt. General Ahmad Shuja Pasha, and General Kayani, the head of the Pakistani army, shuttled between Kabul and the military headquarters in Rawalpindi, presumably to encourage some sort of accommodation between Karzai and the ISI-sponsored jihadi network of the Haqqanis that would leave Karzai in power in Kabul in return for a more pro-Pakistani dispensation in the south. There was even talk of Pakistan agreeing to help train the troops of the Afghan national army.

In the end, however, the reconciliation lasted less than a year. Kayani and Karzai soon fell out again, and in 2011 the pendulum swung the other way when Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visited Kabul, where he signed a strategic partnership deal promising closer cooperation on national security, this time with an agreement to provide light weapons as well as training in counterinsurgency and high-altitude warfare.

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By June 2012 the U.S. had gone on the offensive against what it now openly declared to be a treacherous ally. Reacting to further evidence of Pakistan’s connivance in attacks on U.S. interests in Afghanistan and its hosting of Osama bin Laden on Pakistani soil—intentionally or not—Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said that the U.S. “was reaching the limits of its patience” with Pakistan. More significantly, for the first time he endorsed Indian training of the Afghan army. This brought Pakistan’s fear and mistrust of India to a new high—and its relations with the U.S. to a new low, especially in the face of mounting Pakistani fury over its territory becoming a kill zone for U.S. drones.

Hesco barriers and concertina wire surround the living quarters of the Chinese owned Aynak copper mine in Logar Province, Afghanistan, just south of Kabul. Getty Images/Benjamin Lowy

T welve years after the international community went into Afghanistan to destroy al-Qaida and oust the Taliban, Western troops are about to withdraw, with neither objective achieved. The Taliban now control most of rural southern Afghanistan. That share is likely to increase next year when the British and the Americans withdraw 100,000 of their troops. Al-Qaida, which has moved to the Pakistani borderlands, and elsewhere, has been severely damaged but is far from finished.

Hamid Karzai’s own future is equally uncertain. He must step down from office next year, according to the constitution. And on a recent trip to Islamabad, I heard from everyone from senior officials in the foreign ministry on down that there were severe problems with Karzai’s mental health.

Afghan National Army soldiers practice emplacing anti-tank weapons during training at the Kabul Military Training Center in 2011 in Kabul. NATO Training Mission/U.S. Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Ernesto Hernandez Fonte, via Getty Images

Yet Karzai is no fool, and he retains strong views about Pakistan’s links with his Taliban enemies. “I warn them!” he told me in March in Kabul, waving his finger in the air. “Every day Afghan security forces are getting stronger! No government of Afghanistan can have good relations with [Pakistani President] Zardari, Nawaz Sharif [who has since been elected Prime Minister] or any of the others. Because we all know who is pulling the strings—the mullahs and the ISI…. The Pakistani ulema [scholars] council [has recently] said it is right to advocate suicide bombing in Afghanistan. It is very clear what is going on. Some of our so-called allies—the British in particular—tell me the Pakistanis have changed. Do I believe this?” Karzai laughed a deep, throaty laugh: “Nothing doing!“

If you grow vipers in your back yard, you’re going to get bitten.

For all his failures and all the forces arrayed against him, Karzai has managed to remain in power in Kabul for 12 years and successfully survived setbacks that would have broken a lesser man. Playing India, Pakistan, Iran and China off against each other, and skillfully manipulating the U.S. and the 49 other countries that contribute troops to ISAF, he has successfully advanced Afghanistan’s geopolitical and economic objectives. And occasional outbursts notwithstanding, he knows how to induce his neighbors to compete for good relations with Afghanistan. One day after signing the strategic partnership with India he reassured Pakistan that the deal “was not aimed at any one country.”

Moreover, despite the gross corruption of his regime, Afghanistan under Karzai’s rule has changed beyond all recognition, and for the good. The cities have grown, those who live in rural areas now travel much more widely beyond their ancestral valleys, and people everywhere have become more prosperous and better educated. Television, the Internet and an energetic press have also helped to open many minds. The Taliban may be capable of causing widespread disruption but few observers, inside the country or outside, believe they are strong enough to roll back over the country and retake Kabul or the north. They remain a rural Pashtun force with few supporters north of Kabul. After the American withdrawal, Karzai’s successor is likely to be able to maintain himself in fortress Kabul and continue to manipulate Afghanistan’s neighbors.

Pakistan’s future is at least as uncertain as Afghanistan’s. Fourteen years after the military coup that ousted him, Nawaz Sharif staged a stunning political comeback and is, once again, Pakistan’s prime minister, while the man who staged the coup, Pervez Musharraf, languishes in house arrest and faces the same threat of being hanged that he subjected Nawaz to in 2000.

Nawaz Sharif, newly re-elected prime minister and leader of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz political party, speaks to party members in Lahore, May 2013. REUTERS/Mohsin Raza

All Pakistani interest groups are pondering—and doing their best to manipulate—how these reversals of fortune will affect the country’s politics and policies. Hina Rabbani Khar, the foreign minister under President Zardari, who is said to be close to General Kayani, stressed repeatedly to me that Pakistan is currently fighting a major internal war with the Pakistani Taliban, and claimed that a return of the Afghan faction of the Taliban to Kabul is the last thing her country wants or needs. Most Afghan and Indian observers would scoff at her, arguing that she was trying to pull the wool over their eyes, just as Karzai did with me in his insistence that the Pakistani motives have not changed.

But there are certainly many good reasons why the Pakistanis might be worried about the jihadi protégés they have so lovingly funded and trained for three decades. For while many in the ISI may still believe that they can use jihadis for their own ends, the Islamists have increasingly followed agendas that put them at odds with their sponsors, sending suicide bombers out against not just Pakistan’s religious minorities, especially the Shia, and its political leaders, but even the ISI headquarters at Camp Hamza itself. As Cameron Munter—the former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan—succinctly put it: “If you grow vipers in your back yard, you’re going to get bitten.”

The continuation of clashes between India and Pakistan in—and over—Afghanistan after the U.S. withdrawal is dangerous for all countries in the region and for the world.

Nawaz Sharif is the newly-elected prime minister of Pakistan, a post he has held on two previous occasions. He was premier in 1988 when Pakistan conducted its first nuclear tests, in response to India's doing the same for the first time in 24 years. Ousted in a military coup and threatened with jail or execution in 2000, Sharif has turned the tables on his former adversaries, including former President Pervez Musharraf.

The danger posed by the jihadis—not just to India, but to Pakistan as well—is increasingly clear to all. In the late spring, when I tried to have breakfast with a Pakistani friend who lives near the military’s main primary school in Lahore, I was unable to get to him because all the roads through the Lahore Cantonment area were blocked by checkpoints. According to the soldiers manning the roadblocks, so fearful have the generals become of the Pakistani Taliban that they lock down much of Lahore every day in order to insure that their kids can get safely to school and back. They have also abandoned the use of military number plates on their cars, aware that these might attract the attention of Taliban suicide bombers.

In March 2013, essay author William Dalrymple met with Afghan President Hamid Karzai at the presidential palace in Kabul. Photo: Author's own

British diplomats in Islamabad take the view that because the Pakistani army now fears jihadi-generated instability more than it fears India it really has changed its attitude toward the jihadis. As General Kayani himself stated in a major speech in April on the eve of the elections: “The menace of terrorism and extremism has claimed thousands of lives, including those of the Army, Rangers, FC, Police, Frontier Constabulary… and the innocent people of Pakistan… [A] small faction wants to enforce its distorted ideology over the entire nation by taking up arms and for this purpose defies the Constitution of Pakistan and the democratic process,” he said. He went on to call on militants to lay down their arms and accept the country’s constitution unconditionally.

This has led many Pakistan-watchers to speculate that the generals may have had a change of heart about the dangers of their longtime strategy in Afghanistan. General Kayani recently told a senior American military officer that if Afghanistan deteriorated into chaotic civil war after the Americans leave, it would be bad for Afghanistan but a disaster for Pakistan. The army now fears the possibility that the return of Taliban rule would create a reverse sanctuary for Pakistani Taliban and other malcontents.

A Pakistani police officer at a checkpoint in Lahore, Pakistan. AP Photo/Anjum Naveed

The continuation of clashes between India and Pakistan in—and over—Afghanistan after the U.S. withdrawal is dangerous for all countries in the region and for the world, especially given Pakistan’s reported fondness for developing tactical nuclear weapons for use on the battlefield, such as the recently tested Hatf IX missile, with a range of under 40 miles. Pakistan is apparently also testing other small, low-yielding nuclear devices such as landmines, presumably designed to destroy large Indian tank formations moving into Pakistani territory.

The priority that Pakistan has given to such weapons and the scenarios they’re meant to deal with constitute the latest and most alarming manifestation of the government’s fixation on India as the main threat to Pakistan’s existence. In fact, however, the threat to Pakistan’s territorial integrity and sovereignty is clearly no longer from India at all, and arguably never has been. For years, largely and perversely because of Pakistan’s own policies, that threat has come from within Pakistan itself. Likewise, as far as India is concerned, the real threat to its dominance of the region is not Pakistan so much as the dragon rising on the other side of the Himalayas: China, which now has very considerable mineral assets in Afghanistan.

Kandahar, Afghanistan, May 2013: Afghan men march through downtown chanting “Death to Pakistan” and “Death to the ISI.” AP Photo/Allauddin Khan

In 2008, a Chinese mining consortium—Chinese Metallurgical Group and Jiangxi Copper Co.—bought a 30-year lease on the Afghan copper deposits at Mes Aynak for $3 billion; they estimated that the valley contained potentially $100 billion worth of copper, possibly the largest such deposit in the world, and potentially worth around five times the estimated value of Afghanistan’s entire economy.

China is also training a first batch of 300 Afghan policemen. China is arguably the only country to which the Pakistani security establishment defers. If China continues to invest in Afghan mineral resources, and the roads and railways with which it can extract them, it will expect Pakistan to protect its interests and not allow the Taliban to disrupt these operations in Afghanistan. This could be a boon for future peace in Afghanistan. The Indians, of course, view these developments with some foreboding. But there have been recent secret talks in Beijing between Chinese and Indian officials to discuss their interests in post-American Afghanistan.

Hamid Karzai visiting the Badaling Great Wall on the outskirts of Beijing in 2002. REUTERS/Guang Niu

Much will depend on what India decides to do. It is unclear whether its government will choose to play an enhanced role in Afghanistan after the departure of American troops. Some Indian hawks, in the army and the Ministry of External Affairs, argue that by taking on a more robust and possibly even a military role in Afghanistan, India could fill the security vacuum left by the U.S. withdrawal, advance its regional interests, compete with their Chinese rivals for influence in Afghanistan, and thwart their Pakistani enemies at the same time. Others in New Delhi argue that by willfully fueling Pakistani paranoia, India would panic Islamabad into going on the offensive and providing ever greater support for the Taliban, which, in turn, would be dangerous for both India and Pakistan.

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William Dalrymple is the author of nine books about India and the Islamic world, including award-winning titles such as City of Djinns ; White Mughals ; The Last Mughal ; and Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India . He recently curated a major show of Mughal art for the Asia Society in New York. His new book, Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan 1839-42 was published to acclaim by Knopf in February. He writes regularly for the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books and the Guardian , and is one of the founders and a co-director of the Jaipur Literary Festival . He has honorary doctorates of letters from the universities of St Andrews, Aberdeen, Bradford and Lucknow, and in September took up a visiting fellowship at Princeton. Learn more about Dalrymple and his work at http://www.williamdalrymple.uk.com/

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Further reading

Shooting for a Century: The India-Pakistan Conundrum Stephen P. Cohen (Brookings, 2013)

Avoiding Armageddon: America, India, and Pakistan to the Brink and Back Bruce Riedel (Brookings, 2013)

Aspiration and Ambivalence: Strategies and Realities of Counterinsurgency and State-Building in Afghanistan Vanda Felbab-Brown (Brookings, 2012)

Deadly Embrace: Pakistan, America, and the Future of the Global Jihad Bruce Riedel (Brookings, 2012, revised edition)

The Future of Pakistan Stephen P. Cohen, ed. (Brookings, 2011)

History Does Not Condemn Afghanistan to Failure or India and Pakistan to Rivalry There Michael E. O'Hanlon, (Brookings, 2013)

Get more Brookings research on Afghanistan , Pakistan and India

Like other products of the Institution, The Brookings Essay is intended to contribute to discussion and stimulate debate on important issues. The views are solely those of the author.

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