The complicated web we weave

A former Afghan journalist I once ran into in China – one who gave up a comfortable life in the Gulf to return to Afghanistan when the Taliban were toppled but left again when they came back to power – speaks of a strange transformation in his country that the mainstream press seems to have missed.

“All Afghan liberals hate Pakistan”, he told me nine years ago, “just as much as we hate the Taliban because Pakistan imposed the Taliban on us” and all that. But since liberals have been a dying breed in Afghanistan since the Taliban first captured Kabul in the ‘90s, the country’s roughly 41-43 million population is dominated by conservatives and extremists.

This was true in the Karzai and Ghani days as well.

“The conservatives tolerate the Taliban and the extremists love them”, he added, “and both of them also hate Pakistan”.

Now a school teacher in Saudi Arabia, he was “shocked” last week when social media accounts of the “liberal Afghan diaspora” lit up in support of the Taliban regime after it claimed retaliation against Pakistan for last week’s airstrike against TTP (Tehreek e Taliban) hideouts in the Paktia region.

That’s not all.

“My friends and family in Kabul also joined the public march in favour of the regime, just because it stood up to Pakistan”, he added.

“Clearly we hate Pakistan even more than we hate the Taliban”.

Yet however the average Afghan – liberal, conservative or extremist – feels about Pakistan or the TTP, it’s clear that last week’s strike pushed the reset button on an understanding, if not an arrangement, that has lasted for decades.

The average Pakistani has no problems with last week’s airstrike, of course. In fact, from their point of view it couldn’t have come soon enough considering how TTP had already very successfully reignited its insurgency and the Afghan Taliban had just as clearly gone back on their word about controlling them.

Yet, however they feel about it, the Pakistani people and/or their wishes have also never mattered in the calculus of “strategic depth” that emerged after the so-called anti-Soviet jihad and endured the long years of the war on terror.

Headlines spoke of Afghan Taliban aiding TTP attacks on Pakistani border posts in response to the airstrike, which must have worried security analysts counting on a quick return to the status quo; like after the tit-for-tat with Iran in early 2024. But that would require the Taliban to take the strike as a reality check and finally deliver on their promise to clamp down on TTP. And the two joining hands instead to hit back at Pakistan, with Kabul again referring to the border as a “hypothetical line”, threatens to push things on an entirely different trajectory.

Surely they’ve thought through the most obvious contingencies. Or have they? For example, what will the military do if, rather when, TTP carries out its next attack inside Pakistan? Will it hit harder in Afghanistan, or not order another sortie because the Taliban didn’t like the last one? And if they do hit, and push TTP further into the embrace of the Afghan Taliban, and the two carry out more joint attacks across the “hypothetical line” – which is likely enough to at least feature in the calculations – is strategic depth a thing of the past or can they still mobilise factions of the clergy to liaise with the Haqqanis and restore the old arrangement? Of course, that would require official Taliban action against TTP which has been flatly ruled out so far.

We go round in circles.

And what of the natural marriage of convenience between the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban that would see the latter aid the former in their fight against ISKP (Islamic State Khurasan Province) and ensure complete control over the whole country? So much for the analysis, on the Pakistani side, that the Taliban were happy with the TTP near the border because they didn’t want any more militant presence near the capital, which was already being encroached upon by ISKP.

Pakistan delayed “decisive action” against TTP, despite threatening it since at least 2022, because the military establishment didn’t want to poison the “strategic depth” relationship with Kabul. Islamabad even opened negotiations with TTP, as equals, at the behest of the Afghan Taliban, with the Imran Khan government – which openly celebrated the Taliban’s return to Kabul – going as far as beginning the process of repatriating TTP fighters back into the country.

Now all that is history as Pakistanis, horrified at the prospect of revisiting the nightmare of TTP’s last insurgency, celebrate the air force’s strike on its camps in Afghanistan and all shades of Afghans stand behind a government they hate as it stands up to its old benefactor, which they hate more.

Lost somewhere in all this is the cold logic that kept strategic depth at play for so long.

What a complicated web we weave.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2025