Islamabad cannot defeat its own Taliban rebels without fighting its former proxies on the other side of the border - by Kamran Bokhari
Pakistan and Afghanistan cannot coexist. As competing models of Islamic statehood, the two are engaged in a long-term struggle to shape each other through a process of ideological and territorial osmosis. Pakistan, which is in the throes of an unprecedented political and economic crisis, is especially vulnerable now that the Taliban is back in power in Afghanistan. And the government in Islamabad cannot defeat its own Taliban rebels without fighting its former proxies on the other side of the border.
Inevitable Attacks
On Dec. 20, Pakistani security forces launched a nine-hour military operation to retake a counterterrorism facility in the northwestern city of Bannu seized by militants belonging to the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) militant group. Four security forces personnel died and 18 were wounded, while 25 militants were killed and 11 surrendered. This is just the latest incident in a sharp uptick in attacks after the TTP ended a cease-fire agreement on Nov. 28. Even the Afghan Taliban have been engaged in cross-border attacks on Pakistani soil. The truce, which lasted a little less than six months, was the outcome of behind-the-scenes talks between Pakistani military officials and the TTP and was mediated by the Afghan Taliban. It followed a rise in militant activity after the Afghan Taliban returned with the departure of U.S. forces in August 2021.
Attacks were all but inevitable. From 2007 to 2015, the TTP waged a ferocious insurgency against the Pakistani state targeting major law enforcement, military and intelligence facilities across the country. Pakistan’s security forces were able to defeat the Taliban rebels and retake large swathes of territory along the border with Afghanistan, but it cost the country 80,000 lives and $150 billion in economic damages. Many TTP militants were either killed or captured in Pakistani counter-insurgency operations, but a great many were forced to sanctuaries across the border.
At the time, Pakistan’s was a complex political and militant landscape. It was home to the country’s own Taliban rebels and a safe haven for Afghan Taliban insurgents fighting U.S.-backed NATO forces in Afghanistan whom Islamabad supported. Pakistan opposed Afghanistan for being allied with its historical rival India – which explains its support for the Afghan jihadists, even as it was fighting their comrades at home. To counter Islamabad’s support for the Afghan Taliban, Kabul was supporting the Pakistani Taliban.
By the time Pakistan realized it could no longer control the Afghan Taliban, it was already too late. As early as the 1970s, Islamabad sought regime change in Kabul to break what it saw as strategic encirclement by India in the east and a pro-New Delhi government to the west. Afghanistan has never recognized the border between them, and for decades the Pakistanis feared the threat of Kabul-supported Pashtun ethno-nationalism in their own northwest.
To counter this threat, Pakistan promoted Islamism – both domestically and abroad – a strategy that gained momentum after the Soviet military intervention in 1979. By the early 1990s, with massive military and financial support from the United States and Saudi Arabia, Pakistan had defeated the Marxists in Afghanistan and weakened left-wing Pashtun nationalists on its side of the border. But this only made things worse, geopolitically speaking. Pakistan was no longer flanked by a hostile regime but by a massive power vacuum in which Islamist factions struggled for power.
When the Afghan Taliban emerged from this struggle in 1996, Pakistan thought it had finally gotten the strategic depth it wanted against India when, in fact, the opposite was true. The Taliban ideology was quickly gaining ground in Pakistan, even as al-Qaida’s particular brand of international jihadism took root in both countries. In no small part, this was due to Pakistani authorities enabling the flow of foreign fighters to Afghanistan as a force multiplier for the Taliban’s efforts to consolidate power.
9/11 laid to rest any doubt that Pakistan had created proxies it could no longer control. Pakistan’s perennial political and economic problems only got worse, sandwiched as it was between its ally in the United States, which had given it some $20 billion in assistance, and its premier Islamist proxy in the Taliban. By the time Washington withdrew its forces, Pakistan was critically unstable, while the Taliban had gone from a proxy force to a major national security concern. It was a natural consequence of a strategy of cultivating non-state proxies whose ideology challenged the national identity and narrative of the patron state.
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Kamran Bokhari, PhD is the Director of Analytical Development at the New Lines Institute for Strategy & Policy in Washington, DC. Dr. Bokhari is also a national security and foreign policy specialist at the University of Ottawa’s Professional Development Institute. He has served as the Coordinator for Central Asia Studies at the U.S. Department of State’s Foreign Service Institute. Follow him on Twitter at @KamranBokhari
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