With Pakistan recently (in April 2022) conducting a series of airstrikes in Afghanistan’s border districts of Kunar and Khost, relations between Pakistan and the Taliban have nosedived. At least 47 people have been killed in the Pakistani airstrikes in Afghanistan’s eastern border areas, prompting an acrimonious response from the Taliban.
Taliban has fulminated against Pakistan’s newly-formed Shehbaz Sharif government of violating Afghanistan’s sovereignty, which, it said, will not have good consequences. Pakistan’s tone, in turn, too, has been accusatory, blaming the Taliban leadership of not fulfilling the promises that it made while gaining control of the war-torn country. Taliban had promised that its territory would not be used for terror activities under any circumstances.
Tensions have been simmering for the eight months now, since the Taliban took over, and Pakistan has its hands full, what with terrorist organisation, Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), carrying out attacks in parts of Pakistan from the Afghanistan border. Pakistan has repeatedly requested the Taliban government not to allow terrorists to use its soil for carrying out attacks in Pakistan.
On 14 April, the TTP killed seven Pakistani troops in the North Waziristan district. The TTP has aggressively carried out acts of terror in Pakistan to compel the Pakistani government to allow its cadres to return home to Pakistan with impunity. Pakistan has been vociferous about the fact, so far, that the TTP, that operates from Afghanistan, is becoming an increasing threat, and that the Afghanistan Taliban is doing little to reign them in.
Post the airstrikes, the Taliban government summoned Pakistan’s ambassador in Kabul, Mansoor Ahmad Khan, and warned Islamabad not to test the patience of Afghans on such issues. The Taliban has called the Pakistan military action as an act of cruelty and a violation of Afghanistan’s sovereignty.
It also warned that if a limited war broke out between the two neighbours, it would not be in the interest of either side.
Apart from the TTP, Pakistan and the Taliban also have differences over the Durand Line, the long and porous border between the two countries. The Taliban has a position consistent with the stance of all previous Afghan governments, since 1947, asserting the right to free movement of Pashtuns across the colonial era frontier and not recognising the line as an international boundary.
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.
On 22 December 2021, Afghan defence ministry spokesman Enayatullah Khwarazmi disclosed that the Taliban forces had stopped the Pakistani military from erecting an ‘illegal’ border fence along the eastern Nangarhar province.
A video circulating on social media showed that Taliban soldiers had seized spools of barbed wire and one senior Taliban official warned Pakistani soldiers stationed in security posts not to try to fence the border.
Two Taliban officials told Reuters that Taliban and the Pakistan military came ‘face-to-face’ over the border incident and the situation was ‘tense’.
Following the incident, there was also cross border mortar fire from the Pakistani side of the border in the Kumar province further north on 22 December 2021.
The Taliban has never accepted the legitimacy of the 2,611-km Durand Line, leave alone its fencing, which was a prestigious project of the Pakistani military leadership undertaken at enormous cost over a period of four years with a view to prevent cross-border attacks on Pakistani posts.
For Pakistan, the fence, that cost around $600 million to erect, was not just a demarcative boundary but also a legitimate accession of disputed territory for posterity. Taliban, on its part, desecrated the fence within 100 days of coming to power in Kabul. The Durand Line was established by the British in 1893.
Tensions have also been exacerbated by the fact that the Taliban is suspicious of Pakistan’s overly interfering in Afghanistan’s affairs. That the relationship between the two, is being harnessed for Pakistan’s own interests not Afghanistan’s. The fact is Pakistan has not officially recognised the Taliban as the legitimate government in Afghanistan. This may be to prove to the international community that Pakistan does not sympathise with the ideology of the Taliban or that it had nothing to do with the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in August 2021.
This is contrary to the worldview that Pakistan was singlehandly, both overtly and covertly, responsible for abetting Taliban’s resurgence in Afghanistan, even to the extent that it went about playing a duplicitous game with the US, that culminated in the US defeat in Afghanistan and the withdrawal of the US from Afghanistan. Not to forget, that Pakistan aided the mujaheedin to end the Soviet invasion in the eighties. To Pakistan’s credit goes the fact that it was Taliban’s nurturer, right from its nascence to its gaining power in Afghanistan on two different occasions.
It also played an important role in facilitating the 2020 US-Taliban deal. However, for the Taliban, that is facing an overwhelming humanitarian crisis and a destabilising terror campaign by the Islamic State, the economic crunch in addition; a bankrupt Pakistan has little to offer by way of direly needed financial help. Pakistan has not the wherewithal to be the Taliban’s crutch anymore. The honeymoon between the Taliban and Pakistan now seems over.
montes-musings.blog 