Details
Western expressions of dismay at the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 were as resounding as they were hypocritical. While the chaotic scenes at Kabul’s airport, with hundreds of people attempting to flee the Taliban takeover at the last moment, were not how things were supposed to go, neither did anybody in the West want to take responsibility for the chaos.
Britta Petersen heads the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s New Delhi Office.
Pakistan’s politicians were more sincere. Imran Khan, the country’s prime minister at the time, declared that Afghanistan was finally “breaking the chains of slavery”. Khan’s special assistant Raoof Hasan went so far as to describe a “virtually smooth shifting of power” from the “corrupt Afghan government” to the Taliban. Islamabad, after all, had been hoping and working for the success of the Islamic fundamentalist militia for years.
Much has changed since the Taliban took power. Imran Khan has been imprisoned since 2023 on corruption charges; Pakistan’s army now has the upper hand in politics. Not much remains of the country’s formerly friendly ties with Kabul.
In October, the two countries came to blows. Pakistan flew airstrikes on the Afghan capital as well as parts of the Pashtun border region — the cities of Jalalabad, Khost, and the region of Paktika — targeting Noor Wali Mehsud, an internationally wanted terrorist and head of the Pakistani Taliban (Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, TTP). The TTP has been behind numerous attacks on both military and civilian facilities in Pakistan. Its goal is to topple the government in Islamabad and establish an Islamic state.
Kabul responded with a series of attacks on Pakistani military bases along the border. Pakistani drone attacks in Kandahar and Helmand followed, as well as heavy fighting near the Afghan border post of Spin Boldak and airstrikes by Pakistan on military bases in Kabul and Kandahar. After ten days of fighting, Qatar, which, alongside Turkey, had been mediating between the two countries, announced a ceasefire in which Kabul agreed to abstain from further assisting the TTP. According to the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), 37 civilians had been killed in the dispute and a further 425 injured.
The Islamic fundamentalists and the Hindu nationalist government led by Narendra Modi may seem like strange bedfellows, but their new romance is born of pragmatism and strategic considerations.
But the conflict is far from over. On the contrary: just a few days after the ceasefire was announced, both sides had distanced themselves from the agreement. Pakistan’s federal minister for information and broadcasting, Attaullah Tarar, declared that the talks had “failed to bring about any workable solution”, and Defence Minister Khawaja Asif accused Afghanistan of “backpedalling”. Meanwhile the suggestion coming out of Kabul was that Pakistan had made “unrealistic demands”. The breakdown in negotiations is hardly surprising, given the Pakistani Taliban’s close ties to their fellow fundamentalists in government in Kabul. Further disputes seem inevitable.
The withdrawal of NATO troops from Afghanistan has put the unfinished business of colonialism — the partition of the Indian subcontinent — back on the regional agenda. In its rapprochement with the Taliban this year, India has performed an about-face in its relations to Afghanistan, while the ouster of Bangladeshi prime minister Sheikh Hasina has led to a reappraisal of relations between Islamabad and Dhaka. These changes mean that a new geostrategic hand is being dealt in South Asia — one whose outcome remains uncertain.
Pakistan’s Motives
A brief history may be helpful here. The partition of British India in 1947 into the then secular state of India (a majority of whose population were Hindus) and the Muslim state of Pakistan defined an unstable new order in South Asia. By 1971, this new order had dissolved, with East and West Pakistan splitting into the independent states of Pakistan and Bangladesh. These developments also failed to provide a clear framework for relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan, two majority-Muslim countries that share a 2,640-kilometre border, the Durand Line, which British India and the former Emirate of Afghanistan agreed to in 1893.
Since 1947, subsequent Afghan governments have refused to recognize this international border; it slices through numerous Pashtun tribal territories that Afghanistan views as part of its national identity. As a result, Pakistan sees itself threatened by Kabul, perhaps existentially. In combination with its difficult relationship with India, this situation has always made Islamabad eager to install a Pakistan-friendly government in Afghanistan. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the country supported US attempts to topple the government in Kabul with the help of Islamic fundamentalist factions.
It was during this era that Islamabad developed the concept of “strategic depth”, in which Afghanistan is seen as a potential refuge in case of war with India; Afghanistan is out of reach of India’s medium-range missiles.
At the same time — and studiously ignored by Islamabad — Pakistan was also emerging as a refuge for various religious warriors (mujahideen) from Afghanistan. While India supported what was known as the Northern Alliance during the Afghan civil war, Pakistan had multiple irons in the fire, including Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s party Hezb-e-Islami and later the Taliban. During the latter group’s first term in office (1996–2001), Pakistan was one of only three countries worldwide to recognize the Taliban government in Kabul.
When the US drove the Taliban out of Kabul in the wake of the attacks in New York and Washington on 11 September 2001, the latter mostly disappeared across the Durand Line into Pakistan. It was at this time that the Pakistani Taliban came into being, allying itself with the Afghan Taliban, maintaining contact with Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda as well as the Islamic State Khorasan (IS-K), and working to establish an Islamic state throughout the whole region.
India’s Role
Given their ideological proximity and close ethnic ties, it seems unlikely that the Taliban in Afghanistan will distance themselves from their fellows in Pakistan. They are bound, among other things, by the code of honour known as Pashtunwali, which, among other things, extols hospitality; one of its tangible consequences was the refusal of the Taliban in Afghanistan to comply with US demands to hand over Osama bin Laden.
Ideologically, both factions trace their roots to the Deobandi movement, which began in British India at the end of the nineteenth century as a reaction to colonial rule. The movement is based on the putative return to an orthodox Sunni Islam focusing on the Hanafi school of Islamic jurisprudence (sharia). Then as now, the Deobandi movement sought an Islamic revival to counteract foreign influences and preached global jihad as a holy duty of Muslims.
The movement’s focal point is the town of Deoband in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, home to the Islamic seminary Darul Uloom Deoband, an important centre of Islamic scholarship. In 2008, the seminary issued a fatwa against terrorism of every kind — which was necessary not least because India had become a target for Islamist terror attacks. Socially, the seminary remains ultra-conservative, as evidenced by its fatwa barring the author Salman Rushdie from returning to India. Women are only allowed to enter the campus if veiled and accompanied by a man.
Islamabad, at least, seems determined not to stand idly by in the face of this new development.
Nonetheless, India never recognized Afghanistan’s Taliban government, instead supporting the Northern Alliance led by Ahmad Shah Massoud, which, assisted by the US, brought about the fall of the Taliban in 2001. But times have changed — and so has India’s strategic outlook. Deciding that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”, New Delhi is now trying to take advantage of the conflict between Pakistan and the Taliban, currying favour with Afghanistan’s rulers.
The Islamic fundamentalists and the Hindu nationalist government led by Narendra Modi may seem like strange bedfellows, but their new romance is born of pragmatism and strategic considerations. While New Delhi is facing up to the fact that there is currently no alternative to the Taliban in Afghanistan, for their part, the Taliban anticipate further aid and investment from India, as well as greater independence from Pakistan.
The Taliban Gain Confidence
The arrangement seems to be paying off. Afghan foreign affairs minister Amir Khan Muttaqi’s visit to Delhi in October was a win for the Taliban; photos taken with him and India’s external affairs minister, S. Jaishankar, lend international legitimacy to the government in Kabul. Yet India is playing a dangerous game. When the Taliban delegation excluded female journalists from a press conference in Delhi due to their sex, the Indian media erupted in outrage — rightfully so.
Just as problematic was Muttaqi’s visit to the Darul Uloom Deoband seminary, where he was received with enthusiasm. India may nurture the hope that the seminary’s teachers might have a moderating influence on the Taliban; at least women are not excluded from education institutions in Deoband. But this hardly makes the Deobandi ideology any less radical. As Kabir Taneja, deputy director of the Strategic Studies Programme at the Observer Research Foundation (ORF), a pro-government think-tank in New Delhi, remarked, Muttaqi’s visit “opened a delicate new chapter between India and the new powers in Afghanistan”.
That’s putting it rather diplomatically. It is no coincidence that the military exchange between Afghanistan and Pakistan began during Muttaqi’s visit; rather, it indicates the Taliban’s growing confidence. While the group is known for many things, moderation is not one of them. New Delhi would do well to remember an Afghan saying that has so far been directed mostly at Pakistan: “If you keep snakes in your yard, eventually you’ll get bitten.”
Islamabad, at least, seems determined not to stand idly by in the face of this new development. After a suicide bombing in Pakistan’s capital in early November, for which the Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif accused India of having “supported” the attack. Defence Minister Khawaja Asif went one step further, declaring, “we’re ready for war on two fronts with Afghanistan and India.”
Translated by Anna Dinwoodie and Marc Hiatt for Gegensatz Translation Collective.
