Political audit of Afghan policy
THE latest clashes between Pakistani and Afghan security forces are yet another sign of the deepening rift between the two neighbours.
Just three years after the Taliban’s takeover of Kabul — a moment that was celebrated by Pakistan’s civil and military elites — relations between Islamabad and the Taliban have soured dramatically.
Since the Taliban’s ascent, Pakistan has faced a renewed wave of terrorism along its western frontier, with the TTP and IS-K at the forefront. Pakistani air strikes on suspected TTP hideouts and repeated diplomatic warnings have done little to persuade Kabul to rein in the militants.
As our military and civilian leaders grapple with the failure of the Afghan policy, an honest introspection and soul-searching is overdue. Rethinking strategy requires more than military responses and diplomatic ultimatums; it demands an unflinching assessment of past miscalculations and a clearer vision for the future.
The resurgence of terrorism along the western border is the direct outcome of decades-long state policies that fostered religiously motivated extremism and militancy as tools of foreign and domestic policies, including nation-building strategies and internal security policy. Chief among these has been Pakistan’s Afghan policy, which has relied on Islamist proxies since at least the 1970s.
Defenders of this policy traditionally argued that it was shaped by constraints of regional geopolitics and security. While the geopolitical constraints are undeniable, the security leadership had alternatives at critical junctures — choices they avoided.
During the Cold War, our security establishment chose to serve as a proxy in the US-Soviet rivalry. In the 1990s, it doubled down on support for the Taliban, alienating all other Afghan stakeholders it had built cordial relations with in the preceding decade. Post-9/11, Pakistan permitted its soil to be used as a sanctuary for the Taliban, even as these actions drew domestic and international backlash. Despite the obvious costs, the pro-Taliban Afghan policy persisted.
Rethinking strategy requires more than military responses and diplomatic ultimatums.
At its core, the Afghan policy has relied on sponsoring Islamist extremists of various stripes to achieve maximalist strategic ambitions in Afghanistan. The results have been catastrophic, both externally and internally.
Externally, Pakistan’s objectives — countering Indian influence and ensuring a friendly (read: pliant) government in Kabul — have failed. For most of the past four decades, Kabul’s ties with New Delhi have been more cordial than with Islamabad.
Despite nurturing various shades of Pakhtun Islamists in Afghanistan for over five decades, Pakistan has few friends there, let alone a pliant government. The 1980s alienated secular and left-leaning Afghan nationalists. The 1990s alienated Pakhtun nationalists and non-Pakhtun groups. Since 9/11, the state has managed to alienate virtually every segment of Afghan society, including the Taliban. The goodwill Pakistan had garnered during the so-called anti-Soviet jihad was squandered. Today, Afghan factions across the political spectrum view Pakistan’s policies as domineering.
The pro-Taliban policy also damaged relations with the US and the broader Western world. This security-centric approach also undermined the country’s geo-economic interests, such as trade with Afghanistan, access to Central Asia’s resource wealth, and the repatriation of Afghan refugees.
Internally, the costs have been devastating. Pakistan’s Afghan policy has directly contributed to the rise of domestic terrorism, claiming over 70,000 lives and causing economic losses in billions. In its quest for the elusive and misguided goal of ‘strategic depth’, the state fostered a sprawling network of religious seminaries along the Durand Line and cultivated a political environment ripe for the rise of religiously inspired extremism, with little regard for the domestic fallout. These religious networks have since evolved into existential threats.
Security elites justified these policies by claiming that the Taliban would counter Indian influence and weaken ‘Indian-backed’ militancy within Pakistan. Yet the massive surge in violence since the Taliban’s takeover of Kabul proves these assumptions wrong. Ironically, with the Taliban in power in Kabul, we have only ended up facilitating ‘reverse strategic depth’, whereby the TTP uses Afghan-Taliban-controlled Afghanistan to launch attacks in Pakistan.
In any political system with a semblance of accountability, such persistent policy failures would have prompted major course corrections and held decision-makers to account. But in Pakistan, the same failed policies have continued to thrive.
The mix of failed policies and a culture of impunity has inflicted significant damage on state legitimacy, which is becoming increasingly evident in the peripheries in recent months, as grassroots movements — and even elements within the police and civilian agencies — blame state institutions for these disastrous policies, despite the fact that soldiers are themselves under daily attack.
Equally troubling is the apparent complicity of Pakistan’s mainstream political parties, and sections of the media, and civil society, where dominant narratives muzzle the voices from the periphery. Grassroots movements in the country’s periphery — the ones bearing the greatest costs of these misguided policies — have consistently sounded the alarm, only to be ignored or suppressed.
The complicity of mainstream civilian parties has continued unabated, despite all the losses and sufferings of the past two decades. During the PTI government, the previous security leadership brokered secretive deals to enable the return of the TTP. Only parliamentarians from the periphery voiced serious concerns. Their warnings were dismissed — not just by the PTI but also the current government.
The time for relying solely on kinetic measures is long past. What Pakistan needs is a wholesale rethinking of its internal nation-building strategies, security priorities, and foreign policy. Achieving these shifts will require political will, vision, and genuine democratic oversight.
Dealing with the rising terrorism threat has been complicated by the non-inclusive nature of the current political settlement in Islamabad. It excludes all political parties and movements whose primary social support is based in Balochistan and KP — the provinces most directly affected by the escalating violence.
Going forward, Pakistan’s Afghan policy should be formulated through an inclusive process and placed under proper democratic oversight. Without democratic input and oversight, Pakistan remains doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past, stumbling from crisis to crisis while paying an ever-higher price.
The writer is a public policy and development specialist from Balochistan.
Published in Dawn, March 21st, 2025