What’s behind Pakistan’s war with Afghanistan’s Taliban government?

Pakistan has been at war with Afghanistan’s Taliban regime for just under one month. Yet the conflict, which was officially declared by Pakistan the day before the US and Israel launched their strikes on Iran, has been overshadowed by events in the Gulf.

Pakistan and the Taliban have made widely differing claims regarding the numbers of people killed on either side. The rising casualty toll only briefly captured global attention when a Pakistani airstrike hit a drug rehabilitation centre in Kabul on March 16, killing more than 100 people.

But the three weeks of fighting, with a brief pause for the Eid al-Fitr holiday between March 20 and 23, confirm for anyone who still doubted it, that the schism between Pakistan and the Taliban is real. Of course there are complex geopolitical and regional interests at play. India provides some support for the Taliban while China tries to balance its alliance with Pakistan and its more tentative relationship with the Taliban. But the conflict tells us more about the politics of the Taliban movement itself and its relationship with Pakistan.

The Taliban are happy to exploit the spectacle of the conflict with Pakistan as their latest bid for legitimacy. They pose to the Afghan population as defenders of national sovereignty. And they believe that their guerrilla tactics give them an advantage in ground fighting against what they disparagingly refer to as the “Punjabi army”. Meanwhile, their ideology, which is based on religious zeal tinged with nationalism, plays to historical Afghan ideas around resisting foreigners, including the defeat of the British Army of the Indus in the 1838-42 war, is a potent recruiting tool.

Pakistani militants

The Pakistani Taliban (TTP) are the key factor behind the breakdown in Afghanistan’s relations with Pakistan. The TTP are a group of Pakistani militants, inspired by the Afghan Taliban, but with their own leadership and structure. The Afghan Taliban have provided a haven in Afghanistan to the TTP that mirrors the refuge they themselves received in Pakistan until 2021.

In the run up to the latest war, the TTP escalated their insurgency against the Pakistan state. Now TTP leaders have declared themselves a part of the Taliban’s emirate. They claim to be fighting to impose the Taliban version of the emirate on the whole of Pakistan, not just the tribal areas of the frontier, where the TTP originated.

This may help Pakistan persuade other regional powers that the Taliban pose a threat to stability analogous to that posed by Iran – but with IEDs and suicide bombers instead of ballistic missiles and drones. The problem for the Pakistan army is that neither previous efforts at containment of the Taliban nor the current limited aerial campaign against them has made the extremist regime amenable to cooperation.

Building grievance

For years, the Taliban were widely denigrated as a proxy force that had been created and supported by Pakistan and served Islamabad’s interests. This is simply wrong. The Taliban as a movement is rooted in Afghan culture and history, dominated by conservative Sunni clerics and madrassah (Islamic school) students from the Kandahari branches of Afghanistan’s Pashtun tribes. It was these tribes’ 18th-century rebellions against their Persian overlords which led to the emergence of modern Afghanistan. For three decades the movement has pursued a vision of imposing the Taliban’s Islamic system on Afghanistan.

They only accepted safe haven in Pakistan because they saw it as their best chance of outlasting the US intervention in Afghanistan.

The Taliban never felt much gratitude towards their hosts. Instead they accumulated grievances against their benefactors during the safe haven period. These grievances started soon after 9/11, when Pakistan helped the US detain numerous Taliban leaders. By August 2021 the Taliban had a pantheon of senior figures whose deaths they blamed on Pakistan – such as their former defence minister Obaidullah Akhund in 2010 and their second leader Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansoor in 2016.

When the Taliban leaders and security chiefs returned to government in Afghanistan in 2021, they were still nursing these grievances. As a result they have adopted policies to reduce Pakistan’s influence in their country. Taliban with families and assets in Pakistan were pressurised to repatriate them to Afghanistan. They have also redirected Afghanistan’s trade so that, by 2025, Iran had replaced Pakistan as the main source of Afghanistan’s imports. Meanwhile India has replaced it as the main destination for Afghan exports.

Since taking power, the Taliban have built their insurgent fighters into coherent national security forces – but forces that are subject to intense religious indoctrination. Anticipating the current conflict, they built a series of underground storage facilities for weaponry and to shelter their leaders if required. For now, they rely on vehicle-mounted heavy machine guns as air defence, but they continue trying to acquire more advanced capabilities, for example by showing up at Russian arms exhibitions.

Risk of escalation

If the Taliban were dancing to Islamabad’s tune, they would have answered Pakistan’s call to help deal with the TTP insurgency. Instead, the Taliban has sheltered the TTP allowing them to conduct attacks against Pakistan, despite repeated Pakistani protests and airstrikes against TTP targets in Afghanistan.

But in the fighting since the end of February, Pakistan has escalated from bombing the “guests”“ – TTP targets in Afghanistan – to bombing the "hosts” – the Afghan Taliban. So Afghanistan’s Taliban government has escalated by openly sending Afghan fighters across the border.

The war in the Persian Gulf rapidly overshadowed the Taliban’s war with Pakistan. But that does not diminish the potential for serious consequences from the latest twist in Afghanistan’s conflict. By openly allying themselves with a movement which seeks the overthrow of Pakistan’s government, the Taliban pose a threat to the stability of the second most populous Muslim majority state – a country with a nuclear arsenal.

And this, in turn, increases pressure on the Pakistan army to expand its campaign against the Taliban, contemplating regime change if the regime cannot be reformed. But regime change would require an alternative to the Taliban, which does not currently exist. This suggests that achieving Pakistan’s objectives will require more ambition than yet seen in the air campaign.

Michael Semple has received European and UK government funding for his research on the Taliban