The 12 troops who were martyred in two events in Balochistan this week—the military’s biggest single-day death toll from terrorist strikes this year—are most likely to blame for the shift in tone.
With two communications from the top echelons of the state arriving on consecutive days, Pakistan’s anger with the Afghan Taliban’s accommodative stance to militant organizations (barring IS-K) on its soil has been communicated more harshly than normal.
An official statement criticizing the “safe havens and liberty of action available to TTP in Afghanistan” was released by the military’s media wing on Friday. Following that, yesterday, Defense Minister Khawaja Asif lambasted the Taliban regime for “neglecting its duties as a neighboring and fraternal country” and for disobeying the counterterrorism pledges it had made in the Doha peace accord.
He said, “This situation cannot go on any longer.” Although Mr. Asif refrained from announcing that Pakistan will engage in hot pursuit of terrorists across the border into Afghanistan, as he threatened a few months ago, Pakistan’s tolerance with Kabul is obviously running out.
Given that the security establishment has thus far refrained from making a direct remark on the situation, the ISPR statement regarding the Afghan Taliban’s passivity with regard to counterterrorism is very relevant. The state of affairs has gotten worse for a good reason.
Pakistan’s leadership was upbeat in the knowledge that a “friendly” regime had taken power in the neighboring country when the Taliban marched into Kabul in August 2021. Events that followed exposed this assumption’s flaw. A recent UN report that claims 20 terrorist groups have “freedom of movement under the Taliban’s protection” reflects the reality of the situation.
The TTP is “part of the emirate” and the regime’s links to them are “the closest” of all of them. The Strategic depth’ theory seems to have completely fallen apart.
What else can Pakistan do in this situation besides express its disapproval of an Afghan government that refuses to be labelled a global pariah due to its abuses of human rights? While bilateral efforts must continue, a regional strategy has a better chance of succeeding.
The first big foreign investment under the Taliban was a multimillion dollar agreement to collect oil from the Amu Darya basin made in January by a Chinese company. Pragmatists would undoubtedly be interested in the potential of continuing such investments in cash-strapped Afghanistan or the risk of losing them.
Such initiatives have already started; China, Pakistan, and Iran had their first trilateral conference on the regional security situation last month in Beijing. It is worth noting that the Taliban’s defenses have a weakness. There is a growing rift within its leadership between the ideologues in Kandahar and the “pragmatists” in Kabul, as the aforementioned UN study elaborated on in some detail.