Afghan security stands guard at a fenced corridor of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border in Spin Boldak, Afghanistan, on Dec. 3, 2023.Sanaullah Seiam/AFP via Getty Images
by Michael Kugelman 21, 2024 Foreign Policy Magazine
On Monday, Pakistan announced that security forces conducted anti-terrorism operations against militants based in Afghanistan that morning. The strikes came on the heels of an attack at a military post in North Waziristan, Pakistan, that killed seven soldiers. It is the latest of many assaults against Pakistani soldiers and police in the last few years, most of them perpetrated by Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which is closely allied with the Afghan Taliban.
Taliban officials, who have long denied that militants stage cross-border attacks from Afghan soil, condemned the Pakistani strikes and rejected the claim that the operations targeted terrorists, accusing Islamabad of killing civilians, including children. (In brief comments about the crisis, the Biden administration also said that the strikes killed civilians.) The Taliban said they retaliated with their own strikes against Pakistani troop locations.
These new developments are not surprising, given recent events. The TTP has ramped up attacks in Pakistan in the last two years, emboldened by the Taliban’s return to power in Kabul. Pakistan has tried many things to stop the attacks: talks with the TTP, domestic counterterrorism operations, a border fence, and pressure tactics including the expulsion of thousands of Afghan refugees. Nothing has worked.
Unlike Pakistan’s brief cross-border crisis with Iran in January, the situation on the border with Afghanistan won’t fade away. The new government in Islamabad, already struggling with severe economic stress and public anger about the controversial Feb. 8 election, must now grapple with a crisis it can’t afford.
Pakistani Army Chief Asim Munir, who has held office since November 2022, has taken a tough public stance against Afghanistan, going as far as saying that “when it comes to the safety and security of every single Pakistani, the whole of Afghanistan can be damned.” As the most powerful figure in Pakistan, Munir would have signed off on the strikes.
Pakistan may hope its cross-border operations will restore a semblance of deterrence, freeing up policy space to focus on other concerns, such as the economy. But it’s not that simple. Although Pakistan has staged counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan in the past, the weekend strikes were unusually large in scale, targeting two provinces, suggesting a level of escalation that will be difficult to dial down. Both Pakistan and Afghanistan confirmed the strikes on Monday, raising the domestic political costs of backing down.
Furthermore, Pakistan’s relations with the Taliban, its longtime ally, have been fraught for months. Since 2021, the group hasn’t needed the wartime support it once received from Pakistan, depriving Islamabad of leverage. Festering disagreements have come to the fore, including over the border itself. The Taliban regime, like previous Afghan ruling entities, doesn’t recognize the border with Pakistan, and Taliban fighters have clashed with Pakistani soldiers putting up border fencing.
As a result, Pakistan can’t assume that dialogue will defuse tensions, as it did during the crisis with Iran. Pakistan also doesn’t have the luxury of a truce with Afghanistan, as it has had with India along their disputed border since 2021. Since seizing power, the Taliban have warned that they will not tolerate any foreign military operation on Afghan soil. The border has been relatively calm in the days since the Pakistani strikes, but the recent escalations were too major to expect that the crisis will end as quickly as it started.
The best-case scenario is that relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan remain highly tense, while the worst-case scenario is that the Taliban support or stage more attacks on Pakistani military targets. There is an irony here. During the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, Taliban militants used Pakistan as a base to stage attacks in Afghanistan. Then, Afghanistan counted on operational support from NATO forces, but now Pakistan must wage its battle alone.