The New War in Afghanistan

Editor’s Note: The Pakistan-Afghanistan conflict is escalating, with Pakistani air strikes killing hundreds of Afghan civilians and rhetoric on both sides heating up. My Center for Strategic and International Studies colleague Alexander Palmer explains the dynamics of war on both sides and why the crisis could spin further out of control, with dangerous implications for the United States and the region, as well as Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Daniel Byman

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While the world focuses on the joint U.S.-Israel war against Iran, another conflict is escalating right next door. In the early hours of Feb. 26, Pakistani Defense Minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif posted online that the country was at “open war” with Afghanistan’s Taliban government. The statement accompanied a series of air strikes in Kabul and Kandahar, as well as against targets in Paktia province.

In the weeks since Asif’s statement, Pakistan claims to have struck a variety of military and insurgent targets in Afghanistan, while the Taliban claim that Pakistan has struck mainly civilian infrastructure. Meanwhile, the Taliban have attacked Pakistani border posts and claimed to have conducted incursions deeper into Pakistan, although Islamabad has disputed whether this has occurred. On March 13, the United Nations estimated that more than 75 civilians have been killed, but the bombing of an apparent drug rehabilitation clinic in Kabul during the night of March 16 has probably increased that total many times over. Taliban authorities have claimed that the air strike killed more than 400 people. The Taliban have also threatened retaliation for the attack, risking further escalation in the conflict.

The violence is the most serious escalation between Afghanistan and Pakistan since the Taliban took power in Kabul in August 2021. Americans who do not follow the region closely may find the violence surprising—Pakistan was the Taliban’s patron since the 1990s and provided a haven for the group in the decades after 9/11, when the United States sought to destroy it. Asif’s statement suggests a shift in how Pakistan sees the Taliban, which it has supported for decades to maintain influence in Afghanistan.

From Allies to Adversaries

Pakistan has long seen Afghanistan as critical terrain for its security policy. Pakistan’s interest in Afghanistan is usually described as “strategic depth”—territory into which its forces could withdraw in case of an attack from India. Islamabad also wants a friendly government in Kabul to minimize the threat Pakistan faces from the west and allow it to focus on India. For decades, Pakistan has often pursued its Afghanistan policy through non-state proxies. An important aspect of this policy has been to direct militant groups west toward Afghanistan to prevent them moving east into Punjab.

The Taliban have been Pakistan’s most effective proxy in Afghanistan since Islamabad helped facilitate the group’s rise in the 1990s. During the first period of Taliban rule, Pakistan was one of only three countries to recognize the Taliban regime. After the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan, Pakistan continued to support the Taliban with funding, training, and safe haven. The group’s reliance on Pakistani territory was so widely known that the Taliban’s two most important leadership organs were known as the Quetta and Miran Shah shuras. The group’s long-standing ties to the Pakistani state are presumably what led multiple Pakistani politicians to publicly laud the Taliban victory in Afghanistan.

Despite decades of support, Pakistan never controlled the Taliban. And since the Taliban have achieved their main goal of expelling foreign forces from Afghanistan, Islamabad has even less influence over the group than when it needed Pakistan to survive. Since 2021, militants based in eastern Afghanistan have increasingly targeted Pakistan in a reversal of pre-2021 dynamics. Violence has surged, and Pakistan has grown increasingly unstable. This instability has been concentrated in the western provinces but also reached Islamabad, where two suicide bombings have occurred in the past six months.

Pakistan is now experiencing the consequences of the Taliban pursuing their interests as seen from Kabul and Kandahar, rather than from Quetta and Miran Shah.

The Other Taliban

Pakistan’s war against Afghanistan is motivated primarily by the Taliban’s support for the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP, also frequently called the Pakistani Taliban). The TTP is an increasingly centralized coalition of Pakistani militant groups united by their desire to create a Taliban-style government in Pakistan to enforce a hardline interpretation of Sharia, although it has also signaled that it would accept local autonomy in negotiations with Pakistan.

The TTP has significantly escalated its insurgency since 2021, increasing the tempo of its attacks and expanding what it considers to be legitimate targets to include commercial interests controlled by the Pakistani military. In recent years, the group has stepped up its attacks against Pakistani security forces, including suicide attacks. In 2023, the group even assassinated a senior Pakistani intelligence official from the same agency that spearheaded Islamabad’s support of the Taliban. Despite frequent Taliban denials, the TTP enjoys at least safe haven in Afghanistan, from which it has launched attacks on Pakistani military positions across an expanding area. The TTP has also benefited from the Taliban’s capture of weapons from the U.S.-backed Afghan government, which may have increased the lethality of its attacks.

Underlying the relationship between the Taliban and TTP is a web of ideological, tribal, and battlefield ties between members of the two groups. Both the Taliban and TTP are committed to a similar ideology. The TTP’s emir, Noor Wali Mehsud, celebrated the Taliban victory in Afghanistan in a statement released two days after the fall of Kabul, praising the Taliban victory as a triumph for the broader jihadist movement and reaffirming the TTP’s allegiance to the Taliban. Both groups are also dominated by Pashtuns, and the TTP has increasingly positioned itself as fighting to end the Islamabad government’s marginalization of Pakistan’s Pashtun minority. This ideological and ethnic bond has been reinforced through cooperation. The TTP participated in the Taliban’s war against U.S. forces in Afghanistan, and the Taliban openly thanked the TTP for its support following the fall of Kabul.

The Taliban’s opposition to Pakistan also helps the group stay in power. Taliban leaders almost certainly believe that the greatest threat to their rule is the breakdown of internal cohesion. Although the Islamic State-Khorasan Province (ISKP) is attempting to wage an insurgency against Taliban authorities, it lacks the strength to meaningfully challenge Taliban rule. The Taliban’s victory in 2021 has also probably cured most foreign governments of any desire to topple the Taliban as the United States did in 2001. Instead, the greater concern for the Taliban is internal. The links between the Taliban and TTP mean that cracking down too hard on the TTP could threaten Taliban cohesion. Some Taliban fighters want to join the TTP’s war against Pakistan, and the Taliban may fear they will defect to the Islamic State if the group restrains the TTP.

In addition to preventing the Taliban’s authority from fracturing, the TTP’s campaign serves other Taliban interests as well. The Taliban have never accepted the legitimacy of the Durand Line, as the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan is known, and have faced criticism from within Afghanistan for being a Pakistani proxy, with some Afghans referring to the group as “Punjabis” rather than Afghans. Opposing Pakistan allows the Taliban to bolster their Afghan nationalist credentials and build unity by fighting against an unpopular adversary.

No Good Options

Islamabad has no appealing options for resolving the threat emanating from Afghanistan. The core problem is that Pakistan’s most important tool for influencing the threat from Afghanistan is the Taliban, but the Taliban are helping drive the insecurity Pakistan hopes to reduce.

Pakistan has repeatedly turned to negotiations to stabilize the situation along the Durand Line. After the fall of Kabul, the Taliban mediated talks between Islamabad and the TTP on several occasions, but the talks failed and violence has continued to increase. It is possible that Pakistan sees its current campaign as a way to increase pressure on both the Taliban and TTP in order to extract concessions at the negotiating table and achieve a more stable outcome. However, attempting to bomb the Taliban into an agreement failed for the United States, and Pakistan has little reason to assume it can do with airpower in weeks what the United States failed to do with both air and ground forces over the course of two decades. Even so, negotiations have led to temporary ceasefires and may remain the most viable pressure valve for Pakistani leaders hoping to manage the problem rather than resolve it.

Pakistan may also come to see the TTP much as Israel saw the armed Palestinians on its borders before the Oct. 7 attacks: as a threat to be managed by periodic operations to keep their capabilities below a certain level. This approach, known in Israel as “mowing the grass,” would involve periodic flare-ups in violence that look much like the conflict playing out today. The goal, however, would not be to bring the Taliban and TTP to the negotiating table but to prevent the TTP from growing strong enough to further destabilize northwest Pakistan and carry out attacks in the country’s major cities. A major problem with this approach, though, is that the Israeli intelligence services, critical in planning and implementing the “mowing the grass” strategy, are much more effective than those of Pakistan. Another is that the “lawn” Israel faced in Gaza, the West Bank, and southern Lebanon was much smaller than Afghanistan, which sprawls over an area roughly the size of Texas characterized by some of the world’s most difficult terrain.

In the past, Pakistan has tried to directly pacify insurgent groups in its western province. In 2014, for example, Pakistan undertook a massive, 32-month operation against the TTP in North Waziristan called Zarb-e-Azb. Although the short-term gains were significant, the offensive clearly did not end the TTP insurgency and may have contributed to the rise of ISKP in Afghanistan. In a smaller-scale version of this strategy, the military undertook a weeklong air-ground offensive in February against separatist insurgents in Balochistan province in response to a wave of coordinated attacks.

Pakistan’s military efforts have not been particularly successful. Even if Islamabad can eject militants from their strongholds in Pakistan, the safe haven they enjoy over the border in Afghanistan could allow them to resurge if Islamabad is unable to build a sustainable security architecture and win over key populations in northwest Pakistan. This dynamic should be familiar for Islamabad. After all, the Taliban’s ability to operate freely in Pakistan allowed the group to rebuild after the U.S. invasion and eventually overthrow the U.S.-backed government in Kabul.

Probably the least appealing option for Pakistan is to bring the fight to Afghanistan on the ground. A large ground offensive in Afghanistan might, in theory, push the Taliban to make greater concessions at the negotiating table or directly eliminate the TTP’s ability to take advantage of its Afghan safe havens by creating a buffer zone. But the manpower required for such a task would be enormous and would face many of the same problems as an offensive in Pakistan, although those problems would be magnified by the greater distances involved as well as the increased hostility such an offensive would engender among Afghans.

What Happens in Afghanistan …

Some Americans may have a sense of schadenfreude watching Pakistan struggle against the Taliban after having backed the group against the United States. However, the United States has both humanitarian and security interests in deescalation. What happens in Afghanistan does not always stay in Afghanistan.

Instability will provide room for the region’s international terrorist groups to rebuild and plot. Afghanistan and Pakistan are home to at least 20 terrorist organizations, some of which have international ambitions. ISKP and al-Qaeda are the two most dangerous of those groups. ISKP has conducted several mass casualty attacks in Afghanistan and beyond in the past few years—most notably the attack on Crocus City Hall in Moscow, which killed about 150 people. It has been under significant military pressure from the Taliban since 2021, and continued conflict with Pakistan could sap Taliban security forces’ strength and draw their attention away from ISKP, allowing the organization to focus on increased plotting rather than survival.

The relationship between regional stability and al-Qaeda’s capabilities is more complex. Unlike ISKP, al-Qaeda is allied with the Taliban and a serious blow against it could negatively affect the group. However, the Taliban have allegedly restricted al-Qaeda activities in the country, and conflict with Pakistan could weaken both their ability and willingness to enforce those restrictions. Al-Qaeda has served as a force multiplier for the Taliban and could bargain for greater latitude if the services it offers the Taliban—especially training—become more useful. Al-Qaeda has also supported TTP operations in Pakistan in the past and could potentially do so again.

Of course, al-Qaeda could also become bogged down in a conflict, diverting resources away from external plotting to supporting the Taliban. In general, however, it is in the U.S. interest that the Taliban never again see al-Qaeda as a strategic asset after decades of trying to turn the relationship into a liability.

The “open war” between Pakistan and its former Taliban allies could mark the end of Islamabad’s decades-long strategy of supporting militant proxies to exert influence over Afghanistan. Islamabad lacks a clear path to eliminating the threat posed by the TTP, now backed by an Afghan government that was once dependent on Pakistan for its survival. While outside powers like the United States may see the conflict as peripheral, the presence of international terrorist organizations, most notably al-Qaeda and ISKP, means that chaos in the region could lead to attacks outside of it.