The mountainous terrain that divides Pakistan and Afghanistan has always been referred to as one of the most unstable geopolitical fault lines of the world. Decades have passed, and it has been the scene of proxy wars, insurgencies, and great power competition. This last weekend, the border was made to be violent. Following a series of suicide attacks and militant attacks within its own borders, the Pakistani military had gone on cross-border airstrikes into Afghanistan, the first of its kind.
The Pakistani government claimed that the attacks were intel-based, anti-terrorist, raids targeting hideouts of the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). In their turn, the Taliban government of Afghanistan denounced the attacks, which, according to them, constituted a total outrage to sovereignty and threatened to cause a severe retaliation.
It is not just another local border skirmish. It is a dramatic failure of a long-standing Pakistani approach to the region and it points at the severe problems in contemporary border security, counter -insurgency and the safety of nuclear armed South Asia. In order to be able to understand the seriousness of the airstrikes, we have to review the past historical grievances, the changing militant scene and the strategic error made that led these neighbors to the edge of war.
The Catalyst: The Revitalization of the TTP.
In order to comprehend the strong response of Pakistan, we should refer to the resurgence of the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), also known as the Pakistani Taliban. Although the TTP shares an ideology with the Afghan Taliban, it is another umbrella of militant organizations whose mission is to topple the Pakistani state and establish a fundamentalist government in Islamabad.
Over the years the Pakistani military has been conducting ruthless counter-insurgency operations, most notably of operation Zarb-e-Azb in 2014, to force the TTP out of the former Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). These operations were able to push the TTP leadership across the porous border to eastern Afghanistan. All this however took a different turn in August 2021 when Kabul was recaptured by the Afghan Taliban.
The TTP restructured itself emboldened by the victory of the Taliban and alleged to be roaming freely within Afghanistan. During the past two years, militant violence has increased drastically in Pakistan. The TTP has changed its rural ambush attacks to advanced suicide attacks on police stations, military convoys and civilian quarters in cities such as Peshawar and Quetta.
To the military leadership of Pakistan, the balance was lost. Being under the pressure of domestic factors and losing its soldiers in large numbers, Islamabad made a decision that the border defense had become insufficient. Crossing the border to make airstrikes was a frantic effort to strike the danger at its alleged root.
The Reaction of anatomy of the Strikes and Kabul.
Escalation of airstrikes was on high level during the weekend. Pakistani fighter jets and precision weapons were used to strike suspected militant compounds on both Khost and Paktika provinces in Afghanistan. The message of Islamabad made the operation look like a surgical counter-terrorism operation against a non-state actor, and not an operation against the Afghan state.
In international law, sovereignty is not a compromise. Kabul retaliated fast and bitterly declaring the strikes savage aggression. Kabul also alleged that the bombings were causing civilian deaths, women and children.
As a counter, the Afghan border security forces opened on Pakistani bases with heavy artillery and mortar. This resulted in the blockage of major trade routes, including the Torkham crossing, and the choking of the economic lifelines of the two sides of the Pashtun communities. More to the point, the firm response of Kabul proved any further line of illusion that Afghan Taliban might become a good proxy of Pakistan.
The Durand Line: A Cartography of Colonialism.
The history of the Durand Line can be regarded as a full picture behind the ongoing conflict. The 2,640-kilometer boundary was created in 1893 by a British diplomat known as Sir Mortimer Durand, and was a buffer between the British Indian Empire and the emirate of Afghanistan.
The Durand Line was an unsuitable one like most of the colonial borders. It dismembered traditional houses of Pashtun and Baloch tribes dividing families, trade routes, and ancestral lands. None of the Afghan governments, be it monarchy or Soviet-controlled republic to U.S-backed democratic government or Taliban, ever recognized it as a valid international border.
This outstanding claim is a nightmare to the management. The landscape is very unfriendly with steep mountains and deep valleys that can hardly be patrolled. Historic routes have seen the militants, smugglers and the local tribes by-pass official checkpoints over the decades.
Pakistan has used billions of money to fence the Durand Line, deploy sensors, drones and concrete walls. However, the recent period of unprecedented TTP penetration demonstrates that even the infrastructure is not enough to safeguard a border in situations when the local geography and social processes are against its existence.
The Depth of Strategy Failure.
In terms of strategic studies this is a disaster of Pakistani long term doctrine of Strategic Depth. For several decades, some of the members of the security establishment of Pakistan considered Afghanistan as a backyard a territorial buffer in an event of war with its main enemy India.
To ensure this depth, Pakistan traditionally developed a relationship with Afghanistan militant groups, and eventually assisted the Taliban in the 1990s and secretly over the 20-year U.S./NATO occupation. The assumption made was that a Taliban controlled Kabul would never forget the debt and would always remain in line with the interests of Pakistan and be in an ideal location to remove anti-Pakistan elements such as the TTP.
This has turned out to be the contrary of reality. The Afghan Taliban are aggressive nationalists who are very aggressive in protecting their independence that they have achieved. They have never been ready to attack TTP as they see them as comrades in their ideologies who struggled with them against foreign powers. Pakistan would require the Afghan Taliban to attack its allies the TTP by insisting that Kabul should remove them which they will never achieve. The proxy policy of Pakistan has succeeded in establishing a safe haven of their deadliest internal adversary.
Security at the Border and Wider Regional Impact.
The fluctuation of the border security between Pakistan and Afghanistan sends fearful waves across the greater South Asian security systems. When the state actors use cross-border military attacks on non-state actors that a neighboring government hosts, the possibility of a conventional war being wrongfully calculated increases exponentially.
To the rest of the world, the instability is very alarming. The area is a powder keg already, and the weaponisation of the border region interferes with regional interconnectedness initiatives, such as the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). Projected to invest a lot in the infrastructure of Pakistan, Beijing considers the revival of the TTP and the border instability as a direct menace to the security of its people and its Belt and Road Project.
Moreover, the immediate conflict does not directly concern Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear and high yield Explosives (CBRNe) but still it is impossible to ignore the larger picture. Pakistan is a nuclear equipped nation with grave economic vulnerability, sharp political polarization, and a metamorphic internal insurrection. Any widening that causes the Pakistani military to stretch and destabilizing the state apparatus increases the systemic risk of the regional security. The worst nightmare to international strategic planners is not a war between two neighbors, but internal collapse of order in a state with weapons of mass destruction.
Conclusion: A Paradigm Shift was in Order.
The Durand Line airstrikes on the weekend are the beginning of a blacker chapter in the complicated relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan. The kinetic operations might have offered a transitory tactical impediment to TTP networks, however, they have done nothing to address the strategic putrefaction beneath.
Pakistan is getting a bitter lesson on the extent of military force. Airstrikes cannot strike down an insurgency that is well-established and has taken safe haven in an adjacent state and fencing cannot protect a border that has long been subject to dispute and is immanently hard to defend. The Afghan Taliban, in their turn, are finding out that harboring international militant organizations comes with the kinetic vengeance and diplomatic isolation that they purport to shun.
The solution to this crisis is that it needs a paradigm shift. Unilateral use of military force and colonialism-era demarcations are not enough to secure the borders of this region. It demands a negotiated political resolution eventually, full economic integration and one which provides the populations of the borderlands alternative ways out of militancy and a mutual acknowledgement of state sovereignty. Until such faraway reality is obtained, the Durand Line will be a bleeding wound, and the vicious circle of violence will keep on robbing the very heart of Asia.
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