Mistrust, mayhem and militants: Stakes are high as trouble brews on Afghan-Pakistan border

Three years into the Taliban rule in Afghanistan, and neighbour Pakistan is looking increasingly ragged around the edges with the former head of Pakistan’s intelligence agency facing court martial, a former prime minister languishing in jail. And while human rights violations mount daily, hundreds of Pakistani soldiers are being killed in cross border attacks by militants living in Afghanistan.

Pakistan’s southwestern Balochistan province is battered by a violent secessionist movement, led by the Balochistan Liberation Army. Among others, the Balochistan Liberation Army, who hide in neighbouring Afghanistan, often in plain sight, have taken aim at China and its Chinese workers, who are in Pakistan implementing Beijing’s One Road One Belt initiative that links China to its neighbours.

Last month, Pakistan’s former intelligence czar, General Faiz Hameed was arrested for “multiple instances of violations of the Pakistan Army Act”, after retiring, according to the official army statement. Those offences are said to be linked to alleged shady real estate deals among other alleged crimes.

Mutual mistrust

Afghans will remember general Hameed, from August 15, 2021, when he was seen in Kabul just hours after the collapse of the United States-backed government of President Ashraf Ghani and the return of the Taliban to power. He was sitting in a luxurious five-star hotel, saying it was all going to be OK.

He couldn’t have been more wrong for either country.

Following the Taliban’s return and believing Pakistan had influence over Afghanistan’s Taliban, China, the US and most others left Pakistan to be the key Taliban interlocutor in the early days of their 2021 takeover, Muhammad Amir Rana, founder and president of the independent Islamabad-based Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies, told me earlier this month.

But this strategy, like most of the Afghan strategies crafted by the international community, has failed.

Even as Pakistan allowed Afghanistan’s Taliban to use its territory to headquarter its leadership and to use its hospitals to treat its wounded throughout most of the 20-year US-led invasion, Afghanistan’s Taliban did not trust Pakistan. Nor did Pakistan trust them.

This mutual mistrust has long been an open secret. And yet the international community foolishly ignored it.

The Taliban didn’t listen to Pakistan when they first ruled in Afghanistan in 1996. They listen even less now, And today they are more belligerent toward Islamabad, with the occasional firefight breaking out between Pakistan and Taliban troops along their lengthy border.

The relationship between the two countries is at its lowest today, and neither country has a strategy to move forward. The international community has neither the time, the knowledge, nor the appetite for the effort it would take to help both nations address the growing violent threats in the region.

But the stakes are high.

Three years on, and Afghanistan’s territory has a myriad of militant groups, setting up bases, holding recruitment drives and threatening its neighbours.

To be very clear, the Taliban don’t necessarily want all these groups on its territory, nor did they invite all of them to Afghanistan. Some, like the Balochistan Liberation Army, which took responsibility for a rash of brutal attacks last month in Pakistan, were given safe haven in Afghanistan during the US-led coalition’s tenure under Afghan President Ashraf Ghani’s rule.

In 2018, at the height of President Ghani’s rule, Aslam Baluch, a Balochistan Liberation Army leader, who took responsibility for an attack on the Chinese Consulate in Pakistan’s southern city of Karachi, was blown up in a suburb on the outskirts of Afghanistan’s southern Kandahar city, some say by a car bomb gone wrong. He and several other Balochistan Liberation Army members died.

They had been operating against Pakistan for years out of Kandahar, just as the Taliban operated for years in Pakistan against the Afghan National Forces and the US-backed government.

The reality of this region is that Afghanistan has been used for decades as a repository for militants of varying origins. First militants were used in the 1980s to help the US and its allies fight the former Soviet Union in Afghanistan at the height of the Cold War, but also they have been used by Pakistan to fight India, and by India to fight Pakistan and by Afghan groups to fight other Afghan groups.

Caught smack in the middle are the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan. In Pakistan the worst-affected live in its border regions with Afghanistan. Violence is commonplace and both economies are dreadful.

The complexity of the problem is evident from just a quick look at the many militant groups in Afghanistan – and there are many.

They include the Islamic State of Khorasan Province, the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, and Al Qaeda in the Subcontinent, but there are many more, including the Balochistan Liberation Army, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, the Chinese Uighurs of the East Turkestan independence movement and Jamaat Ansarullah.

As well, there is the Islamic Jihad Group, the Khatiba Imam al Bukhari group, Jaysh al-Fursan and Jamaat-ul-Ahrar. These many groups, among still others, were reported last month by the United Nations Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring team. This report is periodically released and is in fact a compilation of information gathered and supplied by UN member states. The report does not purport to verify the information provided.

The UN report says the TTP, or Pakistani Taliban, is the largest militant group in Afghanistan, and It has been deadly for Pakistan since the Taliban’s return in 2021.

In the three years between August 2021 and August this year, militant assaults in Pakistan have killed nearly 1,000 Pakistani security officials, including army personnel, and injured more than 1,100, according to data collected by the independent Islamabad based Pakistan Institute of Peace Studies.

A good first step

The Institute’s founder and president Rana tells me that the Taliban are taking a page out of Pakistan’s playbook, turning a blind eye to the Pakistani Taliban, and using them when they need them. Pakistan is struggling and until now unable to come up with a strategy to halt the violence.

The question of the day has to be how to move forward?

A good first step would be acknowledging and understanding the past.

The past clearly shows no one is without blame and every player has used militants as a means to an end. In this complex region it seems imperative that global powers also accept their share of responsibility.

After all, it was the US Agency for International Development that spent $50 million in the early 1980s to teach Afghan refugees in Pakistan English using Islamic fervour against the former Soviet Union as its template. The English was taught as such: “I" is for infidel (meaning communists), “K” is for Kalashnikov to kill the infidel (communist) and “J” is for jihad in which the Kalashnikov is used to fight the communists.

The past must show that no country should believe that they have a high ground from which they cannot descend.

After decades of war there are also no quick fixes and no one country or ideology has the answer.

But the current Afghan policy being followed by the US and Europe simply mimics the past failed policy of isolation and long-distance talks. It did not work then and there is no evidence it is working now, in fact just the contrary. Evidence would indicate it is making things worse.

When the Taliban last ruled, the world’s answer was to isolate them. It allowed al Qaeda and others room to grow and plot. The resultant “9/11” attacks against the United States showed the folly of the strategy of isolation and also put an end to it.

Today, like in 1996-2001, threats and insults mixed with cajoling and warnings have brought few good results.

Three years in and the most restrictive among the Taliban are the strongest and until now it seems that the more isolated Afghanistan has become, the stronger they have become. That has been good for militants and bad for women as well as the region.

I will say it again: It is time for the diplomats – not military folks – to return to Afghanistan, so the country’s 40 million people feel neither abandoned nor isolated.

For Afghans to find their own solutions they need an engaged international community inside Afghanistan. The more isolated they become the more possible it is for the most regressive among the Taliban – which it must be said is not a monolith – to impose tighter and tighter controls, which is what is currently happening.

It also leaves Afghan territory increasingly accessible to militant groups, who can sometimes seem to Afghans as the only source of help.

Returning diplomats to Afghanistan, and opening embassies does not require recognition of the Taliban. Already 17 embassies are open in Kabul; the United Nations is also there and yet no one has recognised the Taliban.

The international community needs to be in Afghanistan to talk to Afghans in Afghanistan, in the countryside, in the villages, as well as the cities, to understand better what they want, what they need.

They have the answers.

Isolating the Taliban doesn’t hurt the Taliban nearly as much as it does the 40 million Afghans of Afghanistan and the larger region.

Kathy Gannon is author of I is for Infidel, a longtime former correspondent and bureau chief for the Associated Press in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and a member of the Sapan News Advisory Council. This is a Sapan News syndicated feature, first published on Kathy Gannon’s Substack.