In an unprecedented, however unsurprising, coverage shift, Pakistan has determined to take a tricky line on the Taliban’s de facto regime. It won’t be supporting its case on the worldwide degree or prolong some other help. This was determined following the Taliban’s persistent refusal to rein in Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP)’s rising assaults in Pakistan from its sanctuaries in Afghanistan.
On October 8, Pakistan’s Caretaker Prime Minister Anwar-ul-Haq Kakar accused the Taliban of sheltering and facilitating the TTP in a strongly worded presser. Kakar maintained that “because the Taliban’s return to energy, “terrorism in Pakistan has surged by 60 p.c and suicide assaults by 500 p.c, killing over 2,300 folks.” Moreover, he claimed that of the 24 suicide bombings witnessed in Pakistan in 2023, 15 had been carried out by Afghans.
The announcement has come on the heels of Pakistan’s resolution to expel round 1.7 million “unlawful Afghan refugees” in October. Since then, roughly 375,000 Afghans have left Pakistan amid chaos and harsh Himalayan winters to an unsure future. Even these possessing authorized paperwork, such because the Proof of Registration playing cards, are being deported.
A lot of the Afghans expelled from Pakistan are those that left Kabul to flee the Taliban’s harsh rule. Regardless of being victims of conflicts, proxy wars, and terrorism, the hapless Afghan refugees discover themselves within the crosshairs of the rising Taliban-Pakistan tensions. They’ve been slapped with unsubstantiated accusations of facilitating terrorism, the unlawful drug commerce, and smuggling in Pakistan.
It bears mentioning that the Taliban have decried Islamabad’s compelled deportation coverage as unjust and inhumane. Rejecting Pakistani allegations of supporting TTP, Taliban spokesperson Zabiullah Mujahid maintained that Kabul “is just not accountable for sustaining peace in Pakistan and (Islamabad) ought to deal with its home safety issues as a substitute of blaming Afghanistan.”
If Pakistan’s Afghan coverage, based mostly on the hope of securing the Taliban’s help towards TTP for serving to it return to energy in Afghanistan, was a strategic blunder, the brand new coverage consumed in anger is a fair greater catastrophe. As hope is just not a method, anger can’t be a coverage.
On one hand, the unilateral resolution to eject the Afghan refugees will erode the little diplomatic goodwill left for Pakistan in Kabul. On the opposite, it is going to additional alienate the already hostile anti-Pakistan public opinion in Afghanistan. Extra importantly, it’s counterproductive, as a substitute of curbing TTP’s assaults, it is going to add to the prevailing ranges of violence in Pakistan. A brand new technology of Afghans will hate Pakistan for pushing their nation beneath the Taliban’s harsh rule after which throwing them beneath the bus for its strategic myopia of anticipating the Taliban’s cooperation towards TTP.
Following the Taliban’s return to energy and the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, Pakistan’s then Prime Minister Imran Khan wrote on X, previously Twitter, that “Afghans have damaged the chain of slavery.” Likewise, whereas responding to a media question, in Serena Resort, Pakistan’s former spy chief Lt.-Gen. (Retired) Faiz Hameed, who flew to Kabul just a few days after the Taliban’s takeover, remarked, “Don’t fear, all the pieces might be okay.”
Nonetheless, greater than two years later, the preliminary euphoria and jubilation have evaporated as violence surges throughout Pakistan. The near-daily killings of Pakistani safety personnel within the Afghanistan-Pakistan border areas have resulted in unprecedented strain on the highest army management to do one thing.
The Taliban’s lack of cooperation, Pakistan’s home political turmoil and the slow-performing financial system have left the Pakistani institution between a rock and a tough place. It doesn’t have the political and monetary bandwidth to launch a large-scale army operation within the nation. On the similar time, pushing the warfare inside Afghanistan, towards TTP’s sanctuaries, might be seen as an assault on the Afghan sovereignty by the Taliban regime. Therefore, to generate the impression that Pakistan is doing one thing to enhance the deteriorating safety state of affairs, the anger has been taken out on the Afghan refugees to extend political and financial strain on the Taliban to halt help to the TTP.
Paradoxically, Pakistan supported the Taliban by offering them sanctuaries and help after the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan in October 2001. The goal was three-fold: i) have a pleasant regime in Kabul, ii) curtail Indian affect in Afghanistan, and iii) rein in anti-Pakistan militant and rebel networks in Afghanistan.
In its oversimplistic considering, Pakistan not solely undermined the Taliban’s company of appearing independently, however their deep-seated ideological, ethnic, historic, and geographical linkages with TTP as effectively. Quickly after the Taliban returned to energy, the precise reverse of what Pakistan anticipated occurred.
TTP and the Baloch insurgents’ assaults in Pakistan’s northwestern and southwestern peripheries surged. The Taliban’s takeover had a rejuvenating impression on TTP. Hundreds of jihadists freed from the Bagram and Pul-e-Charkhi prisons and greater than 40 jihadist factions which have joined TTP since July 2020 swelled its ranks. Presently, the group boosts of 4,000-6,000 fighters in its ranks. A number of of Pakistan’s serving and retired diplomats and safety officers had been beneath the impression that if push got here to shove, the Taliban would select Pakistan over TTP given the previous’s geographical, political and financial leverages on Afghanistan. Nonetheless, such unfounded assumptions have backfired.
For 2 years, the Taliban regime didn’t dismiss Pakistan’s safety calls for and to allay its worry it brokered two short-lived ceasefire agreements with TTP in November 2021 and June-September 2022, respectively. Nonetheless, the peace offers proved to be counterproductive as they allowed TTP extra time and area to reconsolidate its community. The myopic coverage of permitting some TTP parts to secretly return to their native areas on circumstances of dwelling peacefully proved to a deadly error.
In subsequent months, the repatriated TTP parts proved instrumental in resurrecting TTP’s footprint inside Pakistan. As quickly as these militants trickled again into completely different elements of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, the native populations got here out to protest, warning the state towards such a misadventure. Later, in December 2022, the Nationwide Counter Terrorism Authority, Pakistan’s central counterterrorism company, knowledgeable the Senate that peace talks emboldened TTP, and the group used the negotiations to swell its ranks.
Had Pakistan’s strategic thinkers learnt any classes from historical past, they need to have recognized that the Taliban’s founder Mullah Muhammad Omar defied the U.S. strain and sacrificed his authorities as a substitute of giving up al-Qaida chief and mastermind of the September 2001 assaults, Osama bin Laden.
TTP is the Taliban’s ideological extension in Pakistan and seeks to create a mirror picture of its self-styled Islamic Emirate within the nation. Moreover, TTP’s strongholds within the ex-FATA (Federally Administered Tribal Areas) area, now merged with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, present the Taliban regime a buffer towards Pakistan. Furthermore, TTP is the Taliban’s partner-in-crime to strengthen the de-facto regime’s irredentist claims that Pakistan’s Pashtun majority areas as much as Attock district belong to Afghanistan.
The Taliban think about the Durand Line a British colonial imposition, which has divided the Pashtun group dwelling on each side of the border. TTP pledges its oath of allegiance to the Taliban’s supreme chief Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada. At this juncture, the Taliban are extraordinarily cautious about their organizational coherence and ideological legitimacy. Therefore, any transfer on the Taliban’s half to expel TTP from Afghanistan would expose and widen the motion’s inner cracks between ideological hardliners and political pragmatists. Moreover, any motion towards TTP would set off a mass exodus of its fighter to the Islamic State of Khorasan, the Taliban’s ideological arch-foe. Evidently, Pakistan did not anticipate the long-term penalties of the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan for its inner safety in addition to the depth and breadth of the Taliban-TTP ties.
For 20 years, Pakistan supported the Taliban towards the worldwide group’s will and to the detriment of its status and inner safety. Although many overseas governments urged Pakistan to indiscriminately struggle non secular extremists, the nation maintained an imaginary bifurcation of the nice and the dangerous Taliban. In actual fact, Islamabad inspired the worldwide group to interact with the Taliban to finish the warfare in Afghanistan via a politically negotiated settlement. Twenty years later, when the worldwide group is discovering methods to have interaction with the Taliban, Pakistan has determined to scuttle the ties and go on one other tangent.
Pakistan’s Particular Envoy for Afghanistan Asif Durrani’s current assertion “peace in Afghanistan has turn into a nightmare for Pakistan” sums up the failure of two-decades of funding within the Taliban. Insurance policies are made on rationality and logic, not on assumptions or anger. As Islamabad is rethinking its ties with the Taliban, it’s excessive time it abandons the usage of faith to additional its regional pursuits and creates a holistic counterterrorism framework that targets the extremist teams as a substitute of venting out its frustration on hapless Afghan refugees.
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