The latest round of fighting between Afghanistan and Pakistan did not begin with one airstrike or one angry speech on social media. When Pakistan’s defence minister publicly spoke of an “open war” with Kabul after Pakistani jets bombed targets in Kabul and Kandahar, it sounded like a sudden eruption. In reality, it is another flare-up in a conflict whose roots go back to British imperial map-making in the 19th century, the politics of Pashtun identity, and decades of proxy wars that both states have used and then lost control over.
Afghanistan was one of the first states in the region to be shaped as a modern territorial buffer. Its present borders were not drawn mainly by Afghans but by British and Russian officials during the Great Game. They wanted a cushion between Tsarist Russia and British India, not a stable homeland for the peoples who actually lived there. Through a series of treaties, they carved out a landlocked Afghanistan, cut many Pashtun communities in half, and left the new state dependent on its neighbours for trade and access to the sea. The Durand Line of 1893, agreed between Sir Mortimer Durand and Amir Abdur Rahman, sliced right through Pashtun tribal lands. For the British, it was a frontier. For many Afghans, it was a temporary administrative line that was never meant to become a permanent international border.
Things became even more complicated in 1947. When Pakistan was created, Afghanistan was the only country to vote against its admission to the United Nations. Kabul refused to formally recognise the Durand Line and began to talk about “Pashtunistan” – an imagined homeland for Pashtuns on both sides of the frontier. For Pakistan, trying to consolidate its western border while already locked in rivalry with India, this looked like an existential threat. Relations between Kabul and Islamabad were born with a built-in trust deficit.
Cold War politics added another poisonous layer. During the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Pakistan became the main staging ground for mujahideen groups backed by the United States and Saudi Arabia. For the Pakistani security establishment, supporting Afghan fighters and later the Taliban was part of a bigger strategy: to gain “strategic depth” against India by having a friendly or dependent regime in Kabul. That logic survived into the 1990s when the first Taliban government came to power with heavy Pakistani support. It was a short-term success that turned into long-term blowback.
The same militant networks that Pakistan had helped nurture across the Durand Line did not stay in neat boxes. Out of the jihad infrastructure and the radicalisation in the tribal belt came the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). By the late 2000s the TTP was waging war on the Pakistani state itself, bombing schools, mosques, army bases, markets and police stations. Today, different estimates suggest that TTP and allied groups can field tens of thousands of fighters spread across the border areas. From Islamabad’s perspective, the biggest security threat now comes not from India alone but from these groups sheltering in or moving through Afghan territory.
The return of the Afghan Taliban to power in Kabul in 2021 changed the balance again. Pakistan’s generals initially hoped that a friendly Taliban government would help control the TTP. Instead, many Pakistani Taliban leaders relocated across the border and gained new space. A brief ceasefire between the TTP and Pakistan collapsed, and attacks inside Pakistan rose. Afghan Taliban officials publicly promised not to let anyone use their soil against other countries, but on the ground, TTP cadres kept posting videos from Afghan districts and claiming responsibility for attacks in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan. Pakistan felt betrayed by a movement it had once supported.
From 2022 onwards, Pakistani forces carried out airstrikes inside Afghan territory several times, targeting what they said were TTP bases. Afghan authorities accused them of killing civilians and violating sovereignty. There were cross-border raids, artillery duels and temporary closures of key crossings like Torkham and Spin Boldak. By late 2025 and early 2026, the clashes had become more intense.
On paper there is no doubt that Pakistan holds much greater conventional military power. It has a large standing army, tanks, fighter jets, drones and nuclear weapons. Afghanistan under the Taliban has a much smaller force, mostly light infantry and limited air capability, with no navy and no nuclear deterrent. Pakistan can also hurt Afghanistan in quieter but equally painful ways: closing borders, restricting trade, cutting off banking channels, or deporting Afghan refugees. As a landlocked country that depends heavily on its neighbours for transit and on aid for its fragile economy, Afghanistan is extremely vulnerable to such pressure.
But power is not just about numbers and hardware. The Taliban also have levers that can deeply hurt Pakistan. Allowing TTP and other groups to use Afghan soil as safe havens means that they can continue to bleed the Pakistani state with relatively low cost. Even if Kabul does not formally endorse their operations, a blind eye is often enough. Guerrilla attacks on remote Pakistani outposts have a disproportionate psychological impact. For an army that prides itself on controlling the country, the image of Afghanistan-linked militants raising their flag on Pakistani soil is a humiliation.
Every Pakistani bomb that lands on Afghan soil may weaken Kabul militarily but it also deepens the story that Islamabad is an enemy of Pashtuns, not just of one regime.
The fighting therefore moves in circles. Pakistan hits suspected TTP or Taliban positions; Afghan leaders publicly condemn the strikes and quietly tolerate or encourage retaliatory attacks across the border; Pakistani security forces respond with more operations; and ordinary people are displaced or killed on both sides. Each round leaves more bitterness, shrinks the space for dialogue, and strengthens hardliners who argue that “the other side only understands force.”
This conflict is not sealed off from the rest of the region. India quietly watches Pakistan’s western border heat up while its own Line of Control with Pakistan stays relatively quieter. For New Delhi, a Pakistan stuck in a two-front security dilemma is not necessarily bad news. China, on the other hand, worries that instability in Pakistan and Afghanistan will threaten its Belt and Road investments, especially the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor and potential mining deals in Afghanistan. It wants Pakistan strong enough to protect Chinese workers and Afghan Taliban leaders serious enough to curb any group that might fuel militancy in neighbouring Xinjiang. Russia and the United States, despite being rivals, also do not want another full-scale regional war that can create fresh space for transnational jihadist networks.
A full traditional war, with large armies crossing the Durand Line, is still unlikely. Pakistan knows that invading Afghanistan would be a nightmare: the terrain is unforgiving, the Taliban are experienced guerrilla fighters, and any occupation would trigger wider regional reactions. The Taliban also know they cannot defeat Pakistan’s army or survive sustained bombing of their main cities and ministries without massive damage. What is much more probable is a continuing pattern of “low intensity, high impact” conflict.
At the heart of all this lies a set of unresolved questions. Will Afghanistan ever formally recognise the Durand Line, or will it continue to treat it as an imposed colonial border? Can Pakistan accept that its project of using Islamist groups as foreign policy tools has produced enemies it can no longer control? Will both sides find a way to speak honestly about Pashtun grievances on both sides of the line without turning them into weapons? Without movement on these basic issues, every new government in Kabul or Islamabad will inherit the same script.
Asif Bin Ali is an Atlanta-based geopolitical analyst and a doctoral fellow at Georgia State University. He can be reached at [email protected].
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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