![]() He’s even disingenuously argued that the Taliban are hiding among Afghan refugees in Pakistan. Khan has said that the Taliban’s battlefield victories render moot any leverage Pakistan could have over it. withdrawal before peace talks has set the stage for the current situation. Prime Minister Imran Khan recently said that Pakistan doesn’t speak for the Taliban, nor is it responsible for it. The only time top officials have admitted to these recently is behind closed doors, when the army chief and the head of the military intelligence agency Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) called the Afghan Taliban and the TTP “two faces of the same coin.”Īmid the increased violence in Afghanistan, with fingers being pointed at Pakistan’s relationship with Taliban, Pakistan has been trying to distance itself from the group. You’ll see Pakistanis being supportive of the Afghan Taliban and against the TTP, because the Pakistani state has obfuscated the connections between the two groups. This tension is not apparent to Pakistan’s public. There’s some speculation that Pakistan could work out a deal with the Afghan Taliban to constrain the TTP, but even if it comes to pass, there is a real question of how effective it would be. The Afghan Taliban’s potential rise in Afghanistan will almost certainly embolden the TTP, and threatens to engulf Pakistan in the kind of violence it experienced between 20. Pakistan routed the TTP in military operations starting in 2014, but many of them sought refuge across the border in Afghanistan, and have been regrouping since last year. This tension is clearly making Pakistan nervous. What Pakistan doesn’t discuss openly is this central tension: Pakistan has long treated the Afghan Taliban as friends - preferring them to Pashtun nationalists (which it viewed as threatening, fearing that they would mobilize Pashtuns on the Pakistani side of the border as well) and to the current Afghan government (which it sees as friendly with India) - while the Afghan Taliban’s friend and ideological twin, the TTP, has posed an existential threat to Pakistan and killed tens of thousands of Pakistanis. As part of the Extended “Troika” on Peaceful Settlement in Afghanistan - which also includes the U.S., China, and Russia - Pakistan has signed a statement saying a Taliban emirate would be unacceptable to it. The implication, presumably, is that the road to a comprehensive Taliban military victory would be violent, setting up many of the same concerns identified above. Pakistan is less clear about what a Taliban military victory would mean for it, but discusses it in the same vein as the possibility of civil war in Afghanistan. Third, this would increase the amount of refugee flows to Pakistan (which has hosted millions of Afghan refugees since the 1990s, including 3 million at present), which it can’t afford. Second, Pakistan fears that this would set up space for the resurgence of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), a group responsible for killing tens of thousands of Pakistani civilians and attacking the country’s army, security forces, and politicians. But Pakistan argues that a protracted civil war in Afghanistan would be disastrous for it, on three dimensions: First, insecurity from Afghanistan would spill over into Pakistan. Many are skeptical of this given Pakistan’s support of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in the 1990s, and the sanctuary the group later found in Pakistan. ![]() Pakistan’s official stance is that it would prefer a peaceful outcome in Afghanistan, some sort of a power-sharing arrangement reached after an intra-Afghan peace deal. And the situation in Afghanistan may define the future of the relationship as well. The result is a relationship with the Biden administration that has been defined by Pakistan’s western neighbor, as has been the case for U.S.-Pakistan relations for much of the last 40 years. Pakistan responds that it has exhausted its leverage over the Taliban. has made it clear that it expects Pakistan to “do more” on Afghanistan in terms of pushing the Taliban toward a peace agreement with the Afghan government. ![]() Pakistan has indicated repeatedly that it wants the relationship to be defined more broadly than with regard to Afghanistan - especially based on “geo-economics,” its favored current catch-all for trade, investment, and connectivity - and has insisted that it doesn’t want failures in Afghanistan to be blamed on Pakistan. withdrawal from Afghanistan and increasing violence on the ground there, the U.S.-Pakistan relationship stands in uneasy limbo. Six months into the Biden administration, amid the U.S. ![]()
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