Pakistan, After Rooting for Afghanistan’s Taliban, Faces a Blowback

 By Saeed Shah

Islamabad wants a negotiated agreement, fears that outright Taliban takeover would galvanize Pakistani jihadists.

For two decades, a large part of the Pakistani security establishment rooted for the Taliban in the Afghan war. Now that the Taliban are taking over vast tracts of the country and seem to be on the cusp of seizing power, panic is spreading through Pakistan’s halls of power.

Ever since the 2001 U.S. invasion ousted the Pakistani-backed Taliban regime in Kabul, Pakistan’s powerful military has unofficially provided carefully calibrated support to the group, allowing Afghan insurgents to operate from its territory. Pakistan wanted to bolster the Taliban as a counter to the influence of its enemy—India—in Afghanistan and to have a potent proxy there after a U.S. departure.

Formally an American ally since 2001, Pakistan’s government denies backing the Taliban, but says it has some limited influence over the group.

With the Taliban sweeping through a third of Afghanistan’s districts following the U.S. military withdrawal and surrounding the country’s major cities, Pakistani authorities have to grapple with the unintended consequences of their policies. A total takeover by the Taliban or a new civil war in Afghanistan would backfire against Islamabad’s national interests, senior Pakistani officials say.

“We are so closely intertwined with Afghanistan, ethnically, religiously, tribally, that whenever there is civil war, Pakistan gets sucked in automatically,” said Pakistan’s former defense minister, retired Lt. Gen. Naeem Lodhi. “Civil war [in Afghanistan] is the last thing that Pakistan would like to happen.”

The fear in Pakistan is of a flood of refugees across the porous border that would add to the 1.4 million registered Afghan refugees already living in the country. Worse, a triumphant Afghan Taliban would galvanize Pakistan’s own Islamist militants whose power has waned as a result of successive military operations in the country’s tribal border areas.

“Our jihadis will be emboldened. They will say that ‘if America can be beaten, what is the Pakistan army to stand in our way?’” said a senior Pakistani official. “War does not suit us at all. We’ve seen it for 40 years.”

Islamabad says it no longer wants to be the main backer of a pariah regime, as it was when the Taliban controlled Kabul from 1996 to 2001. Instead, Pakistan is aiming for a negotiated peace settlement that would see the Taliban handed a major share of political power in Kabul, along with international legitimacy and funding. Peace talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government and politicians in Doha, Qatar, have largely stalled, with Afghan officials saying the insurgency seeks to use negotiations to legitimize its military conquests.

“Pakistan is a bit stuck,” said Laurel Miller, a former acting U.S. special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan who now heads the Asia program at the International Crisis Group.

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