The surge in terrorist attacks in Pakistan after the Taliban were brought back to power in Afghanistan has sparked concerns among authorities in Islamabad. This concern is especially serious due to the prevalence of radicalized militant groups in the country. Some of these groups are officially designated as “terrorists,” while others haven’t yet received that label. Meanwhile, streets and villages nationwide are teeming with religious schools that operate with minimal government oversight. These “Madrasas,” functioning independently, foster military forces for fundamentalist groups and serve as fertile ground for terrorism. Essentially, a portion of Pakistan’s religious schools act as factories producing combat-ready militants for fundamentalist organizations. This substantial presence of ready-for-combat forces within Pakistan has heightened Islamabad’s apprehensions and somewhat paralyzed the Pakistani leadership. Consequently, the Pakistani military has recently launched offensives against terrorists in different parts of the country. For instance, yesterday in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, an attack resulted in the deaths of six soldiers and four militants.
The Pakistani government has long been accused of supporting terrorism and backing terrorist groups. These allegations have frequently been raised by Afghan governments. One such accusation involves the establishment, management, and support of the Afghan Taliban group. Pakistanis have, in some instances, acknowledged and even taken pride in this accusation. The boasting of Darul Uloom Haqqania, a religious school in Pakistan, about the influence of its students over Afghanistan, is one such example. Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), responsible for this year’s highest number of attacks against Pakistan’s military and installations, is an offshoot of the Afghan Taliban. As a result, it effectively holds the status of the Pakistani military’s de facto progeny. This supposed progeny is currently branded a terrorist by Islamabad, leading to launched attacks against it.
A grim and perplexing cycle has been delineated here, where the Pakistani military supports the Afghan Taliban, the Afghan Taliban backs the Pakistani Taliban which is called TTP, and the Pakistani Taliban attacks the Pakistani military. This implies that the TTP’s assaults on Pakistan’s army and police are a direct outcome of Islamabad’s support for the Afghan Taliban.
When the Taliban were brought back to control Kabul and the government of Afghanistan collapsed, Imran Khan Niazi, the then-Prime Minister of Pakistan, welcomed the event by stating that “Afghans have broken the chains of slavery.” Subsequently, the Taliban faced internal power struggles. Pakistan, which deemed itself the victor of the Afghan battlefield and believed it had placed its handpicked proxy forces in power, dispatched a representative to Kabul to divide the positions within the Afghan government among the Taliban and bring an end to the discord. That representative was General Faiz Hameed, who at the time headed the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) of the Pakistani Army. General Faiz Hameed, akin to a tribal chieftain, arrived in Kabul and partitioned the legacy of Afghanistan’s government among the Taliban. Through this maneuver, he challenged Pakistan’s rivals to the ownership of the Taliban group and made it clear that the Taliban were still Pakistan’s Taliban, managed from Rawalpindi.
When Imran Khan was ousted from power, in May 2022, during an interview with Sky News, he rejected Pakistan’s support for the Afghan Taliban and indirectly labeled them as terrorists. When questioned about his remarks regarding the “breaking of the chains of slavery” by Afghans (Taliban), he not only denied his support for the Taliban but also asserted that his words had been misconstrued. He emphasized that Pakistan itself is a victim of terrorism, posing the question of how it could support the Afghan Taliban, especially considering the TTP’s attacks on the Pakistani military. Imran Khan’s insinuation of the Afghan Taliban as terrorists—given his statement celebrating the Afghans breaking the chains of slavery after the Taliban’s control over Kabul—followed by the subsequent TTP attacks against Pakistan, illustrates the contradictory stance of Mr. Khan towards the Taliban. On the one hand, he links the Afghan Taliban and the Pakistani Taliban, and on the other hand, he seems to distance himself from the former while facing the latter’s attacks. This portrays a complex interplay between the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban and Imran Khan’s shifting positions in less than a year.
This time, Khawaja Muhammad Asif, Pakistan’s former Defense Minister, referred to the Taliban as “freedom fighters” in a tweet with a veiled jab at Amrullah Saleh, Afghanistan’s former Vice President. This comes despite Mr. Asif’s earlier tenure as Pakistan’s defense minister, during which the heads of the country’s army and military intelligence agency warned in a closed parliamentary session about the Taliban’s activities and their impact on Pakistan’s security situation. They had then labeled both the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban as “two sides of the same coin.” General Qamar Javed Bajwa, the former army chief, and General Faiz Hameed, the former head of Pakistan’s military intelligence agency, conveyed in that session, attended by members of the parliamentary defense committee and party leaders in the Senate, that trained Taliban fighters were present throughout Pakistan. Subsequently, we witnessed that the predictions of Generals Bajwa and Hameed were accurate, as following the Taliban’s control over Afghanistan, the number of terrorist attacks in Pakistan has significantly escalated.
The interpretation that Generals Bajwa and Hameed have presented about the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban is accurate. Both groups share similar names, similar ideologies, and similar origins, employing unified military tactics. Both consider established governments of their countries as non-Islamic and deem “jihad” against them obligatory. Both engage in terrorist attacks and acts of sabotage, and neither hesitates to launch suicide attacks. Both seek refuge in neighboring countries after evading government assaults and launch attacks on their own countries.
Consequently, as Mohsin Dawar, one of the leaders of the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM), has responded to Khawaja Muhammad Asif’s tweet if the Afghan Taliban are freedom fighters, then the Pakistani Taliban, who are copycats of the original, should also be freedom fighters. However, this group is regarded as a terrorist by a government that, until just a week ago, Khawaja Mohammad Asif was its Minister of Defense.
When we consider Imran Khan’s statements on the day following the victory of the Taliban in Afghanistan, followed by his denial of those statements, and juxtapose them with the warnings of Pakistan’s former army chief and former head of the military intelligence agency, and then add the tweet by the former defense minister of Pakistan, we are faced with contradictory and conflicting positions of Pakistan’s statesmen. These contradictions and inconsistencies could stem from either two-faced politics or political confusion.
There’s no doubt that Pakistan maintains a two-faced policy towards Afghanistan and its current situation. Since the coup of Mohammad Daoud Khan, Pakistan has consistently embraced, nurtured, and dispatched Afghan government opponents. During the times of the PDPA and mujahideen, it welcomed the leaders and armed forces of the seven parties in Peshawar, providing them with political and material support. Years later, when they gained control over Kabul, Pakistan created yet another group and deployed them against the same parties that had been hosted in Peshawar for years. After the fall of the “First Emirate of The Taliban,” it hosted leaders and fighters of this group, as well as being a co-member of the global coalition led by the United States, which was fighting against this group in Afghanistan. Pakistan’s two-faced policy towards Afghanistan continues, which might explain the conflicting stances of Pakistani statesmen regarding the Afghan Taliban.
The second reason for adopting such positions lies in Pakistan’s tumultuous political situation and the confusion of the country’s policymakers in dealing with the Taliban. As mentioned above, Pakistan has consistently supported the Afghan Taliban, but the Afghan Taliban supports the Pakistani Taliban, which is currently at odds with the Pakistani government. This situation has created a sinister and bloody cycle that has left Pakistan’s policymakers bewildered. Just as once Khawaja Muhammad Asif had stated that Pakistan had miscalculated its dealings with the Afghan Taliban and that its support for the group had been a mistake, the Afghan Taliban, according to Islamabad’s calculations, have not met Pakistan’s expectations. Supporting the TTP is one of the reasons behind this. Pakistan expected the Afghan Taliban to officially engage in fighting against the TTP and assist Islamabad in suppressing it. However, the Afghan Taliban chose to pursue negotiations and a ceasefire between the two sides, a move deemed futile. Consequently, Pakistani policymakers, alongside their double-dealing tactics, are in a state of current confusion. They are unsure of what deal to strike with their proteges that wouldn’t worsen the situation from today and lead tribal areas of Pakistan into further terrorism.
Read this article in Farsi here.