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Soldiers drive toward North Waziristan during a 2014 military offensive against the Pakistani Taliban.
As Pakistan confronts the Taliban, Washington backs Islamabad — kind of
Afghanistan and Pakistan are on the brink of direct conflict.
Terror attacks from the Pakistani Taliban — aka the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan or the TTP, who are ideologically affiliated with and politically backed by the Afghan Taliban — are increasing across Pakistan. In the last two weeks, Pakistani intelligence operatives have been gunned down in the country’s biggest province, and a detention facility has been overtaken and officials held hostage.
To defend itself, Islamabad has hinted that it might attack TTP hideouts in Afghanistan … with Washington’s blessing.
Indeed, in a rare show of direct support for Islamabad, the US publicly backed Pakistan’s position. What does this mean, and what might happen next?
Violence is escalating. There has been an uptick in terrorist attacks in Pakistan since the Taliban decided to release many TTP members from prison upon returning to power in Afghanistan in August 2021.
Many of those insurgents have since pivoted to Pakistan or staged attacks against the country from launchpads in Afghanistan. While much of the fighting has been limited to the border, the last few weeks have seen brazen attacks in Pakistan’s heartland, including a suicide bombing in the capital.
Pakistan-Taliban tensions have been compounded by increased US-Pakistan cooperation. While the Americans have no boots on the ground in Afghanistan, they have been conducting over-the-horizon counterterrorist operations in the country, most notably killing former al-Qaida chief, Ayman al-Zawahri in Aug. 2022 (it is believed that Pakistani help was vital for that operation).
The top US military commander in the region recently spent three days in Pakistan, discussing enhancing counter-terrorism cooperation as well as touring the violent border area. America may have left the region, but it’s still watching this part of the world — and despite its pro-China leaning, Pakistan seems willing to play partner again.
“The stakes are high for Washington,” says Michael Kugelman, deputy director of the Asia Program at the Wilson Center. “Its interests are best served by an Afghanistan that doesn’t house domestic, regional, or international terrorists. The US and Pakistan are both threatened by terrorists on Afghan soil that the Taliban are unable or unwilling to curb.”
While Pakistan damaged its relationship with Washington by supporting segments of the Taliban for much of the 20 years of the US occupation of Afghanistan, it broke 75 years of precedent by conducting air strikes inside Afghanistan last April against what it claimed were TTP safe havens.
The responses from Kabul and Washington showed where they stand now vis-à-vis Islamabad. While the Taliban threatened Pakistan with retaliation if Afghanistan’s sovereignty was breached again, they continued to harbor TTP elements. Meanwhile, considering those strikes were conducted with US-supplied F-16 fighter jets, the Pentagon announced an aircraft upgrade for Pakistan over the protests of India, Pakistan’s archrival and Washington’s strategic partner.
“The US, to the extent that Afghanistan figures in its policy considerations, looks at Afghanistan through the lens of counterterrorism,” says Kugelman. “So this all means the US would want to see a Pakistani counterterrorist mission succeed.”
But this time, the US isn’t going all in when it comes to fighting terrorism in Afghanistan. So far, assistance to Islamabad has been limited, and Kugelman predicts that further assistance to Pakistan for a potential counterterrorism mission will likely be modest. He assesses that some intelligence sharing and public messages of support should be expected, but not much beyond that.
However, Pakistan’s security is only deteriorating. The weekend saw thousands protest for better policing in Pakistan’s terror-struck town of Wana, near the Afghan border. Moreover, Pakistan’s military, police, and civilians haven’t just been attacked at home, but also targeted in Afghanistan.
There’s a larger problem, too: Pakistan is dead broke. Nearing default, the country isn’t in a position to launch a large-scale military campaign or even carry out an extensive counterterrorist mission at home. If pushed into war, it will need help to finance such an operation, too. Kugelman thinks that it’s more likely to get that from Beijing or the Gulf states than from Washington.
“Let’s be clear: The US has left Afghanistan. Its foreign policy interests and strategic priorities lie elsewhere,” says Kugelman.
Although Washington worries about what the local offshoot of the Taliban might do to Pakistan — a nation that US President Joe Biden has called one of the “most dangerous” in the world — it does not consider it a direct threat for America. Not yet, anyway.
The upshot: Yes, the TTP is a problem. But for the most part, it’s a Pakistani problem.A police officer stands inside a cordoned-off area after a suicide car bombing in Islamabad, Pakistan.
Pakistan vs. (Pakistani) Taliban
Pakistan’s “second war against terror” has effectively begun.
On Friday, a suicide bomber killed himself and killed three other people in Islamabad, the first such attack in Pakistan’s capital in eight years. This is just the latest in a series of offensives launched by the Pakistani Taliban, who unilaterally ended a ceasefire with Pakistan last month after their leader was killed in Afghanistan, where they are provided refuge by their allies, the Afghan Taliban. The Pakistani Taliban blamed the death on Pakistani intel.
Since then, the group has stepped up attacks of all types — cross-border sniping, complex hostage-takings, even targeting medical teams trying to cure polio — across Pakistan, further destabilizing a country in the midst of an economic meltdown and a political crisis. But the Taliban aren’t Islamabad’s only problem: this year has seen an uptick of attacks by the Islamic State as well as Baloch separatists who have targeted personnel from China — Pakistan’s only ally.
Meanwhile, Islamabad’s relations with the Afghan Taliban have also deteriorated.
For much of the two decades of the US-led military occupation of Afghanistan, Pakistan aided and abetted senior Taliban leaders, providing them safe haven at the cost of losing Washington’s trust. But a year and a half after the Taliban takeover, the Islamists are turning out to be more than a mere disappointment for Islamabad.
Taliban border guards killed Pakistani civilians and attacked military posts last week, even as the Taliban leadership has continued to protect and nurture anti-Pakistan insurgents as well as engaged commercially and diplomatically with India, Pakistan’s arch-nemesis.
The Pakistani Taliban's comeback is a big problem for the country's army. And the wrong bet on the Taliban might be yet another strategic miscalculation by an institution which continues to rule Pakistan while undermining civilian rule.The Graphic Truth: Terror outfits based in Afghanistan
Even though the Taliban “control” Afghanistan, several militant groups still operate in the war-torn country. That's underscored by the recent killing of al-Qaida chief Ayman al-Zawahiri in downtown Kabul, although not all outfits present in Afghanistan are affiliated with the Taliban. We list some of the major militant organizations working out of the country, with regional and global ambitions.
A Taliban fighter stands guard at the site of an explosion in Kabul.
In spring offensive, the Taliban get a taste of their own medicine
After months of tense calm, a fresh wave of terror attacks by insurgents and airstrikes by Pakistan have killed dozens across Afghanistan, exposing the inability of the Taliban to secure a country already suffering from the world’s worst humanitarian crisis and an economic free fall.
The spate of violence is intense, escalating, and widespread. The attacks have mostly targeted the Hazaras, Afghanistan’s Shia minority, but Sunni Muslims with liberal leanings have also been hit. ISIS-K, the South Asian branch of the Islamic State, has claimed responsibility for most of the attacks. (A bomber from the same group killed 13 US military personnel and 170 Afghans at Kabul airport last August during the last days of America’s military pullout.)
Meanwhile, the Taliban’s scorched-earth policy of pursuing ISIS-K fighters and sympathizers – including the enforcement of collective punishment – has created further unrest and resistance against the Islamist regime, which prefers to ban social media and prohibit females from attending schools and colleges.
Spring is the fighting season in Afghanistan. During the 20 years of US occupation, the Taliban would always step up their attacks against US, NATO, and former Afghan government forces in what was traditionally known as the “spring offensive.” But this time, the Taliban are the ones being challenged by an insurgency even more extremist than their own.
Although the Taliban, most of whom belong to the conservative Deobandi school of Islam, have a history of targeting Afghanistan’s Shias, they proclaimed all Afghans under their protection when they took over last summer. But ISIS-K, which is inspired by the even more conservative Salafist school, is fiercely anti-Shia and regards members of the minority branch of Islam as heretics.
What’s more, ISIS-K is equally intolerant of Sunnis who follow more liberal principles. This harsh bias exposes vast swathes of Afghanistan’s diverse population to be targeted by ISIS-K.
The Taliban have condemned ISIS-K violence. Suhail Shaheen, the group’s international spokesperson and UN ambassador-designate, called the Islamic State affiliate “enemies of humanity and Islam” in an interview with GZERO. He claimed that ISIS-K “are not strong in terms of manpower and military capabilities, and that is why they are focusing on soft targets like mosques.”
But when asked about the adequacy of the Taliban’s own countermeasures, he deflected, responding: “Henceforth, we will boost security in key vulnerable places.”
ISIS-K isn’t just the Taliban’s problem. The US Department of Defense assesses that “ISIS-K could establish an external attack capability against the United States and our allies in twelve to eighteen months, but possibly sooner if the group experiences unanticipated gains in Afghanistan.” Meanwhile, the UN believes that the Taliban’s takeover and the withdrawal of foreign troops have emboldened terrorist groups to “enjoy greater freedom in Afghanistan than at any time in recent history.”
Fighting their own insurgency is just half of the story of the immense security challenge Afghanistan’s rulers face. While the Sunni Taliban may be against ultra-Sunni ISIS-K, they are ideological and political partners with the Tahreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, also known as the TTP or the Pakistani Taliban. TTP is a 10,000-strong insurgency battling Afghanistan’s eastern neighbor — and in doing so, creating a uniquely fresh security problem in this war-torn region.
Enter Pakistan. Nuclear-armed, with the world’s fifth-largest military, Islamabad has conducted airstrikes inside Afghan territory, where the Pakistani Taliban enjoy safe-havens. This directly challenges the authority of the Afghan Taliban, which Pakistan has armed, trained, and supported for decades.
The airstrikes have caused massive civilian casualties, triggered anti-Pakistan protests across Afghanistan, and even inspired a rare warning by the Taliban against the Pakistanis. The Pakistani military didn’t comment about attacking what it calls its “brotherly country,” but Islamabad’s compulsions are clear: Pakistan recorded almost 300 terror attacks in 2021, a 56% spike compared to the previous year. The Pakistani Taliban were responsible for most of the incidents, even as Pakistan’s friends, the Afghan Taliban – who also happen to be the TTP’s mentors – were gaining power.
This isn’t the first time the Pakistanis have operated inside Afghanistan. Covert operations by special forces and artillery/small arms used by border forces have been the Pakistanis’ preferred methods to thwart cross-border threats. But the use of airpower by Islamabad against targets on the Afghan mainland has set a new precedent in the decades-long conflict.
“The airstrikes are a big deal and a bad omen for the future,” says Asfandyar Mir, a senior expert at the US Institute of Peace. “It is undeniable that the Afghan Taliban have given the Pakistani Taliban de-facto political asylum — TTP has freedom of movement, freedom to bear arms, freedom to recruit and conduct operations against Pakistan from Afghanistan.”
At the same time, he adds, “the policy logic of the Pakistanis, who have had a relationship with the Afghan Taliban for decades and should have seen this coming, is not obvious. They have moved from using machine guns and mortars to F-16s — almost overnight.”
Mir doesn’t consider Pakistan’s use of airstrikes as a thoughtful approach.
“Where is the escalation ladder? And what is the theory of coercion here? The politics of the Taliban’s support for the TTP and cross-border military action against them is complicated, and requires a more considered response than one-off, poorly directed airstrikes.”
Still, air capability remains essential to fighting in Afghanistan, where the US military often used drones and manned aircraft for reconnaissance and counterterror operations. With no military presence in landlocked Afghanistan, the DOD admits that conducting “operations in Afghanistan from ‘over the horizon’ remains difficult, but not impossible” in a region where terror groups now operate freely.
To fill that void for its own purpose, Pakistan has emerged as an airpower, even willing to risk the ire of its longtime ally, the Taliban, as Afghanistan’s “forever war” keeps on morphing.What We're Watching: Viktor Orbán's rival, Pakistan's Taliban making moves, abducted Americans in Haiti
Can this guy defeat Viktor Orban? Hungary's opposition movement of odd bedfellows has finally settled on the person they think has the best chance of defeating PM Viktor Orbán at the ballot box: Péter Márki-Zay, a politically conservative small-town mayor from southeastern Hungary, who beat out left-leaning European Parliament member Klara Dobrev in a weekend poll. Márki-Zay has a lot going for him: as a devout Catholic and father of seven it will be hard for the ultraconservative Orbán to paint him as a progressive threat, even as Márki-Zay reaches out to reassure left-leaning groups that he will protect LGBTQ rights. What's more, Márki-Zay has little political baggage: until recently he was a marketing executive. But can the relatively inexperienced Márki-Zay keep the various opposition factions happy? The stakes couldn't be higher: since taking power more than a decade ago, Orbán has deliberately made Hungary into an "illiberal" state, cracking down on the press, undermining the rule of law, and clashing with the EU. Bonus: if Márki-Zay stays in the news, you get to say "Hódmezővásárhely" the name of the city he currently runs.
Pakistani Taliban making a move? Emboldened by the triumph of their coreligionists in Afghanistan, Pakistan's Taliban movement — known as Tehrik-e-Taliaban, or TTP — is becoming more active as well. Seven years ago,Pakistan's military crushed the TTP in the regions of Pakistan along the Afghanistan border where they operate. But local reports say that they are coming back now, extorting local businesses, seizing territory, and carrying out terrorist attacks that have killed hundreds of civilians and soldiers. Pakistan, of course, has long-standing ties to the Afghan Taliban, but it's not clear whether that will help them manage growing tensions with the Pakistani Taliban who, for now, want political recognition and control over tribal borderlands. Would it be a mistake for Islamabad to negotiate with the TTP? A poll from last week showed that 55 percent of Pakistanis would welcome a Taliban-style government throughout the country.
Can Biden rescue abducted Americans in Haiti? Crisis-wracked Haiti was rocked by another catastrophe Sunday, when gang members abducted 17 foreign missionary workers (16 Americans and one Canadian national), including five children. It is yet another sign of the deteriorating security situation in the country, where nearly complete lawlessness has reigned since President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated in July. Large swaths of the capital Port-au Prince are now dominated by increasingly powerful gangs, who rule by terror and often kidnap civilians for ransom. In recent days, even Prime Minister Ariel Henry himself was forced to flee an official commemoration ceremony in the capital when gangs drove his security detail from the site. The US says it is working closely with the Haitian government to rescue the kidnapped missionaries, but remained mum on details. The Biden administration says it doesn't pay ransoms to terrorist groups or gangs, but we're watching to see whether it caves to the bad guys' demands.