Pakistan’s Taliban Partner in Afghanistan Turns on Islamabad in Favor of Separatist Kin

A blood-soaked reckoning years in the making is unfolding on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, the catastrophic consequences of the Pakistani intelligence establishment’s own proxy strategy. The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), the Pakistani offshoot of the Afghan Taliban, which returned to power in 2021 after America’s abrupt evacuation from Kabul, is waging an increasingly lethal campaign against the Pakistani state. The violence in 2025 was among the worst in more than a decade, with militant attacks killing hundreds of security personnel and civilians across Pakistan. Trends in 2026 are running at a similar or higher pace.The breaking point came in a cascade of recent attacks. A suicide bomber struck a Shia mosque in Islamabad on February 6, 2026, killing 31 worshippers. Days later, an assault in the Bajaur district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa killed 11 soldiers and a child.Then came another suicide attack in Bannu, located in the southern part of Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa region. According to Pakistani authorities, each assault bore the fingerprints of Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan operatives using Afghan soil as their launchpad. Pakistan’s patience, built up over years of failed diplomacy, official warnings, and limited military strikes, finally collapsed.“Our cup of patience has overflowed,” Pakistan’s defense minister, Khawaja Muhammad Asif, announced on X late last month after Pakistani airstrikes lit up the skies over Kabul. “Now it is open war between us and you.”A Proxy That Turned Its Guns AroundThe turnabout is something Pakistan’s powerful spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, should have seen coming. It was the Afghan Taliban’s chief patron throughout the 20 years of American-led war in Afghanistan.Islamabad cultivated the Afghan Taliban as an essential asset, a force that could provide so-called “strategic depth” against India and guarantee a pliant neighbor to the west. Pakistan was one of only three countries to officially recognize the Taliban’s first emirate in the 1990s. When the Taliban swept back into Kabul in August 2021, Pakistan publicly celebrated. What followed instead was a strategic nightmare. The movement Pakistan spent decades cultivating, arming, and shielding turned on its sponsors.The Taliban’s return emboldened the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, which shares ideology, ethnicity, familial ties, and battlefield history with its Afghan counterpart. The Afghan Taliban released Tehreek-e-Taliban senior commanders from Afghan prisons after taking power. The Pakistani Taliban chief, Noor Wali Mehsud, publicly pledged his allegiance to the Afghan Taliban’s supreme leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada. He has declared the Tehreek-e-Taliban a branch of the Afghan Taliban operating inside Pakistan. Crossborder attacks surged. Militant violence in Pakistan rose by nearly 56 percent in 2023 following a steady increase beginning in 2021, according to the Center for Research and Security Studies. It climbed another 40 percent in 2024.Pakistan pressed the Taliban repeatedly to rein in the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan. The Taliban offered limited mediation, then let the talks collapse. The reason is structural: clamping down on Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan militants risks driving them toward the Taliban’s main rival, the Islamic State-Khorasan Province. “The break between Pakistan and its erstwhile Taliban allies was completely predictable,” a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Bill Roggio, told The New York Sun. “Pakistan believed that its support for the Afghan Taliban during its insurgency would get it to rein in its Pakistani Taliban allies. That was never going to happen.”Bombs Over Kabul and the Logic of EscalationThe current military confrontation got its start when Pakistan launched Operation Khyber Storm in October 2025 to kill Mr. Mehsud, who is listed as one of America’s specially designated global terrorists. He survived. The Taliban retaliated with attacks on Pakistani border posts along the Durand Line, the disputed 1,620-mile colonial-era boundary that splits Pashtun communities between the two countries and which Afghanistan has never formally recognized. Fierce fighting broke out around Spin Boldak in Afghanistan’s Kandahar province. As crossborder incidents flared, in February, Pakistani officials issued formal diplomatic warnings, summoned the Afghan ambassador, and issued an ultimatum: act against Pakistani Taliban sanctuaries or face the consequences. Kabul didn’t flinch. The October 2025 ceasefire mediated by Qatar and Turkey collapsed. A subsequent strike by Pakistan, which claimed to have killed more than 80 militants, also hit civilians, including children, according to the Afghan Taliban, which the United Nations partially confirmed.Five days later, Taliban forces launched a large-scale offensive against Pakistani military positions along the Durand Line. Pakistan responded with Operation Ghazab Lil Haqq — “Wrath for the Truth” — striking Taliban brigade headquarters, weapons depots, and installations in Kabul, Kandahar, and Paktia.By early March, Pakistani officials claimed to have struck 46 locations in Afghanistan, including Bagram Airfield, and reported the demolition of 83 Taliban posts and deaths of more than 430 Afghan fighters as well as 12 of its own. Taliban officials offered sharply different casualty figures and claimed multiple Pakistani outposts had been seized.Despite the violence, which both sides say they are in no hurry to end, analysts believe the rupture may not be permanent. “The Taliban and Pakistanis have been lobbing mortars at each other in the border regions for some time; this is nothing new. My guess is things will calm down to as they were before this recent flare-up,” a former CIA officer, Del Wilber, told The Sun.A Humanitarian Catastrophe UnfoldsAs expected, the human cost of the fighting has been staggering. The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan documented at least 146 civilian casualties in Afghanistan between February 26 and March 2, with 42 people killed and 104 injured, including women and children. Afghanistan’s Defense Ministry put the civilian death toll higher, at 110, including 65 women and children killed and 123 wounded.The displacement crisis has spiraled rapidly. The United Nations refugee agency reports that as of March 6, more than 115,000 people in Afghanistan and 3,000 in Pakistan had fled their homes. The International Organization for Migration confirmed that nearly 66,000 people had been displaced in eastern and southeastern Afghanistan, with an estimated 16,400 households uprooted across Paktia, Paktika, Nangarhar, Kunar, and Khost provinces.The fighting has struck communities already reeling from crises. More than five million people returning after years of war, including 2.6 million in 2025 alone, are displaced. Hundreds more displaced by the August 2025 Kunar earthquake, Afghanistan’s deadliest in nearly 30 years, were living in temporary settlements when the conflict erupted. Border operations at Torkham and Bahramcha have been suspended due to security concerns, restricting humanitarian access at a time when needs are rapidly increasing. The emergency hospital at the Torkham border post has been damaged. The U.N. World Food Program warned that residents of more than 46 districts across Afghanistan already faced “severe food insecurity” before the intensified fighting broke out. The situation has forced the food program to temporarily suspend emergency, social protection, school feeding, and livelihood activities in the affected provinces.Beijing’s Belt and Road NightmareThe conflict carries stakes that extend well beyond the Durand Line. China is watching the escalating conflict with mounting anxiety as major construction projects intended on securing a foothold in the region go dark. The $62 billion flagship project of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative in the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, often referred to as CPEC, links Pakistan’s deep-water port at Gwadar on the Arabian Sea to China’s Xinjiang region, promising Beijing a shorter route for energy imports and reduced dependence on Malaysia’s Strait of Malacca.Thousands of Chinese workers involved in CPEC-related projects live in Pakistan. Chinese engineers, construction sites, and security personnel have consistently been attacked by the Pakistani Taliban and its allied militant groups.Another of Pakistan’s separatist forces, the Balochistan Liberation Army, has struck at port facilities, hotels frequented by Chinese officials, and even the Chinese consulate at Karachi. Pakistan has created a special police force and installed hundreds of checkpoints around Chinese interests. Beijing has demanded that Islamabad take stronger action.When Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif visited Beijing in September, China, hinting at a waning level of confidence, withheld support for Main Line-1, a flagship CPEC project. “The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor is the gem of China’s Belt and Road agenda,” a global risk analyst, Dennis Santiago, told the Sun. “This is a strategic lifeline for the Chinese, bypassing their shipping chokepoint vulnerability to the United States via the South China Sea trade route.”In May 2025, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi announced an extension of CPEC into Afghanistan, hoping economic incentives could stabilize the region and bind Kabul to Beijing’s interests. That gamble now appears dangerously fragile as the Taliban has proven unwilling to subordinate its relationship with its Pakistani wing to Beijing’s economic preferences.Still, Mr. Roggio notes, China has little leverage or will to compel either party to stand down.“As long as this conflict does not spill over into China, the government is unlikely to get involved in a protracted and unsolvable conflict,” Mr. Roggio said. The India Factor and Regional MediationUnsurprisingly, Pakistan has accused the Taliban of acting as a proxy for India — a charge New Delhi dismisses and Mr. Roggio calls “ludicrous, and ironic.” “The Pakistanis backed the Afghan Taliban as it killed nearly a 100,000 Pakistani civilians between 2006 and today,” he said. Pakistan is “reaping the poisoned crop it has sown, and wants to blame India for its cynical, dangerous, and irresponsible foreign policy.”Regional actors could serve as a way out for both sides, Mr. Santiago said. Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Iran too have all offered mediation. Riyadh brokered the release of three Pakistani soldiers captured by the Taliban during the October clashes, a rare diplomatic success. Turkey again emerged as a willing mediator early this month. “Both nations can use the statecraft ruse of a negotiation facilitated by a third party like Turkey or Malaysia to create a de facto coalition to eliminate the TTP and force the ISKP to seek exile elsewhere,” Mr. Santiago said.Yet, with Pakistan vowing to continue operations until the terrorist threat is eliminated and the Taliban showing no sign of cracking down on the Tehreek-e-Taliban, the conditions for a durable ceasefire are absent.“Unless Pakistan’s nuclear weapons are threatened, I do not see any other country getting involved,” Mr. Roggio said. “The United States and Russia learned their lessons in Afghanistan. India is content with sitting back and watching Pakistan suffer from its decades of bad decisions. China understands the limits of its power in the ‘stans.’ Iran is quite busy at the moment. No one is coming to save either country.”He added that Pakistan must renounce “the bevy of Pakistani jihadist groups that it uses to target India” and arrest their leaders and members. Pakistan “must end all pretenses that India, and not the jihadi monsters it has helped create, is the real problem. It must stop pretending the Taliban in Afghanistan is a partner and not a direct threat,” he said.

Pakistan’s Taliban Partner in Afghanistan Turns on Islamabad in Favor of Separatist Kin

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