Rokan's Journal

Major General HRM Rokan Uddin (Retd)

Few conflicts in the contemporary world carry the weight of history, the complexity of identity and the tragedy of missed opportunity quite like the ongoing tensions between Afghanistan and Pakistan. These are two Muslim nations bound together by geography, ethnicity, religion and shared suffering – and yet locked in a relationship so deeply fractured, so chronically mistrustful and so laden with grievance that peace between them has remained perpetually out of reach. To understand this conflict is to understand one of the most consequential failures of Muslim solidarity in the modern era.

The roots of this conflict stretch back to 1893, when the British Empire drew the Durand Line – a boundary that divided the Pashtun people between what would become Pakistan and what remained Afghanistan. This colonial wound was never truly accepted by Afghanistan as a permanent international border. When Pakistan came into existence in 1947, Afghanistan became the only country in the world to vote against Pakistan’s admission to the United Nations – a founding rebuke rooted in Kabul’s refusal to recognize the Durand Line and its demand for a “Pashtunistan,” a homeland for Pashtuns straddling both sides of the border. Pakistan interpreted this as a fundamental threat to its territorial integrity. The trust deficit between the two countries was not manufactured by later events – it was written into the original architecture of their relationship from the very first day.

The Cold War added devastating new layers to this poisoned relationship. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, Pakistan became the primary conduit for American, Saudi and Chinese support to the Afghan Mujahideen. Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, the ISI, developed deep relationships with Afghan armed factions that proved both strategically useful and catastrophically difficult to manage in the decades that followed. The Mujahideen victory over the Soviets left Afghanistan without a functioning state, drowning in factional warfare and awash with weapons and extremist ideology that would haunt both countries for generations.

The rise of the Taliban in the mid-1990s and Pakistan’s subsequent support for the Taliban government in Kabul marked a decisive chapter in this relationship. Pakistan became one of only three countries to formally recognize the Taliban government, driven by the doctrine of “strategic depth” – the belief that a friendly Afghanistan would prevent Pakistan from being strategically encircled by India. This created bonds of patronage between Pakistan’s security establishment and the Taliban that would prove extraordinarily difficult to sever even when the strategic calculations changed dramatically after September 11, 2001.

The American invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 fundamentally altered the regional landscape while simultaneously deepening the contradictions in Pakistan’s position. Pakistan officially became a partner in the war on terror while simultaneously – according to overwhelming evidence from American, Afghan and independent sources – its intelligence services maintained covert relationships with Taliban factions operating from Pakistani soil. The Haqqani Network, one of the most lethal armed groups targeting American forces and the Afghan government, operated from sanctuaries in Pakistan’s tribal areas for years. This double game became the defining accusation that poisoned the Afghanistan-Pakistan relationship for two decades.

From Kabul’s perspective, the grievances are specific, documented and deeply felt. The Afghan government and its security forces lost hundreds of thousands of members fighting an insurgency that could not have sustained itself without sanctuary and support from across the Pakistani border. Afghan civilians died in bombings planned in Pakistani cities, financed through Pakistani networks and using weapons that passed through Pakistani territory. Afghan leaders across the political spectrum – Karzai, Ghani, Abdullah – publicly accused Pakistan of speaking the language of partnership in diplomatic forums while enabling the very violence that was destroying their country.

Pakistan’s counter-narrative is equally deeply held. Islamabad argues that it has suffered most from the spillover of Afghan instability – having hosted at the peak of the crisis more than three million Afghan refugees, the largest refugee population in the world at the time. Pakistan points to the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan – the TTP, the Pakistani Taliban – as proof that Afghanistan has been used as a sanctuary by militants targeting Pakistan itself. The TTP has carried out devastating attacks on Pakistani military personnel, police and civilians, operating from bases in Afghanistan. Pakistan argues that it cannot be held solely responsible for Afghanistan’s security failures when its own territory has been the target of hundreds of terrorist attacks carried out by groups sheltered in Afghan territory.

The Taliban’s return to power in August 2021 – when the American-backed Afghan government collapsed with stunning speed as US forces withdrew – created a new and more complicated phase of this relationship. The Taliban’s victory was initially welcomed by significant sections of Pakistan’s establishment, who saw it as the achievement of their long-sought strategic depth. But the relationship between the Afghan Taliban and the Pakistani state has proven far more complicated than Islamabad anticipated. The Afghan Taliban government has shown no willingness to act against the TTP – indeed, senior TTP figures have been welcomed in Afghanistan and in some cases integrated into the Afghan Taliban’s own structures. The result is a paradox of historic proportions: Pakistan helped bring the Taliban to power, and the Taliban’s return has dramatically worsened Pakistan’s own security situation.

The border has become a battlefield. Pakistani military operations inside Afghan territory — including airstrikes killing Afghan civilians – have drawn furious responses from the Taliban government, which has accused Pakistan of violating Afghan sovereignty. The Durand Line has become a daily flashpoint of military confrontation. Diplomatic relations have deteriorated to their lowest point in years, with ambassadors recalled, border crossings closed and rhetoric from both sides growing increasingly hostile.

The humanitarian dimension of this conflict is staggering. Afghanistan is experiencing one of the worst humanitarian crises on the planet – with more than twenty-eight million people facing acute food insecurity, a collapsed healthcare system and a devastated economy. Pakistan is simultaneously managing its own economic crisis while hosting millions of Afghan refugees, including hundreds of thousands forcibly expelled in 2023 in a mass deportation that drew international condemnation. The ordinary people of both countries – the Afghan farmer who cannot feed his children, the Pakistani family terrorized by TTP bombings, the refugee who has known nothing but displacement – are paying with their lives for the strategic games of states and the ideological obsessions of armed groups.

And yet reconciliation between Afghanistan and Pakistan is not merely desirable – it is necessary. It is an Islamic obligation. The Quran commands with absolute clarity: “The believers are but brothers, so make settlement between your brothers and fear Allah that you may receive mercy.” This divine command applies with full force to the governments and peoples of both countries, whatever the depth of their grievances.

What would genuine reconciliation require? It would require, first and most fundamentally, an honest acknowledgment by Pakistan that its decades of playing a double game in Afghanistan caused incalculable harm to the Afghan people. This is not an admission of defeat – it is an act of moral courage and strategic wisdom. A Pakistan that genuinely commits to Afghan sovereignty and stability gains a stable western border, an end to the TTP threat fed by Afghan instability, and a restoration of its international reputation. The costs of the double game have long exceeded any benefits it ever produced.

It would equally require the Afghan Taliban government to recognize that sheltering the TTP and other groups targeting Pakistan is not an act of Islamic solidarity – it is a violation of every principle of neighborly conduct that Islam demands. The Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, established with absolute clarity that a Muslim does not use his land as a base from which to harm his neighbor. The Taliban’s failure to act against the TTP is not strategic wisdom – it is strategic self-destruction, ensuring that Pakistan remains a hostile neighbor and that the Afghan people continue to suffer the consequences.

Reconciliation would require an internationally supported dialogue process involving not just the two governments but tribal elders, religious scholars, civil society organizations and ordinary citizens of both countries. The Durand Line question must be addressed honestly rather than avoided – because a wound that is never treated does not heal, it festers. Some mutually acceptable frameworks for managing the border and protecting the rights of Pashtun communities on both sides must be found.

Economic interdependence offers perhaps the most durable foundation for lasting peace. Afghanistan desperately needs Pakistan’s ports, markets and infrastructure connections to the wider world. Pakistan desperately needs a stable Afghanistan to realize the enormous potential of connectivity with Central Asia through its territory. The Afghanistan-Pakistan Transit Trade Agreement, genuinely implemented and mutually beneficial, could begin an economic relationship that gives both sides a material stake in each other’s stability and prosperity.

The role of Islamic scholars and religious leadership in both countries must not be underestimated. In a region where religion remains the deepest source of identity, the voice of respected ulema carries more weight than a dozen diplomatic communiqués. The great religious scholars who command the loyalty of millions in both countries have a profound obligation to articulate the Islamic imperative for peace, for the resolution of disputes through dialogue, and for the recognition that Muslim blood spilled by Muslim hands is among the gravest sins that Islam recognizes.

The people of Afghanistan and Pakistan share faith, ethnicity across the Durand Line, a history of resistance against colonialism and the Quran and Sunnah as the foundation of their moral universe. These are not small things – they are the building blocks of a relationship that, if patiently and courageously reconstructed, could become one of the most powerful partnerships in the Muslim world. For two nations that both declare their identity as Islamic republics, the failure to pursue peace with every ounce of political will and moral courage available is not merely a political failure. It is a failure before Allah Himself.