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Written by Damir Nazarov
While the international community remains inactive against Israeli crimes and continues to allow jihadists to take over Syria, the border conflict between Afghanistan and Pakistan has once again escalated. Both sides accuse each other of not respecting borders and of a real proxy war.
Pakistan’s main complaint is the alleged support of the Afghan Taliban for the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan(TTP), which is what is called the “Pakistani Taliban.” However, the official government of Kabul rejects such connections and believes that the Pakistani junta should “solve its own internal problems.” The former allies became almost the main enemies in the region, immediately after the departure of the American occupiers, but both sides are restrained from all-out war by the presence of takfirists from local ISIS cells. As for the TTP, they regularly emphasize their autonomy from their “Afghan brothers.”
In response to accusations of “supporting terrorism”, the Taliban have responded with diplomacy, with the Islamic Emirate’s ambassador recently meeting with Unity Party leader Hamid Hussain. The meeting took place amid bloody clashes between Shiites in the Parachinar district and extremist groups. The Shiite issue is no less pressing for Pakistan than the TTP situation. That is why the Taliban has begun to actively play this card, demonstrating yet another “weakness” of Pakistan’s military rule.
Analysts tend to believe that Pakistan’s plans to create “strategic depth” in Afghanistan have failed. By Islamabad’s strategy, they mean long-term support for the Taliban in Afghanistan. However, the Taliban, although an ally of the Pakistani military, never considered itself a “strategic asset” of Islamabad. Simply because the phenomenon of the Taliban structure included a council of three main components, which ultimately formed the backbone of the movement. The three components are political Sufism from Pakistan, local Pashtun nationalism and veterans of Islamic movements from the Soviet occupation. In such a situation, it is simply unrealistic to control an entire ethnic group that has solid military and political experience.
The border dispute between Afghanistan and Pakistan dates back to the British colonization of the region and remains a hot-button issue to this day. Ethnic issues and acute economic problems in both countries exacerbate the situation, which has often escalated into armed conflict. The situation with the territorial crisis has been going on for almost 90 years. A kind of “Pashtunistan” existed both under all types of colonization and without external intervention from world powers. For Islamabad, this is a headache that it has not been able to solve since the declaration of its independence.
The situation is now aggravated, among other things, by the chaos within Pakistan itself, a clear example of the crisis being the frequent change of the head of the Inter-Services Intelligence. The pressure on Imran Khan also demonstrates the problems inside the military rule of Pakistan. Therefore, taking all these combined facts together, one can come to the conclusion that the border crisis with the Taliban may be just a mask to distract attention from the internal chaos in the central apparatuses of Islamabad.
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