Editorial: Karma bites back

The recent airstrikes by Pakistan targeting Afghanistan’s Paktika province and a swift retaliation by the Taliban forces, hitting deep inside Pakistan, indicate worsening tensions in the region

Like the Frankenstein monster, terrorism, nurtured by the Pakistani deep state for decades, is coming back to bite it with devastating effect. For decades, Islamabad nurtured the Taliban for strategic reasons and provided military assistance. Now, the same Taliban is biting the hand that fed it. The irony is too obvious to ignore. Pakistan now faces a dual Taliban challenge: The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which operates against Islamabad from areas along the Afghan-Pakistan border, and the Taliban regime that has been in power in Afghanistan since 2021. The recent airstrikes by Pakistan targeting Afghanistan’s Paktika province, killing nearly 50 people — most of them women and children — and a swift retaliation by the Taliban forces, hitting deep inside Pakistan, indicate worsening tensions in the region. The aerial bombardment came a couple of days after Pakistan’s security forces gunned down 11 suspected terrorists in the restive Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. Relations between Islamabad and Kabul have soured this year as the banned TTP has stepped up operations against Pakistani military and police forces. Islamabad has repeatedly accused the Taliban of sheltering members of this terror group, but the Afghan government continues to be in denial mode. In fact, the airstrikes have exposed Pakistan’s duplicity. They were carried out hours after its special representative for Afghanistan visited Kabul to discuss ways to improve ties. It is apparent that Islamabad is paying lip service to resolving the dispute through diplomatic means. This strategy can have dangerous consequences for the region.

When the Taliban took over Afghanistan three years ago, the influential sections within the Pakistani military establishment celebrated the development while the then Prime Minister Imran Khan hailed that the Afghan people had “broken the shackles of slavery”. But things started deteriorating soon, with the Taliban apparently intent on striking an independent path and moving away from an image of being overly dependent on Pakistan’s military, which has supported the group for decades. A visible manifestation of this shift was the Taliban’s refusal to crack down on the TTP, which renewed its operations in northwest Pakistan after being emboldened by the changes in Kabul. For members of Pakistan’s military establishment, which pushed the doctrine of “strategic depth” in Afghanistan for several decades as a counterbalance to India, this was the ultimate comeuppance. The lesson here is simple: Fundamentalism bites back. The Taliban were raised by Pakistani politicians and generals as an instrument of state policy. This spawned an ecosystem of fundamentalism and terror that has since engulfed Pakistan and threatened to destabilise parts of South Asia. With the Taliban seeking to build ties with other countries, including India, the latest developments can trigger more violence. For Pakistan, this is a moment to reflect on its record of nurturing militants and make course corrections, while the Taliban need to deliver on their commitments to root out terror groups from Afghan soil.

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