“How Pakistan’s India Fixation Obscures the Real Af-Pak Crisis”, India Narrative, October 17, 2025
“Lord Curzon, while delivering a lecture on frontiers at Oxford University in 1907, said that frontiers are the chief anxiety of nearly every foreign office in the civilized world. If that was true for the British Raj in 1907, it remains so for its successor, Pakistan, more than a hundred years later. The matter is even more serious since it has to handle challenges from either flank of its territory, in the east and west. After somehow surviving the Indian onslaught this May in its east, the Pakistani army is now battered by its once ‘friends’ Taliban of Afghanistan on its western frontier. For Pakistan, which has spent decades advocating an Afghan-led and Afghan-owned peace process and which celebrated the Taliban seizure of Kabul in 2021 with then Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan hailing the Taliban for ‘breaking the chains of slavery’, this latest onslaught is an act of betrayal. Meanwhile, there is an attempt to relate this latest conflagration with India following the recent visit of Afghan Taliban Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi to New Delhi, suspecting the Taliban attack on Pakistan as part of ‘broader recalibration’. However, a thorough analysis of the ground reality will not only contradict such an India fixation but also negate such one-track scrutiny of events.
‘Cruel and merciless country’
Noted South Asia analyst Victoria Schofield has said in her book Afghan Frontier: At the Crossroads of Conflict that Afghanistan today mirrors Afghanistan yesterday, echoing with the sounds of gunfire as warring tribes fight for a never-ending battle for power and influence.’ No administrator in the Indian subcontinent’s modern history, from the Mughals and Sikhs to the British, has ever been able to ‘discipline’ these warring tribal factions scattered in the vast terrain between the Pameer Knot and the Hindu Kush range. Winston Churchill, known for his racist slurs against the Indians, called the tribal Waziristan at the Afghan-British India border (now Af-Pak border area) a ‘cruel and merciless country’, but had to bow to the invincible Afghan tribesmen, whom he acknowledged as ‘a brave and warlike race’, after the British gave up the effort to conquer them. Notably, Churchill served the Malakand Field Force at Malakand Pass near Peshawar in 1897. Like the British, their successor Pakistan also left the tribal areas untouched since 1947 until 9/11, which unveiled the U.S global ‘war on terror’, forcing Pakistan to intervene in the tribal areas in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. When military operations unexpectedly encountered stiff resistance, as the British did in similar attempts throughout the colonial era, it somehow disrupted the tribal structure. But more importantly, as a result, some tribal areas fell into the hands of Islamist radicals like the Pak Taliban.
Threat from within
Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), commonly known as Pak Taliban, draws its spiritual guidance from the Afghan Taliban and wants to create a similar theocratic state in Pakistan following the Taliban model in Afghanistan. Founded in 2007, it is an umbrella of various Sunni Islamist factions with mercenaries drawn from the peripatetic tribes along the Af-Pak border. The group is active in the border areas of Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provinces of Pakistan. The recent conflicts between Afghanistan and Pakistan are primarily driven by the long-standing issue of Pakistan accusing the Afghan Taliban of harbouring TTP. Even the UN Security Council has also alleged that the Taliban ‘proved unable or unwilling’ to manage the threat from TTP. Pakistan recently unleashed a series of attacks on Afghan border towns, claiming they were targeting the TTP militants in Afghan shelters. However, the actual problem lies in the state-tribal relations. The Pakistan state and its military are viewed with suspicion and considered alien by the tribal communities of the frontier provinces intruding into their ancestral land. There is a severe trust deficit between the state and its tribal people, which worsened further with Pakistan opting for a foolhardy military solution to crush the resultant rebellion. On the other hand, Taliban and TTP share comradeship as fellow revolutionary brothers who fought against the foreign occupation of both the Soviets and the Americans in Afghanistan. Also, the Afghan Taliban feel cheated by Pakistan for siding with the USA, which dethroned them in 2003. Thus, the recent Af-Pak clash was not the result of any India-linked ‘broader recalibration’ but instead of Pakistan’s traditionally tense relations with its tribal communities and its failure to persuade the Taliban to rein in the TTP…….”
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