​The oped was originally publish at Aljazeera 

When the Taliban seized power in Kabul in August 2021, Pakistan's Interior Minister Sheikh Rasheed Ahmed delivered a triumphant news conference at the Torkham crossing with Afghanistan.

He claimed that the Taliban's swift ascendance to power would create "a new bloc" and the region would reach great global importance. Imran Khan, Pakistan's prime minister at the time, equated the Taliban's return to power with Afghans having "broken the shackles of slavery".

For nearly 20 years, the Afghan Taliban fought a sophisticated and sustained revolt, confronted – at one point – by a United States-led coalition of more than 40 countries in Afghanistan. In that period, Taliban leaders and fighters found sanctuary inside Pakistan across the regions bordering Afghanistan. Taliban leaders also formed a presence in, and links with, major cities in Pakistan such as Quetta, Peshawar and later, Karachi.

Many Taliban leaders and many fighters are graduates of Pakistani Islamic religious schools, including the Darul Uloom Haqqania, where Mullah Muhammad Omar, the founder of the Taliban movement, reportedly studied. In Pakistan, the Taliban found an ecosystem fostering organic relationships across the spectrum of Pakistani society, enabling the group to reorganise and initiate a lethal uprising that began around 2003. Without Pakistan's support and sanctuary, the successful uprising by the Taliban would have been highly unlikely.

Given this background, what explains the recent deterioration of bilateral relations, with the Pakistani military conducting air strikes inside Afghanistan this week – only the latest evidence of the tensions between Islamabad and the Afghan Taliban?

Historical and current factors

Afghanistan has a complicated history with Pakistan. While Pakistan welcomed the Taliban in Kabul as a natural ally, the Taliban government is proving to be less cooperative than Pakistan had hoped, aligning itself with nationalist rhetoric to galvanise support from the wider Afghan society. Taliban leaders are also eager to transform from a fighter group to a government, ostensibly an ongoing endeavour, and forging relations beyond heavy reliance on Pakistan.

The Durand Line, a colonial-era boundary dividing the regions and communities between Afghanistan and what is now Pakistan, has never been formally recognised by any Afghan state after Pakistan's establishment in 1947. The Durand Line is internationally recognised as a border between the two countries, and Pakistan has fenced it almost entirely. Yet, in Afghanistan, the Durand Line has become an emotive issue because it divides Pashtuns on the two sides of the border.

The Taliban government in the 1990s did not endorse the Durand Line, and the current Taliban regime is following its predecessors. In Pakistan, this is seen as a nuisance and a challenge to the doctrine of Pakistan's 'strategic depth' in Afghanistan.

With the Taliban's success in Afghanistan, the armed rebellion arena has seemingly shifted to Pakistan. There has been a significant spike in militant attacks on Pakistani security and police forces since 2022 – particularly in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan provinces.

Most of the attacks are claimed by Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), the so-called Pakistan Taliban. TTP and Afghan Taliban carved symbiotic relations for years, sharing sanctuary, tactics and resources, often in Waziristan and other Pakistani regions bordering Afghanistan.

Pakistan treated the Afghan Taliban as 'friends' after 2001, partly to weaken any sense of cross-border Pashtun nationalism, and hoping to leverage its influence on the Taliban in developments within Afghanistan and in relations with the US. In 2011, Michael Mullen, the US military chief at the time, stated that the Haqqani Network – a key component of the Afghan Taliban – was a "veritable arm" of the Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI), Pakistan's powerful intelligence agency. Analysts predicted, as it was feared, that Pakistan's support for the Taliban to seize power in Afghanistan would lead to a 'Pyrrhic victory' with Pakistani fighter groups and other violent nonstate actors feeling emboldened, not weakened, as a result....

Red the full op-ed at Aljazeera