A War Decades in the Making
In November 1893, a British diplomat named Mortimer Durand sat down in Kabul with Afghan Emir Abdur Rahman Khan and drew a line through a map. The line ran 2,640 kilometres straight through the Pashtun heartland in Afghanistan's east and south, cutting across villages, family compounds, and centuries-old trade routes, without consulting the people who lived there. The Emir had tried to warn the British beforehand, telling them that if they separated the Pashtuns from Afghanistan, those people would serve neither side. Whoever held them, would spend their entire tenure fighting them. The British did not listen and drew the line anyway, and on February 27, 2026, Pakistan's Defence Minister Khawaja Asif signaled a major escalation with the country on the other side of it. On February 6, 2026, a suicide bomber walked into the Khadija Tul Kubra mosque in Islamabad during Friday prayers and detonated his vest, killing 32 worshippers and injuring 170 others, the deadliest attack in the capital since the Marriott Hotel bombing in 2008. On February 16, an explosives-laden vehicle rammed a security checkpoint in Bajaur, killing 11 soldiers and a child. Pakistan had been demanding for months that Kabul act against the militant groups operating from Afghan territory. Kabul had not, so on February 22, Pakistani jets struck camps in Nangarhar, Paktika, and Khost. The Taliban retaliated with drone strikes and border attacks, and Pakistan responded by striking Kabul itself, the first time Pakistani aircraft had ever flown over the Afghan capital in a combat role. Most people outside Pakistan saw this as sudden, but it wasn’t,and it wasn’t even particularly surprising to anyone who had been paying attention to where this relationship had been heading for the past thirty years, or for that matter, the past one-thirty.
Afghanistan-Pakistan border Weaveravel, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The Durand Line is where any account of this conflict has to start, because it is the disagreement that has sat at the centre of the relationship since the relationship began. Afghanistan was the only UN member state to vote against Pakistan's admission to the United Nations in 1947, and that single vote was a statement of position that every Afghan government, from the monarchy to the communists to the mujahideen to the Taliban, has maintained ever since. The position is that the Durand Line is a colonial imposition, it divided the Pashtun people without their consent, and Afghanistan does not recognise it as a permanent international border. When the Taliban returned to power in 2021, they repeated exactly this, stating that the border fencing Pakistan had been constructing for years had separated families and would not be accepted. Pakistan disagrees, and international law broadly supports its position, but international law and reality rarely align along that border, and the Pashtun communities on both sides of it have never organised their lives around it.
When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, Pakistan found itself at the centre of a superpower conflict it hadn’t started. The CIA and Saudi Arabia poured money and weapons into the resistance through the ISI, and the infrastructure of training camps, weapons depots, and ideologically charged madrassas along the border grew into a vast cross-border infrastructure, and when the Soviets withdrew, that infrastructure did not disappear with them. The man most responsible for turning what remained into deliberate policy wasNaseerullah Babar, Pakistan's Interior Minister from 1993 to 1996, who recruited, trained, and armed madrassa students from Pakistan's tribal belt to form the core of what became the Taliban, reportedly calling these fighters "my children." Pakistan was one of only three countries to formally recognize the Taliban regime after it captured Kabul in 1996, and by 2001 was providing it with advisers, fuel, and manpower, all in the service of "strategic depth," the belief that a friendly government in Kabul would prevent Pakistan from being encircled by India on both its eastern and western borders.
When the Taliban entered Kabul in August 2021, there were people in Pakistan's security establishment who were visibly pleased, because by one reading, the strategic depth policy had finally worked, and a government that Pakistan had helped create and train through twenty years of American pressure was now running Afghanistan. Within months, TTP attacks inside Pakistan increased dramatically, rising by 28 percent in 2022 and by 79 percent in the first six months of 2023. The Taliban refused to act against the TTP, refused to recognise the Durand Line, and refused to extradite TTP commanders, and by 2025 more than 2,400 people had been killed in attacks in just the first three quarters of the year. The same fighters Pakistan had trained were now killing Pakistani soldiers.
Taliban members celebrating on the anniversary of their victory in Kabul, August 2022
The Taliban's position in response to all of this has been consistent; they insist the TTP is Pakistan's internal problem, born from Pakistan's own policies, and that Kabul cannot be dragged into a fight against people with whom they share ideological roots. Pakistan made this exact argument to American officials for twenty years when they demanded action against Taliban sanctuaries on Pakistani soil, and the Taliban learned.
Pakistan has tried a range of measures short of what it did in February. Ceasefires collapsed, Qatar-mediated talks stalled, and counterterrorism operations including Zarb-e-Azb in 2014, Radd-ul-Fasaad in 2017, and Azm-i-Istehkam in 2024 disrupted TTP networks temporarily but left the group more organised each time it regrouped. Pakistan deported hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees, which worsened relations with Kabul without reducing TTP activity, and the February 2026 strikes were the seventh time Pakistan had carried out airstrikes in Afghanistan since the Taliban took power in 2021, with the TTP continuing operations through all of them.
The most likely outcome, analysts say, is temporary de-escalation followed by more of the same. Pakistan has airpower and a strong military, and the Taliban have no air force or conventional military capacity that could match Pakistan in open battle, butthe US and the USSR both had boots on the ground in Afghanistan, conducted thousands of strikes, and eventually left, and every strike that kills Afghan civilians strengthens the Taliban's domestic position and makes any negotiated arrangement harder to reach than the one before it.
Former US President Joe Biden discussing the fall of Kabul with the National Security Council on 18 August 2021
It’s unclear what Pakistan does from here, and likely unclear in Islamabad as well. The Durand Line will still not be accepted, the TTP won’t be surrendered, and the Taliban have consistently prioritised their own internal cohesion above everything else, meaning acting against the TTP would risk fracturing the very movement Pakistan spent thirty years building. Pakistan's economy is under serious strain, and its military is fighting a counterinsurgency at home while trying to coerce a neighbouring state through airpower, and none of those things are going well. The Emir warned the British in 1893 that this was what would happen if they drew that line through his people's land, and he was right, yet the British ignored him. Now, Pakistan has gotten what followed.