Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid stands with the flag of the Islamic Emirate
Aizaz Ahmad Chaudhry, a former foreign secretary and current director general of the Institute of Strategic Studies in Islamabad, has written in daily Dawn about how—during an Afghanistan-Pakistan cricket match in Sharjah earlier this month—Afghan players tangled with their Pakistani counterparts on the field and Afghan spectators “exhibited such a strong dislike of Pakistan.” He mentioned past incidents when British-Indian and Afghan warriors violated each other’s territory as well as how Kabul’s refusal to accept the Durand Line border between the neighboring countries is tantamount to not accepting Pakistan with its current western border.
“After 1947, in Afghan narratives, Pakistan came to epitomize the ‘enemy’ that the Afghans must fight to assert their nationhood and reclaim the lands that they thought were theirs, notwithstanding the fact that Pakistan had not negotiated the Durand Line and only inherited it from British India as the border with Afghanistan,” he wrote. “It thus came as no surprise that Afghanistan became the only country to oppose the membership of Pakistan to the United Nations, though it withdrew its objections subsequently. In later years, the Pashtunistan issue was raised by some Afghan rulers, disregarding the fact that Pashtuns on the Pakistan side of the border were more numerous than in Afghanistan, which in fact is a multi-ethnic society.”
The crux of the matter today is that there is a Taliban government in Kabul which gives refuge to members of the Pakistani Taliban guilty of crimes of terrorism inside Pakistani territory. In addition to members of Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, Kabul also gives refuge to an Islamic movement from Uzbekistan. Pakistan fought the Afghan war against the Soviet Union for the Afghan people, over 6 million of whom were to take refuge in Pakistan with 3 million still remaining on Pakistani soil. Non-Afghan rulers before the Taliban government took over Kabul after years of their stay inside Pakistan were mindful of the delicacy of the relationship with Islamabad; but it is only the Taliban government that ignores Pakistan’s plaints about the TTP sheltering on their soil and violating the Durand Line to target Pakistani forces, killing on average 20 Pakistani soldiers per month. Despite what is happening on the ground, Pakistani leaders like Imran Khan continue to speak highly of the Taliban and stand by Afghanistan in its current crisis of Afghan ethnic groups—Tajiks, Uzbeks, etc—fleeing to the north to avoid being persecuted.
The nexus between Kabul and the Pakistani Taliban taking refuge on Afghan territory and attacking inside Pakistan is a lethal phenomenon and has literally destroyed the effectiveness of the “fence” that Islamabad wisely erected on the Durand Line in anticipation of what the Taliban would do to “join” the erstwhile tribal areas of Pakistan with Afghanistan. It was most unwise of Pakistan to allow the tribal areas to remain without proper governance, causing a dearth of proper administration that led to Pashtuns leaving the tribal areas to seek livelihood in Karachi, which today boasts the largest urban Pashtun population in the world.
The Pakistani Taliban—not the Pashtun as people—have been against the country in which they live. And they are being backed by the ruling Taliban in Afghanistan who don’t regard Pakistan as a friendly neighbor. In 2012, the Taliban’s top spokesman, Ehsanullah Ehsan, told international media that a Taliban attack on policemen in Lahore, killing 10, was carried out by his outfit because “they (the policemen) were involved in the torturing of Taliban fighters.” Today, despite Imran Khan’s optimism, Pakistan expects more trouble from Afghanistan, and tackling it is not going to be easy.