From Strategic Depth to Strategic Blowback: Pakistan, the Taliban, and the Unravelling of a Three-Decade Afghan Strategy

Pakistan believed a Taliban-led Afghanistan would secure its western frontier and cement its regional influence. Five years after the Taliban’s return, the evidence points in the opposite direction: rising militancy, deteriorating bilateral relations, and an Afghanistan pursuing its own national interests rather than Islamabad’s strategic ambitions.

Pakistan devoted over three decades and hefty political capital to cultivating the Taliban as an instrument of national strategy. The return of that movement to power in August 2021 ought, on Islamabad’s own terms, to have been a vindication, the culmination of what Pakistani military planners called “strategic depth,” the conviction that a friendly government in Kabul would secure Pakistan’s western border, exclude India from Afghan affairs, and give Islamabad access to Central Asian markets. What arrived instead was a cascade of failures that progressively dismantled every assumption the doctrine rested on.

The doctrine was never purely military in conception. It rested on a political premise: that ideological affinity and operational dependence would sustain compliance. Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence had cultivated the Taliban through sanctuary, logistics, and diplomatic recognition in the 1990s, and through selective shelter during the post-2001 decade, on the assumption that a movement so indebted to Islamabad would, once in power, behave accordingly. The origins of strategic depth are well documented.

Following the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan in 1979, the ISI of Pakistan was provided both the justification and the resources to construct proxy networks throughout Afghanistan. However, Pakistan’s ISI then funnelled CIA and Saudi funds toward ideologically conservative Islamist commanders rather than Pashtun-nationalist factions (Rashid 2000; Haqqani 2005). When the post-Soviet civil war discredited those factions, Pakistan backed the emerging Taliban movement, which offered discipline and willingness to open the Quetta-Kandahar trade corridor northward. In 1996, Pakistan became one of the only three states to recognise the Taliban Emirate. C. Christine Fair has described this as a structural feature of Pakistan’s strategic culture rather than a contingent policy choice (Fair 2014)—preserving the Taliban as a hedge against Indian influence in Kabul was, for the army, non-negotiable.

Table 1 | Evolution of Pakistan’s Afghanistan Strategy, 1979–2026

Sources: Rashid (2000); Haqqani (2005); Fair (2014); SIPRI; International Crisis Group. NOTE: TTP is Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan.

After 2001, the strategy entered its most contradictory phase. Officially a major non-NATO ally in the War on Terror, Pakistan simultaneously provided the Taliban leadership council with sanctuary and logistical cover because the army regarded the Taliban as too valuable a hedge to relinquish. When the Taliban returned to power in August 2021, ISI chief Lieutenant General Faiz Hameed arrived in Kabul within days. Prime Minister Imran Khan declared that Afghans had broken the shackles of slavery. The mood in Rawalpindi was triumph. Within eighteen months, it had become something closer to an alarm.

The reason is structural, not incidental. An insurgency has a different incentive structure from that of a government. A guerrilla movement relies on its sponsor for funds, shelter, and international legitimacy; it has every reason to keep the link stable. An ideal sovereign government is one that has domestic legitimacy, effectively manages internal struggles, and projects independence. After the Taliban’s takeover of Kabul, its priorities changed accordingly, most of which pointed away from Pakistani interests. This is common across the world and not unique to Afghanistan. The bulk of literature on Cold War proxy relations indicates that when non-state actors acquire territorial control, they quickly develop diverging interests from their sponsors (Rubin 2002; ICG 2024). The Pakistani case is unique because of how fast and complete the reversal has been.

Islamabad nurtured a proxy. It has become a state. Everything now sets them apart.

The collapse is illustrated in three dimensions:

The initial one is the TTP (Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan) problem. Pakistan was hoping that once the Taliban returned to power with Pakistan’s patronage, it would repay its debt by destroying TTP sanctuaries in Kunar and Nuristan, but the contrary happened. According to SATP (2024), Pakistan witnessed 521 terrorist attacks in 2024, which resulted in 852 deaths, a 23 percent increase from 2023, with the TTP being the main culprit.¹ The Taliban’s unwillingness to act against the TTP leadership is not a puzzle if you apply sovereign logic: clamping down on the TTP would play at home as capitulation to a foreign power; it would alienate fighters bound by two decades of shared jihad; and defectors would be directed towards IS-K, the Taliban’s most dangerous internal rival. In fact, whoever rules fractious Afghanistan must do so without submission to Pakistan.

Source: South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP), Pakistan Assessments 2018–2024 (satp.org). The fatality spike in 2021–22 follows TTP reunification in December 2021. See Notes section.

Table 2 | Pakistan’s Strategic Expectations vs. Actual Outcomes, 2021–2024

Sources: SATP (2024); MEA India (2023); World Bank Afghanistan Economic Monitor (2024); ICG Asia Report No. 316 (2024).

The second is the Durand Line. No Afghan government across monarchy, republic, communist state, or Islamist emirate has ever accepted the 1893 boundary as a permanent international border (Rubin 2002). Pakistan assumed that religious solidarity, and perhaps gratitude, would finally override this grievance. It did not. The Taliban have made Pashtun nationalist credentials a tool of domestic governance, openly rejecting the legitimacy of the fence Pakistan has constructed along roughly 90 percent of the 2,640-kilometre border.³ In 2024 and 2025, Taliban forces used heavy equipment to dismantle sections of that fence, provoking artillery exchanges that represented something historically without precedent: Pakistani forces in direct confrontation with an Afghan government that Islamabad itself had helped bring to power.

The third dimension is India. Pakistan’s core objective in Afghanistan was exclusion: the removal of Indian consulates from Jalalabad and Kandahar, the elimination of India’s developmental projects, and the consolidation of a Pakistani connectivity monopoly. The Taliban did close Indian consulates. However, India adjusted. In Kabul, Afghanistan, India has maintained a Technical Team to provide a functional diplomatic presence without formal recognition. It also provided over 50,000 metric tonnes of wheat assistance and vaccines through the MEA (India 2023). More consequentially, the Taliban have begun routing commerce through Iran’s Chabahar port—developed with Indian investment and now linked to Afghanistan by road and air corridor—precisely because Pakistani transit routes are periodically closed as a form of coercive pressure (ICG 2024; World Bank 2024). India has acquired, without declaration, the strategic access that Pakistan spent thirty years trying to prevent.

Note: Composite index (0–10); qualitative assessment only. Sources: MEA India (2023); World Bank (2024); ICG (2024); UNAMA (2024). See Notes section.

Table 3 | Regional Stakeholder Interests in Afghanistan

Sources: SIPRI; ICG Asia Report No. 316 (2024); UNAMA Annual Report (2024); Observer Research Foundation.

Pakistan’s military response has deepened rather than resolved these problems. Operation Azm-e-Istehkam in 2024, combined with air strikes on TTP positions in Khost and Paktika, produced civilian casualties, a formal diplomatic rupture with Kabul, and continued documentation by the UN Security Council Monitoring Team of Afghan territory being used for TTP command and logistics (UN Security Council 2024). Kinetic force has a familiar paradox in this context: it degrades physical capacity in the short run while generating political costs that expand the safe-haven problem over time.

Where this leaves Pakistan strategically is a question that three distinct trajectories can illuminate. In the most probable scenario, the current dynamic persists—periodic air strikes, episodic border violence, steady TTP attrition, and gradual Indian soft-power consolidation. The second possibility is a managed cold peace driven by economic interdependence: Afghanistan depends on Pakistani pharmaceuticals and import routes; Pakistan needs transit revenues. This produces functional coexistence without structural resolution. The third, least probable but most constructive, involves China using its economic stakes in both CPEC and the Aynak copper concession to broker a security-for-investment arrangement within an SCO framework. Each trajectory carries its own logic; none resembles Rawalpindi’s August 2021 expectations.

The policy lesson is as clear as it is uncomfortable for the Pakistani establishment. Coercion has not worked, the transit monopoly is being eroded, and air strikes produce diplomatic damage that outlasts any tactical gain. The realistic path forward requires treating the Taliban as a sovereign government with permanent interests of its own—decoupling trade from security demands, seeking multilateral institutional frameworks for the TTP question, and abandoning the premise that a historically nationalist Afghan polity can be managed through the logic of dependence. On India, the more useful question is no longer how to exclude New Delhi but whether Pakistani and Indian interests in Afghan stability are sufficiently aligned to permit parallel engagement without zero-sum competition. They probably are, if Islamabad can bring itself to see it that way.

Pakistan’s Afghanistan policy is collapsing not because the Taliban failed to fulfil their obligations. It is collapsing because they succeeded and, in succeeding, became what they always fundamentally were: an Afghan sovereign actor pursuing Afghan interests. Islamabad cultivated a proxy. It got a state. The difference is everything.

1.  On SATP methodology: The South Asia Terrorism Portal records incidents through a network of field correspondents and open-source media monitoring. Annual figures may vary slightly across SATP publications due to retrospective data cleaning. The 2024 figures (521 attacks, 852 fatalities) are drawn from the Pakistan Assessment 2024 page as accessed April 2025.

2.  On the Chart 2 composite index: The four-dimension engagement score is a qualitative comparative assessment constructed by the author based on publicly documented indicators from the sources cited. It is not a cardinal measurement and should be read as a directional comparison only.

3.  On the Durand Line border fencing figure: Pakistani military officials have cited 90 percent completion of fencing along the approximately 2,640-kilometre border as of 2023 in multiple press statements. This figure has not been independently verified by an international monitoring body and should be treated as an official Pakistani estimate.

Bibliography

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