Pakistan’s relationship with Afghanistan has deteriorated and sunk to its lowest point in years. It is marked by constant recriminations, recurrent border skirmishes and a growing sense of strategic frustration in Islamabad and Rawalpindi. This frustration at deterioration was laid bare on December 10, when Pakistan’s Chief of Defence Forces and Army Chief Field Marshal Asim Munir issued a blunt warning to the Afghan Taliban: Kabul must choose between its ties with Pakistan and its alleged support for the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP.

The statement, delivered at the National Ulema Conference in Islamabad with religious leaders of every persuasion in attendance, was remarkable not merely for its content but for what it revealed about Pakistan’s failing Afghan policy. Rarely has a Pakistani military chief addressed the Taliban in Kabul with such open coercion. The warning, which is essentially an ultimatum, signalled that Pakistan’s long-standing strategy of influencing Kabul through ideological affinity, diplomatic engagement, occasional cross-border strikes and increased deportation of Afghan refugees has run aground. Having failed to secure compliance from Afghan Taliban through these measures, Pakistan appears to have now started resorting to threats afresh with concurrence of religious leadership which otherwise maintain ties with their counterparts in Afghanistan.

Field Marshal Munir’s warning to the Afghan Taliban was framed as a matter of national security. Pakistan, he said, could not tolerate the continued presence of TTP fighters operating from Afghan soil, repeated the accusations that Kabul was shielding and sponsoring the group to conduct attacks against Pakistan. It was a reiteration of Islamabad’s recent messaging that continued ties with the TTP would come at the cost of its goodwill.

But ultimatums are rarely signs of strength in diplomacy. They are more often admissions of failure. For more than three years since the Taliban returned to power in Kabul, Pakistan has attempted, through back-channel talks, intelligence coordination, religious mediation and cross-border military strikes to pressurise the Afghan leadership to curb TTP’s activities across the Durand Line. These persuasive and coercive measures have produced little as the Afghan Taliban have recurrently rebuffed Pakistani claims of TTP’s presence inside its borders. Instead, they have insisted that the issue is Pakistan’s internal problem and hence be not dragged in this fight against those with whom they share ideological roots.

Asim Munir’s public warning thus underscores that Islamabad no longer believes it can influence Kabul through familiarity or patronage. The irony, of course, is that Pakistan once imagined the Taliban’s return as a strategic triumph. Islamabad was among the Taliban’s most enthusiastic backers during the two decades of the American-led war in Afghanistan. The movement survived militarily and politically in large part because it enjoyed sanctuary, logistical support and diplomatic advocacy from across the border. When the Taliban returned to Kabul in August 2021, many in Pakistan’s military establishment saw vindication.

The expectation was straightforward: a friendly regime in Kabul would provide Pakistan with “strategic depth,” limit India’s influence in Afghanistan and cooperate closely on security matters, including suppressing anti-Pakistan militant groups.

But that assumption was deeply flawed. The Taliban of 2021 which returned triumphant to Kabul was not the Taliban of 1996. They returned to power not as an isolated militia but as rulers seeking international legitimacy, economic survival and regional balance. Far from acting as a Pakistani client, the new Taliban leadership set out to assert Afghanistan’s autonomy by cultivating relations with China, Iran, Russia and even India, while refusing to subordinate its security decisions to Pakistani demands.

Most critically, the Taliban drew a red line around the TTP. Bound by ideological kinship, personal ties and a shared narrative of jihad, they showed little appetite for confronting the group at Pakistan’s behest. In doing so, they punctured Pakistan’s long-held belief that the influence earned through its proxy support for terrorists and militants could be seamlessly converted into state leverage.

The Pakistan Taliban today has emerged as the most serious internal security threat having engaged in a sustained campaign of violence against military and state targets. This has persisted despite Pakistan Army’s succession of counterterrorism operations such as Zarb-e-Azb (2014), Radd-ul-Fasaad (2017) and most recently Azm-i-Istehkam (2024). Instead, the TTP seems to have emerged more powerful with these operations merely disrupting its networks temporarily. However, what it succeeded in doing was exact a heavy toll on civilian populations, particularly in the former Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), now part of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

Pakistan Army stands accused of employing collective punishments, razing entire villages in Waziristan which has rendered thousands of people being displaced and homeless. Moreover, thousands of Pakhtun civilians have been subjected to state enforced disappearances. As such, far from eliminating TTP insurgency, these actions deepened grievances and fed cycles of radicalization.

Yet Pakistan’s security establishment continues to frame the TTP problem primarily as an external one wherein it blames Afghanistan for harboring these groups rather than reckoning with the domestic roots of the insurgency. Such a deflection ignores an uncomfortable truth that Pakistan helped create the conditions that allowed the TTP to emerge.

Interestingly, for years, Pakistan even distinguished between “good” and “bad” Taliban with those serving its regional objectives and those who challenged the Pakistani state. TTP constituents such as the faction led by Hafiz Gul Bahadur were tolerated, and at times supported, so long as they refrained from attacking Pakistani forces and focused instead on Afghanistan.

This selective counterterrorism policy collapsed spectacularly after the 2014 massacre at the Army Public School in Peshawar, when the TTP murdered more than 130 children. By that point, however, the damage was done. Networks had hardened, ideologies had spread and the line between allies and adversaries had vanished. Many TTP fighters simply crossed into Afghanistan during Pakistani military operations, regrouped and returned stronger.

To now accuse Afghanistan of being solely responsible for the TTP is to deny this history. The insurgency did not originate in Kabul. It grew out of Pakistan’s own strategic choices, governance failures and reliance on coercion over political reform in its border regions.

Seen in this light, Asim Munir’s warning also reflects another enduring pattern in Pakistan’s security thinking which is a preference for coercion over introspection. While it is true that threatening Afghanistan may offer momentary domestic reassurance, it is unlikely to yield anything tangible as far as forcing Afghan Taliban into submission is concerned.  If Pakistan truly wants to address the TTP challenge, it will need to look inward and reconsider its counterinsurgency tactics, restore civilian governance in conflict-hit regions and abandon the terrorist proxies that have repeatedly turned into liabilities.

It appears that the army chief’s warning to the Afghan Taliban was meant to project resolve in the gathering of religious leaders. Yet, it exposed strategic exhaustion and revealed a Pakistan that overestimated its influence, underestimated Afghan nationalism and remains unwilling to accept responsibility for policies that have backfired with devastating consistency.

While blaming Afghanistan may be politically convenient, it will not make Pakistan safer as the TTP is not an external problem to be outsourced to Kabul and is a consequence of choices made in Rawalpindi over decades. Until Pakistan confronts that reality, ultimatums like these will continue to replace diplomacy and threats will substitute for solutions that were never seriously pursued.

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