Afghanistan and Pakistan Square Off

The most worrisome flash point in South Asia today lies not between the nuclear-armed rivals India and Pakistan but to the west, along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. A simmering conflict between these two neighbors now threatens to explode—with damaging consequences for the wider region.

For nearly 20 years, Pakistan has suffered numerous attacks from terrorists belonging to the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, a militant group that aims to overthrow Pakistan’s government and turn the country into an Islamist emirate. Islamabad blames the Taliban regime in Afghanistan for harboring TTP militants and allowing them to launch attacks on Pakistan from Afghan territory. Terrorist violence has spiked in Pakistan since the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan in 2021, with militants often targeting security forces near the border.

According to the Pakistan Institute for Conflict and Security Studies, Pakistan experienced its deadliest year in a decade in 2025, with most of the violence caused by terrorist groups, including the TTP. Another Pakistani research organization, the Pakistan Institute of Peace Studies, tallied 699 terrorist attacks in 2025 (a 34 percent increase from 2024) that killed 1,034 people (a 21 percent increase from the previous year). Umar Media, the TTP’s official outlet, claims the group carried out 3,573 attacks and killed 3,481 people in 2025. Those figures are likely exaggerated. Still, the overall upward trend in attacks is deeply concerning. And it is made worse by the fact that the TTP can draw on increasingly sophisticated weaponry, including drones. Pakistan could very well face more devastating and deadly attacks in the near future.

In October, Pakistan carried out airstrikes on a terrorist convoy in Kabul and also hit TTP targets in Afghanistan’s Paktika Province. Those assaults precipitated retaliatory Taliban attacks on Pakistani border posts, which then led to another round of Pakistani strikes in Afghanistan. Subsequent talks mediated by Qatar and Turkey failed to secure a formal Taliban commitment to curb the TTP, although they did win a temporary cease-fire. The most recent round of talks, this time brokered by Saudi Arabia, took place at the end of November but made little progress. Several days later, Pakistani and Taliban forces exchanged fire, killing five Afghan civilians and wounding several more civilians on both sides of the border.

In recent weeks, both the Taliban and the Pakistani military have escalated a war of words. In early January, the chief Taliban spokesperson, Zabihullah Mujahid, accused Pakistan of working with outside powers, including the United States, to destabilize Afghanistan. “Pakistan should not harbor dreams of dominance over Afghanistan,” he warned. Several days later, Pakistan’s army spokesperson, Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry, denounced the Taliban in a long press conference, declaring that terrorists across the board, including the Islamic State (also known as ISIS), al-Qaeda, and other regional militant groups, “all have one father—the Afghan Taliban.” (Ironically, Pakistan itself sponsored the Taliban from the group’s inception in the 1990s until the end of the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan in 2021). In recent days, there have been indications that Pakistan may be planning an offensive in the Tirah Valley, a TTP stronghold in the northwest of the country near the border with Afghanistan. Thousands of people have evacuated the area. Pakistani Defense Minister Khawaja Asif has denied that a military campaign is imminent, but he did acknowledge that hundreds of TTP fighters are living in Tirah and that the area could be subject to future Pakistani operations.

With the Taliban rejecting Pakistani demands to rein in the TTP, and with Pakistan committed to rooting out the terrorist group, this conflict looks likely to intensify. It has also proved resistant to outside mediation efforts. If Afghanistan and Pakistan truly do come to blows, the fighting could not just destabilize the two countries; it could spur militant attacks against Americans and American interests in South Asia, cause chaos in the wider region, and even trigger further conflict between India and Pakistan.

TIME TO CHOOSE

Neither the Taliban nor Pakistan has an incentive to de-escalate, which increases the risk of all-out war. The Taliban are closely tied to the TTP, and they don’t typically turn on their militant allies: after the 9/11 attacks, the Taliban refused to give up al-Qaeda even when facing a U.S. military invasion. Part of that calculation has to do with maintaining cohesion among the Taliban’s various factions. If the Taliban expel or use force against the TTP, they risk sparking internal rebellions within their ranks and exposing gaps between the more pragmatic political leadership in Kabul and the supreme leadership, which is largely composed of hard-line mullahs in the southern city of Kandahar. The Taliban also fear that abandoning the TTP could drive the group into the arms of Islamic State Khorasan (ISIS-K), the fearsome ISIS affiliate in Afghanistan and an avowed adversary of the Taliban. So far, Taliban members have maintained a united front in defense of the TTP.

The Taliban also have political incentives to ignore Pakistan’s demands. Given that much of the Afghan public isn’t fond of Pakistan—because, ironically, Pakistan once sponsored and sheltered the Taliban insurgency—the group actually gains legitimacy at home by defying Islamabad. If the Taliban’s continued intransigence causes additional Pakistani airstrikes, Afghans will rally around the flag and support the Taliban regime.

Pakistan, meanwhile, is in no mood for conciliation. Its military—which has suffered the brunt of the TTP’s attacks—dictates Pakistan’s Afghanistan policy and feels betrayed by the Taliban. Earlier talks with the TTP collapsed when the group made demands unacceptable to the Pakistani state, such as asking for sharia law to be imposed across the country and for the withdrawal of Pakistani troops from areas near the border, which would have effectively ceded territory to the TTP.

The Taliban insist that Afghanistan’s sovereignty is inviolable.

But most alarming to Pakistan is the Taliban’s new embrace of India. During the 1990s, New Delhi was hostile to the Taliban and supported their chief adversary, the Northern Alliance, which eventually swept to power in Kabul in 2001 on the coattails of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. India then invested in various infrastructure projects and expanded its diplomatic presence in the country, much to the vexation of Pakistan. The Taliban’s return to power in 2021 seemed to augur the end of significant Indian involvement in Afghanistan. But the Taliban’s foreign minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi, spent a week in India in October and held a series of high-level meetings, including one with his Indian counterpart, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar. Afterward, Muttaqi proclaimed that “the future of India-Afghanistan relations seems very bright,” and India fully reopened its embassy in Kabul for the first time since 2021. Commercial ties between the two countries may also be growing again. In November, Haji Nooruddin Azizi, the Taliban’s commerce minister, met Indian government officials and business leaders in New Delhi and discussed trade and investment possibilities. The two sides announced the establishment of a “joint chamber of commerce and industries” that would foster a greater commercial partnership. In December, the Taliban’s health minister, Noor Jalal Jalali, became the third top Taliban official to visit India in three months.

On December 8, Asim Munir, the head of Pakistan’s armed forces and the country’s most powerful leader, delivered an ominous warning: the Taliban, he said in a speech to military officers, must choose between having ties with Pakistan or having ties with the TTP. Were they to choose the TTP, Munir implied, Pakistan could resort to greater punitive actions against the Taliban regime.

ESCALATION RISKS

In principle, Pakistan has several options. It can intensify kinetic operations against TTP fighters on its side of the border—a step it may take in the Tirah Valley—or it can use its economic leverage over Kabul, including threatening to seize Taliban assets and property in Pakistan or cutting off trade with Afghanistan altogether. The problem for Pakistan, however, is that it has already done much of this but to no avail. Pakistan’s military has previously staged offensives in Tirah and the surrounding areas, with no lasting results. It shut down trade in October, and while that led to a modest decrease in attacks, it hasn’t prompted the Taliban to end or reduce its sponsorship of the TTP. If the TTP ramps up attacks again, the only real option left for Pakistan may be to up the ante by resorting to more escalatory and high-risk measures, such as ground-based incursions to strike TTP targets across the border in Afghanistan.

Any such escalation would have alarming implications for the region. The Taliban insist that Afghanistan’s sovereignty is inviolable. Sustained Pakistani cross-border strikes, especially if carried out deep into Afghanistan, could provoke Taliban-sponsored militant attacks all across Pakistan. The Taliban command the loyalty of a wide variety of militants and are able to recruit fresh radicals. For the TTP, which was inspired by the Taliban victory in Afghanistan in 2021 and is keen to replicate it in Pakistan, such a campaign would advance its plans of unseating the current Pakistani government and turning the country into an Islamist emirate.

A car bomb attack in Islamabad in November, which killed 12 people, could be an ominous portent. It was the first attack on civilians in the Pakistani capital in a decade. Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, an especially brutal faction of the TTP, claimed it carried out the bombing before denying responsibility—likely because the TTP in recent years has insisted it doesn’t target civilians. But Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, while remaining relatively quiet over the last few years, previously targeted civilians across the country, including an Easter attack in a Lahore park in 2016 that killed 75 people and an assault on a U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency delegation in Peshawar in 2016 that killed two U.S. consular staff members.

Neither the Taliban nor Pakistan has an incentive to de-escalate

Between 2007 and 2014, the TTP and other militants staged thousands of attacks on security forces and civilians across Pakistan, including in all major cities. More than 5,000 security forces and 16,000 civilians lost their lives. Escalating Afghan-Pakistani tensions could further inflame Pakistan’s greatest terrorist threat since that long, bloody period.

Escalation could also destabilize Afghanistan and heighten international terrorism risks. Were Pakistan to formally turn on the Taliban, Islamabad might create and arm anti-Taliban groups, target Taliban leaders, and even sponsor efforts to overthrow the Taliban regime. Fresh conflict in Afghanistan would fuel the violent and chaotic conditions that benefit militants there—including ISIS-K, which in recent years has staged attacks as far afield as Iran and Russia and had plots foiled in Europe and the United States.

Trouble on Pakistan’s western frontier could also cause problems on its eastern border. Pakistan has accused both the Taliban and India of sponsoring militant groups active in its territory. With surges in attacks in Pakistan coinciding with warming ties between India and the Taliban, Islamabad could very well accuse Kabul and New Delhi of collusion. Accordingly, Pakistan, through its own proxies, could look to lash out at India—and risk a fresh clash with its giant neighbor. After the two countries fought in May 2025, New Delhi warned that future terrorist attacks in India would be treated as acts of war.

SKIN IN THE GAME

Given the intransigence of both Pakistan and the Taliban, outside powers have struggled to lower tensions. The efforts of the Qataris, the Saudis, and the Turks—which Pakistan has welcomed—have produced only limited negotiation achievements, with the two sides agreeing to uphold a cease-fire. China may be the best bet for an external mediator. It has skin in the game (the TTP has attacked Chinese nationals and investments in Pakistan), leverage (the Taliban seek Chinese capital for infrastructure investments), and precedent (in August 2025, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi met with his Taliban and Pakistani counterparts in Kabul, and Wang pledged to work with Islamabad and Kabul to tackle terrorism). Beijing has called for de-escalation and dialogue. The Taliban, however, may not see China as a neutral intermediary, owing to China’s deep alliance with Pakistan.

As a result, greater strife between Afghanistan and Pakistan remains a distinct possibility. Such a conflict could be bloody, displace thousands of people, destabilize the broader region, and spur global terrorism. The world can’t afford to look away.

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