The Rise of Afghan Autonomy and Pakistan’s Grip Slipping Away
A return to the zero-sum mentality that dominated earlier epochs — where Kabul was binary: allied or hostile — will not suffice.
For decades Islamabad regarded Afghanistan as a strategic depth and a zone of influence — a buffer to be shaped, not simply neighboured. That assumption has been upended. What was once a relationship of patronage and leverage has become a volatile adversarial space in which Pakistan’s ability to shape outcomes is eroding fast.
The proximate causes are familiar: the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan’s (TTP) resurgence, the Afghan Taliban’s evolving priorities, and renewed regional manoeuvring — but the deeper story is institutional: Pakistan’s coercive and diplomatic instruments have less purchase in Kabul than they did a decade ago, and the result is a dangerous ambiguity for peace along a porous frontier.
The unraveling of influence
Pakistan’s influence was built on long-term ties with elements of the Afghan insurgency, cross-border sanctuaries for proxies and a security apparatus that assumed it could cajole Kabul.
After the Afghan Taliban’s return to power in 2021 Islamabad briefly believed those ties would translate into control over insurgent groups that threaten Pakistan’s internal security, especially the TTP. That belief has been proven increasingly fragile.
Since 2023 and into 2024–25, the TTP has consolidated, carrying out a wave of attacks inside Pakistan and openly operating from Afghan territory, according to Pakistani officials and independent monitors — a reality Islamabad blames on Kabul’s unwillingness or inability to rein in militants.
The rhetoric has hardened into kinetic confrontation. October and November 2025 saw some of the deadliest border clashes since 2021, with both sides trading heavy accusations of cross-border strikes and of harbouring militants.
Pakistan’s military leadership framed the dispute in stark terms: peace depends on the Taliban preventing attacks originating on Afghan soil — an implicit admission that Islamabad’s old levers of influence are no longer decisive.
Kabul, for its part, denies institutional complicity while insisting it is a sovereign government contending with its own domestic pressures and complex local actors.
Analysts have been blunt. “Pakistan misread the Taliban and lost peace on the frontier,” wrote commentators after a string of confrontations, arguing Islamabad had underestimated the Afghan leadership’s need to assert independence from Islamabad and to cultivate alternative patrons and legitimacy.
The practical consequence is a loss of predictive power: Islamabad cannot reliably forecast which militant actors Kabul will tolerate or contest, and therefore cannot control the border dynamics that have long defined its security calculus.
New players, old grievances
The decline of unilateral influence does not mean Pakistan has been entirely sidelined; rather, the relationship has been recalibrated amid a broader regional realignment.
China and Turkey have moved to mediate and cajole, economic corridors and diplomatic initiatives have proliferated, and even India has quietly sought to re-engage with Kabul, reopening channels that complicate Islamabad’s calculations.
These shifts give the Afghan Taliban alternatives for diplomatic engagement and economic cooperation that do not depend on Pakistan’s patronage.
Inside Pakistan, the domestic politics of counter-terrorism and the resurging profile of the Pakistani Taliban have also altered official thinking. Policymakers face a grim choice: assertive military options across the border that risk escalation and international censure, or a patient diplomatic strategy that depends on a Kabul willing and able to act.
The ambiguity has produced episodic violence rather than a durable settlement; ceasefires have been brokered and violated, and confidence-building measures are fragile. Observers note that Islamabad’s traditional tools — patronage networks, cross-border pressure and economic inducements — are necessary but not sufficient to resolve the multi-layered conflicts now playing out.
The human cost is immediate. Civilians on both sides of the Durand Line have borne the brunt of the violence: displacement, disrupted trade and a renewal of mistrust that undercuts any long-term reconciliation.
The border is not simply a line on a map; it is a lived geography of interdependence and grievance. As violence spikes, international actors — from Qatar and Turkey to regional capitals — are scrambling to re-establish mediation channels even as the ground reality resists neat diplomatic fixes.
What comes next
If Pakistan’s grip is slipping, the strategic implication is that South Asia’s security architecture must be rethought. A return to the zero-sum mentality that dominated earlier epochs — where Kabul was binary: allied or hostile — will not suffice.
Instead, any viable approach must accept multiplicity: a Taliban government with agency, non-state militant actors with transnational reach and regional powers willing to assert influence through economic and diplomatic means. This requires Pakistan to invest in multilateral mechanisms, to deepen intelligence and law-enforcement cooperation that respects Afghan sovereignty, and to concede that punitive cross-border strikes are not a sustainable substitute for political solutions.
The stakes transcend bilateral rivalry. A durable peace on the frontier matters to refugee flows, counter-terrorism, narcotics trafficking and the broader stability of a region that is again the focus of great-power competition.
If Islamabad wants to protect its core security interests it must adapt to an Afghan polity that no longer responds predictably to old incentives. That adaptation will be neither quick nor comfortable, but it is necessary: failing to do so will leave both countries mired in a costly oscillation of strikes, reprisals and diplomatic ruptures that benefits no one.
As one regional analyst put it, the old script for influence has been burned; the question for Pakistan is whether it can write a new, more cooperative one before the next conflagration.
Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not reflect Milli Chronicle’s point-of-view.
