Pakistan’s double game in Afghanistan waits on reckoning

On Saturday evening, October 11, 2025, Pakistan carried out an unprecedented airstrike on the Afghan capital, Kabul, aiming to target a leader of TTP (Tahrik-e-Taliban Pakistan), formerly seen by Pakistan as ‘good Taliban’ proxy militants. The attack ignited a fierce retaliatory cross-border skirmish by the Taliban along the disputed Durand Line, which divides the two neighbouring countries, resulting in scores of fatalities on both sides. Pakistan is hoping that by using its renewed ties with the US, it will succeed in dragging the US back to the Afghan theatre of war to restrain the rising internal insurgency.

Mediated by Qatar and Turkey, both sides mutually agreed to an immediate ceasefire in Doha. However, the third round of the peace negotiations in Istanbul collapsed.

Both sides, guns a-blazing, resumed exchanging fire for a single day last week.

Given a rollercoaster relationship between the Pakistani military and the Taliban since the latter regained control of Kabul in 2021, neither side appears to maintain the ceasefire afloat for long.

The underlying root cause of the strained relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan stems from the 2,670-kilometre Durand Line, which was drawn during British India, cutting off heartlessly Pashtun communities, villages, cemeteries and mosques.

Since its creation in 1947, Pakistan has maintained that it inherited the Portugal-sized Pashtun tribal belt from the British Raj, viewing the Durand Line as an immutable border. However, Afghanistan contests the legitimacy of the de facto border. Each subsequent Afghan government, including the Taliban, has refrained from acknowledging the legitimacy of the Durand Line.

The mere mention of a border with Pakistan evokes a deep emotional response within the Afghan psyche. During the negotiation leading up to the ceasefire, the tense atmosphere was so palpable that, according to the Taliban’s persistence, the Qatari foreign office removed the term ‘border’ from the text of the truce.

Following an agreement with the protectorate king of Afghanistan, Amir Abdul Rahman Khan, the Foreign Secretary of British India, Sir Mortimer Durand, delineated the boundary between Afghanistan and British India in 1893. The primary objective of drawing the Durand Line was not to create a border between the two sovereign nations, but rather to determine the administrative boundaries between the Afghan king and the British Raj.

“The Durand Line was an agreement to define the respective spheres of influence of the British government and the Amir (Abdul Rahman). Its object was to preserve and to obtain the Amir’s acceptance of the status quo,” the Viceroy, Lord Elgin, wrote in 1896.

Similarly, according to his biographer, Percy Sykes, Durand himself acknowledged during negotiations with Amir in The Right Sir Mortimer Durand that the British Empire intended to bring areas of Afghanistan under its political control. He clarified: “The tribes on the Indian side are not to be considered as within British territory. They are simply under our influence in the technical sense of the term, that is to say, so far as the Amir is concerned and as far as they submit to our influence or we exert it.”

The geopolitical significance of the Durand Line has been widely acknowledged globally. As Lord Curzon, the former British Viceroy, aptly noted in 1907, “‘the razor’s edge [Durand Line] on which hang suspended the modern issues of war or peace, of life or death of nations.’”

This longstanding border dispute has never been as explosive as it is today. The shifting geopolitical dynamics in South and Central Asia pose the risk of a full-blown war between Afghanistan and Pakistan at any moment.