At dawn on a cool October morning, officials in Islamabad and Kabul performed a rare ritual in the history of their troubled frontier: they agreed to keep talking.
After five days of tense exchanges in Istanbul, complete with diplomatic walkouts, late-night interventions by Turkish and Qatari mediators, and negotiators nearly boarding flights home, Pakistan and the Afghan Taliban settled on extending a ceasefire and committed to working out a mechanism to verify violations.
In most regions, this would be routine diplomacy. In South Asia, where ceasefires are less agreements than moments of quiet between artillery bursts, it passes for progress. Pakistan’s defence minister cautiously called it a “ray of light”.
Taliban officials offered familiar assurances about mutual respect. Turkey and Qatar congratulated themselves – justifiably – for keeping two suspicious neighbours in the same room.
But even the most optimistic diplomats would privately concede what can be described wryly as a framework for peace, not yet peace itself. Frameworks in this relationship are delicate instruments; they seldom survive their first encounter with reality.
To see why even this thin reed matters, one must understand why the frontier between Pakistan and Afghanistan has rarely been at ease. The 2,640-kilometre Durand Line, drawn in 1893 by a British administrator, was intended as a hard border.
Afghans never fully accepted it. Pakistan insists it is settled international law. Kabul sees unfinished history. The mutual resentment dates back to Pakistan's very birth: Afghanistan was the only country to oppose Pakistan’s admission to the United Nations in 1947.
For decades, the Pashtunistan dispute simmered. There were border closures, cross-border raids and propaganda campaigns, all fuelled by the suspicion that geography had imposed an untrustworthy neighbour.
History offered few remedies. During the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Pakistan became the staging ground of the anti-Soviet jihad. More than three million Afghans crossed into Pakistan; we cultivated mujahideen commanders and later the Taliban as instruments of strategic depth.
The bargain was simple: Pakistan offered sanctuary and financing; Afghan militants offered hostility to Moscow, then New Delhi. As is so often the case with militant clients, loyalty proved temporary and consequences long-lasting.
After 2001, Pakistan aligned itself officially with Washington, while hedging its bets by maintaining relationships with Taliban channels it considered future insurance. The wager, in its own cynical way, was rational: foreign armies come and go, but Afghanistan sits eternally on Pakistan’s doorstep.
When the Taliban returned to Kabul in 2021, Pakistani officials anticipated gratitude, leverage and perhaps influence. Instead, they discovered an Afghan leadership that acknowledged past support but refused present obedience.
The TTP resurged, cross-border attacks multiplied and Kabul warmed unexpectedly to India. Islamabad found that its old leverage had evaporated, leaving behind only expectation and embarrassment.
Against that backdrop, the Istanbul talks mark less a reconciliation than a pause in recrimination. Pakistan arrived with hard demands: the Taliban must take “clear, verifiable and irreversible action” against the TTP, declare it a terrorist organisation and accept an external mechanism to verify cross-border incidents.
The Afghan delegation resisted, offering instead to detain or expel TTP operatives they found, while insisting Islamabad’s real problem lay inside its own territory.
Their response was blunt: these are Pakistanis fighting Pakistan inside Pakistan. They are not ours. Thus, both sides repeated the circular logic that has long frustrated counterterrorism in the region. That the parties reached even a modest agreement owed much to external mediation. Turkey and Qatar deployed diplomatic muscle few others possess in Kabul and Islamabad simultaneously.
Both sides were reminded, firmly, that escalation was costly and isolation worse. Border clashes had killed fighters on both sides. Trade crossings were briefly shut.
Neither government has the appetite for uncontrolled escalation; both fear losing command of events along a border where tribes, smugglers and militants sometimes act faster than states. Yet mistrust remains thick enough to carve.
Pakistan is convinced the Afghan Taliban are offering sanctuary, ideological sympathy and at times logistical indulgence to the TTP. Afghan leaders believe Pakistan has not abandoned the temptation to meddle across the Durand Line, whether through intelligence networks, air strikes or pressure on border communities.
Each side sees the other as the author of its insecurity. Both are partly right. And each suspects the other of courting India, America or China at its expense, depending on the week. For Pakistan, the stakes are immediate. Since the Taliban’s return to Kabul, the TTP has mounted attacks on Pakistani soil with renewed vigour.
Islamabad faces a stubborn insurgency in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan, fragile economic conditions and political volatility. Our army, already overstretched by domestic security commitments and eastern vigilance against India, has little patience left for another open front. Chinese pressure adds urgency: Beijing wants CPEC routes secure and has little tolerance for militant adventurism near its investments.
For Afghanistan, the calculus is no less stark. The Taliban government needs trade routes, fuel, food imports and diplomatic recognition. Pakistan remains Afghanistan’s primary commercial artery to the world. Alienating Islamabad while also contending with Western sanctions, internal economic collapse and restive commanders is unsustainable.
Kabul knows that too much belligerence risks provoking a neighbour with stronger conventional forces and a demonstrated willingness to strike across borders.
The truce, therefore, is less an embrace than a grudging recognition that neither side can afford a rupture. But experience urges sobriety. We have walked this path before – negotiating with militants in Swat in 2008, in South Waziristan in 2009 and again in 2014, each time discovering that truces with ideologues become traps.
Diplomacy with the Afghan Taliban has likewise oscillated between high expectations and rude awakenings. In 2021, our officials were photographed sipping tea in Kabul days after the Taliban takeover; two years later, they found themselves threatening air strikes against their former proteges.
The challenge now is to transform a tenuous ceasefire into something more durable, tethered not to sentiment but to structure. If the new monitoring mechanism is to mean anything, it must eventually involve transparent reporting, independent verification and consequences for violations.
Economic incentives – transit access, energy cooperation, trade facilitation – will be essential carrots. So too will multilateral pressure: China, Iran, Russia and the Gulf states all have interests in a stable frontier, and each holds some sway over Kabul. No one wants Afghanistan to drift once more into a sanctuary for transnational militants.
The burden lies also with the Afghan Taliban. To treat sovereignty as anything more than a slogan, they must confront the paradox at the heart of their rule: a government cannot host armed groups attacking its neighbours and still expect recognition, legitimacy or investment. Many states – from Egypt to Saudi Arabia to Indonesia – have discovered that ideological kinship dies where national survival begins. Kabul may yet learn the same lesson, though at a cost that remains uncertain.
In truth, the agreement in Istanbul is less a victory than a reprieve. Its success will depend less on what was signed in Turkey than on what is enforced along the stony hills of Kurram and Kandahar. If militants cross the line again, or if Pakistan strikes unilaterally, the current paper will become another entry in a long archive of failed understandings.
Yet if quiet endures, however uneasy, it will mark a rare moment when South Asian history pauses rather than repeats. For now, the guns have fallen silent, the diplomats have exhaled and the border has been granted a brief intermission.
In a region where geography seldom forgives strategic miscalculation, even fragile pauses have value. Peace is a distant ambition; survival, for the moment, is achievement enough.
The writer holds a PhD from the University of Birmingham, UK. He tweets/posts NaazirMahmood and can be reached at: mnazir1964yahoo.co.uk
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