On a map, the Durand Line appears as a faint, tired scar, a 2,640-kilometre boundary that once divided empires and now divides illusions. In 2025, that colonial incision came alive again, cutting through the idea of Pakistan’s control over its western frontier. The line, long treated as a bureaucratic formality, became a battlefield, and the Pakistan-Taliban alliance, a forty-year experiment in proxy politics, finally devoured itself.
For decades, Pakistan had pursued a strategy that diplomats called “strategic depth,” a euphemism for control. The concept was simple and self-destructive: secure influence in Afghanistan to prevent encirclement by India. To achieve this, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate cultivated the Taliban, provided sanctuary, funding, and guidance, and in return expected loyalty.
For a time, the illusion worked. The Taliban, trained in Pakistani seminaries and armed by its generals, served as both buffer and bargaining chip. The policy’s premise was that Pakistan could manage extremism as an instrument of statecraft, a weapon to be calibrated and contained.
Trouble across the Durand Line
History has a long memory of arrogance. The Taliban that returned to power in 2021 was not a client state but a sovereign actor. The victory that Pakistan celebrated as its triumph proved to be its undoing. Within three years, the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) emerged from the ashes of earlier military operations and began striking deep inside Pakistan.
What Islamabad had once deployed against Kabul now turned inward. By 2024, attacks were hitting Punjab and Karachi, and by November 2025, a suicide bomber in Islamabad’s court district made clear that the war was no longer along the border. It had come home.
The Pakistani military responded with an escalation it could neither sustain nor justify. On October 9, 2025, its fighter jets crossed Afghan airspace and struck targets near Kabul, marking the first time Pakistan had bombed the Afghan capital. The strikes were aimed at the TTP leadership but symbolically struck the heart of the Taliban regime.
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Kabul’s response was conventional and immediate. Over the next week, the Taliban’s regular army, not its insurgent proxies, assaulted Pakistani military posts along the Durand Line. Tanks rolled, artillery thundered, and the border that Islamabad had once used to project power became a front line it could no longer control.
By mid-October, both sides were claiming victory, and both were bleeding. Mediators in Doha and Istanbul scrambled to contain the conflict. The negotiations that followed exposed the moral bankruptcy of Pakistan’s strategy. Islamabad demanded that the Taliban’s supreme leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada, issue a religious decree condemning the TTP’s jihad as illegitimate.
It was an extraordinary request: a state asking the ideological father of one jihadist movement to disown another born from the same theological womb. The Taliban’s answer was diplomatic mockery. “The Amir is not a mufti,” their delegation said. “He issues orders, not fatwas.” The talks collapsed, not because of procedural failure, but because the very premise of Pakistan’s demand contradicted the ideological reality it had created.
The Afghanistan-Pakistan Conflict: A Cultural Reality
The conflict did not end in surrender or peace. It devolved into something worse: mutual humiliation. Pakistan closed its borders, expelled more than two million Afghan refugees, and halted trade through Torkham and Chaman. The economic strangulation, meant to force Kabul’s compliance, instead forced it eastward and northward.
Afghanistan turned to India, Iran, and Russia, forming new alignments that redefined the region’s geography. New Delhi reopened its embassy in Kabul and began moving goods through Iran’s Chabahar Port, a route that bypassed Pakistan altogether. The dream of “strategic depth” had inverted itself: the very Taliban Pakistan had nurtured to deny India influence now welcomed Indian diplomats with state banquets.
Inside Pakistan, the blowback was cultural as much as military. The state, unable to admit its complicity, invented a new lexicon to mask defeat. Terrorists became “Khawarij,” heretics. The insurgency was renamed “Fitna al-Hindustan,” the mischief of India. The enemy was externalised, as if ideology could be bombed by renaming it.
This rhetorical pivot was designed to unify the public around a myth that the violence was foreign, imported, a conspiracy rather than a reckoning. It was easier to blame Delhi than to confront the truth that the men detonating suicide vests in Islamabad were graduates of Pakistan’s own madrassas, trained in doctrines the state once subsidised.
How the Durant Line fuels the Afghanistan-Pakistan Conflict
The deeper fault lies in the map itself. The Durand Line, drawn in 1893 by a British diplomat and an Afghan king under duress, bisected the Pashtun world. No Afghan government, royal or republican, has recognised it since. The Taliban’s refusal to enforce it is not defiance of Pakistan alone; it is fidelity to a transnational identity that predates the modern state.
When Pakistan armed Pashtun militants to secure its frontier, it ignored the ethnic and religious continuum that runs through that border like a live wire. The same Pashtun solidarity that served Islamabad in the 1990s now anchors the TTP’s insurgency. A border cannot separate brothers who believe the line itself is a colonial insult.
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In the refugee camps of Nangarhar and Baluchistan, the theory of strategic depth has a human cost. Families deported from Pakistan now sleep in tents near the border, dispossessed twice by the same fiction of control. Pakistani farmers in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa watch their markets collapse as trade routes remain closed. Afghan merchants, cut off from Karachi’s ports, send goods through Iran at quadruple the cost. The war, in this sense, is not about sovereignty but about survival. It has rendered two nations, one haunted by its ambitions, the other by its dependence, mutually broken.
China’s planners, counting returns on the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, now speak in the cautious tones of accountants managing losses. Iran and Russia have stepped into the vacuum, trading oil and wheat with the Taliban while positioning themselves as peace-brokers. The United States, architect of the previous Afghan collapse, watches from afar, relieved that this war can be blamed on someone else.
The Mirage of a ‘Manageable Crisis’
In Islamabad, politicians insist the situation is temporary, a “manageable crisis.” But history rarely forgives such euphemisms. Pakistan’s long experiment in ideological engineering has reached its natural conclusion: the apprentice of jihad has turned master. The Afghan Taliban, once a proxy, is now a rival power with conventional forces and international partnerships. The TTP, once a manageable nuisance, is an insurgency rooted in the same Deobandi creed that Pakistan’s clerics once celebrated as resistance.
No treaty will solve this. What remains is an old lesson disguised as a new tragedy: states that weaponise belief cannot dictate the direction of faith. Once unleashed, ideology develops its own gravity. It attracts, reorganises, and consumes the very structures that thought they could command it. The men who once spoke of strategic depth will learn that there is no depth deep enough to contain a lie.
The war of 2025 was never simply about terrorism, or borders, or sovereignty. It was about the reckoning of a nation that mistook manipulation for mastery. The Durand Line, that thin colonial cut, has become a mirror in which both Pakistan and Afghanistan must now see themselves, not as victims of geography, but as inheritors of choices made in arrogance and paid for in blood.
