What is the rivalry between Afghanistan and Pakistan?

History

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After Pakistan’s creation in 1947, Afghanistan objected to its admission to the United Nations. The Afghan government of the time decided not to recognize Pakistan as the legitimate inheritor of the territorial agreements reached with the British India. There were several ambiguous and often changing demands from Kabul centered around the aspirations—as Kabul saw it—of the Pashtun and Baluch ethnicities inside Pakistan. For intermittent periods between 1947 and 1973, Kabul extended support to Baluch and Pashtun nationalists inside Pakistan and even called for the creation of a new state called “Pashtunistan.” In 1973, Pakistan, grappling with territorial insecurities, resorted to extending support to Islamists dissidents that opposed Afghanistan’s Republican government of Sardar Daud. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s government created the “Afghan Cell” within Pakistan’s foreign office and assigned it a policy that included strengthening ties with and empowering Islamists in exile in Pakistan, and improving Pakistan’s influence over governments in Kabul.

Sardar Daud made friendly gestures to Pakistan in the late 1970s, but his overtures were cut short by a Communist coup in 1978. The new regime in Kabul returned to the support—at least rhetorical—for Pashtun and Baluch nationalists in Pakistan. The 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was seen by Pakistan as a grave threat to its national security. It also presented Pakistan with a major avenue to build on its 1973 policy of empowering dissident Islamists against the governments in Kabul. Furthermore, Pakistan had been a partner of the United States in the Cold War since the 1950s, and this cooperation had provoked numerous Soviet threats over the years.  The new leader of Pakistan, General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, who seized power in a 1977 military coup, was a fervent anti-communist and Islamist.  General Zia approached the United States for help with organizing a religious resistance against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

After the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, international interest in Afghanistan and the mujahideen began to wane.  Zia died in a plane crash in 1988, and was succeeded by Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, the daughter of the man he had overthrown and hanged a decade earlier.  However, even though Hezb-e Islami was closely affiliated with Bhutto’s political enemy, Jamaat-e-Islami, the ISI continued to support Hekmatyar’s faction and the other mujahedeen parties against the communist regime of Dr. Najibullah in Kabul.  After Kabul fell in 1992, attempts were made to bring Hekmatyar into a unity government with Rabbani and Massoud, but the Hezb-e Islami commander continued to attack his rivals.  Afghanistan spiraled into a brutal civil conflict between competing mujahideen warlords, none of whom were capable of unifying or stabilizing the entire country. Kabul remained in Massoud’s control.

Benazir Bhutto briefly lost the office of Prime Minister in 1990, but returned to power three years later.  Hekmatyar’s failure to advance against Jamiat and other forces around Kabul led to the decline of Islamabad’s support for his group. Bhutto’s interior minister, General Nasirullah Babur discovered and empowered a group of former Mujahideen from the Kandahar area as Pakistan’s new strategic card in the Afghan conflict. Working through Jamaat-e-Islami’s rival Pakistani Islamist party Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, Islamabad began supporting the students the party trained in its madrassas in the Afghan refugee camps, who came to be known as the Taliban.  Bhutto was determined to deal a blow to Jamaat-e-Islami, which she believed had aided and abetted her father’s executioner and was partly responsible for her losing power.  She also wanted to weaken the ISI. But in 1996, as Bhutto’s second government was dissolved by Pakistan’s president, and as the Taliban grew into a formidable force, the ISI regained control of Pakistan’s Afghan policy.

During the 1990s, at the center of Pakistan’s Afghan policy was the military’s pursuit of “strategic depth” in Afghanistan that could be useful in the event of any military conflict with India. Bhutto’s second government also sought a stability that will allow it access to the newly independent Central Asian republics.  Pakistan was also seeking a government in Kabul that did not indulge ethno-nationalists issues inside Pakistan, and question the Duran Line as the boundary between the two countries.  The Taliban, with Pakistani and Saudi backing, proved very capable, conquering Kandahar in 1994, Kabul in 1996, and most of the rest of the country by 1998.  Pakistan, along with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, extended diplomatic recognition to the Taliban regime—the only countries to do so.  Rabbani, Massoud, and other factional leaders retreated to corners in the north of the country and later formed the United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan (also known as the Northern Alliance).  Hekmatyar sought refuge in Iran in 1997.

In the late 1990s, Pakistan continued to support the Taliban regime in its war against the Northern Alliance, while Russia, all the Central Asian Republics minus Turkmenistan, Iran, and India backed the opposition.  However, after the attacks of 11 September 2001, General Pervez Musharraf—who had seized power in a military coup in 1999—was forced to reverse Pakistani policy and reluctantly joined the US in its “War on Terror.”  Musharraf feared US action against Pakistan and the prospect of a US-Indian alliance.  In return for supporting the US war effort, providing bases, and facilitating the transport of supplies, Pakistan would receive billions of dollars in US aid over the coming years.  Less than two months into the military operations in Afghanistan the US-led coalition, working with the Northern Alliance, toppled the Taliban regime, which fled across the Pakistani border with its al-Qaeda allies.

In Pakistan, the Taliban and al-Qaeda regrouped along the border in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), Baluchistan province, and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).  In 2002, the Pakistani military moved into parts of the FATA in search of Al Qaeda operatives. (The FATA is a largely neglected part of Pakistan that is still ruled by colonial era laws. Pakistan’s constitutional order and liberties does not extend to the region, and political parties are barred from operating there.)  In retrospect, Pakistan’s efforts in the region have been dubbed as half-hearted since Islamabad has pursued a double policy towards Afghanistan. The Musharraf regime declared support for the government of Hamid Karzai in Kabul but retained involvement with the Taliban who were mounting an insurgency against Karzai’s government and its international backers.

Thousands of fighters from Maulana Fazlullah’s Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM) effectively took control of the Swat Valley in the NWFP, less than a hundred miles from Islamabad.  Fazlullah and TNSM worked with Mehsud’s TTP, and although they were briefly beaten back by the Pakistani military, they seized Swat again by the end of 2008.  In February 2009, the Pakistani military agreed to a ceasefire and allowed TNSM, under the direction of Sufi Mohammed, to implement Sharia law.⁷ But militant continued their expansion, reaching areas such as Buner which is only a few dozen kilometers from the capital. In the meantime, local media broadcasted enraging statements from militants such as Sufi Mohammad and videos surfaced showing the gruesome treatment of the population in areas under the control of the Pakistani Taliban. Public outrage, international pressure, and the proximity of the threat to Pakistan’s strategic centers such as Rawalpindi and Islamabad appears to have compelled the military to push back TNSM and other militant advances in areas such as Swat.