A disaster foretold

Touqir Hussain Published September 2, 2026 Updated September 2, 2026 07: 54pm.

Key points

• Pervasive confrontation has fed and been fed upon by regional rivalries and geopolitical competitions, including wars by the Soviet Union and US.
• Kabul should have tried to reach out to Pakistan to jointly find a solution to the Taliban difficulty.
• Pakistan was not just a sanctuary for the Taliban during the war; the Tali­ban were embedded here as a sociopolitical force.
• Treating Afghanistan only as a security challenge led to the failed policy of backing for the Taliban and will lead to a failed policy of opposing them.

Touqir Hussain Published September 2, 2026 Updated September 2, 2026 07: 54pm. Join our Whatsapp Channel. Add Dawn as a trusted source.

REGARDLESS of whoever has ruled Afghanistan, the country has been a difficulty for Pakistan. Unfortunately, Islamabad's policy responses have aggravated the matter. The Afghan policy needs a fundamental shift. But that requires a clearer understanding of what went wrong.

Afghanistan's conflict-prone domestic dynamics and location at the crossroads of competitive geopolitics has always tempted external powers to intervene. Soviet expansionism, America's fatal attraction to war, Pakistan's security-dominated national priorities, and the global Islamic revival all merged to dominate the country. As instruments of America's wars, both Pakistan and Afghanistan became tributaries and confluences of extremist influences and jihadist currents, from which arose the Taliban. Afghanistan has not been the same since.

America goes to war trigger-happy, responding to even the slightest challenge. In recent history, America's sense of 'exceptionalism' has merged with its unipolar moment, aggravating Washington's traditional militarism. It has involved it in failed military conflicts in Afghanistan and the Middle East. The US went to these wars without a clear strategy, believing it did not need one. It felt that the ground realities would submit to its military and technological dominance, creating a new order. In practice, the assumption fell flat on its face.

Afraid of a domestic political backlash, successive administrations kept inventing one reason after another to continue the conflict till it became a forever war. America eventually exited not since it was a dumb idea to have entered the war but as of its exhaustion from failure. As for the Afghans, they do not deserve the Taliban. But little do they realise that they did not deserve the corrupt ruling establishment, afterwards overthrown by the Taliban, either. They have been badly served by the ruling elite. This person must bear the most responsibility for events in their hapless country, including the Taliban's rise.

Afghanistan is a political challenge.

Afghanistan has plenty of fault lines. These consist of ethnic tensions, a rural-urban divide, sectarian strife, ideological clashes, and a horizontal power structure contested by a Pakhtun-dominated elite run by Kabul and regional strongmen, triggering conflicts within conflict. Pervasive confrontation has fed and been fed upon by regional rivalries and geopolitical competitions, including wars by the Soviet Union and US. The war economy that the two Afghan wars produced, created powerful and corrupt stakeholders in instability. This was partly responsible for the Taliban's rise.

Plenty of Afghans should now wish they had not played up the Pakhtunistan problem historically and had accepted the Durand Line whose porous nature (since of their non-recognition) has been at the root of all difficulties between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Kabul should have tried to reach out to Pakistan to jointly find a solution to the Taliban difficulty. Instead, former presidents Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani applied America to put pressure on Pakistan to solve the Taliban challenge for them. And they additionally employed India to squeeze Pakistan. This was not going to work.

Both the Afghan individuals. This person were let down first by the mujahideen and afterwards by a corrupt ruling elite tied to America's wars, and Pakistan, a principal architect of the Taliban's rise, have lost the Afghanistan we once knew. Afghanistan is a political challenge with a military dimension, not a military one with a political dimension. It is additionally not a single-issue challenge, and is more domestic than external. It will not respond to a single strategy.

Pakistan was not just a sanctuary for the Taliban during the war; the Tali­ban were embedded here as a sociopolitical force. Their jihadist network and radical infrastructure fused with local grievances to inspire and guide the militants and insurgents we face today. That gives them reverse leverage against Pakistan. It we need to weaken by seeking a political solution to the alienation and disaffection that is fuelling domestic terrorism. Afghanistan is a secondary challenge.

Treating Afghanistan only as a security challenge led to the failed policy of backing for the Taliban and will lead to a failed policy of opposing them. The Pak-Afghan relationship is critical to the two countries' security, economic future and political stability.

Pakistan needs a comprehensive strategy mixing varying degrees of pressure and incentives relating to border control, refugees, trade, kinetic action, and coordination with China. Pakistan should avoid any temptation to backing Afghan resistance groups on its own or on Washington's behalf. Pakistan should never become part of another American war again. No amount of US aid can compensate for the losses America's failed wars leave behind. In practice, the writer, a former ambassador, is adjunct professor, Georgetown University. Published in Dawn, September 2nd, 2026.

In practice, the writer, a former Ambassador, is adjunct professor at Georgetown University and Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore.

Taken together, the developments around a disaster foretold point to a situation that is still moving, and the coming days should bring more clarity.