Pakistan and the Middle East’s evolving approach to Afghanistan

With the third anniversary of the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan approaching, the plight of ordinary Afghans is by no means over. Throughout its history, the strategic location of this landlocked country has proven to be more of a curse than a blessing. Afghanistan is vitally situated at the crossroads of Central Asia, South Asia, and the Middle East. Its location has spurred significant great power competition in the modern era, going back to the days of the 19th-century “great game” between Britain and Russia, and later between the Soviet Union and the United States in the 1980s. Afghanistan was then the site of the longest American-led foreign occupation after al-Qaeda used the country as a base from which to orchestrate the September 2001 attacks on the US. Closer to home, neighboring Muslim states have exerted a significant influence on developments in Afghanistan as well. It should be obvious why Afghanistan matters to Iran and Pakistan, for instance, given that both countries share long and porous borders with it, as well as transborder rivers, on which the lives and livelihoods of millions of people depend. Afghanistan has longstanding religio-cultural and economic relations with many other Middle Eastern countries as well, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. Besides these evident affinities, Afghanistan became an arena for proxy contestations by regional powers, which have adopted rather divergent Afghan policies over the past several decades of foreign occupation and are doing so again now when the country is in the vicelike grip of a resurgent Taliban.

Cold War proxy contestations in Afghanistan

Historically, Pakistan and major Middle Eastern powers, such as Saudi Arabia, are often blamed for fanning the flames of extremism within Afghanistan. However, this did not happen in isolation but was rather the outcome of broader geostrategic compulsions and national insecurities. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 stoked fears within Pakistan of an impending incursion to enable Soviet access to the Arabian Sea. Pakistan thus began an American-funded operation to arm and train mujahideen, then dubbed Afghanistan’s “holy warriors.” Billions of dollars of US military aid also provided a vital lifeline to Gen. Zia-ul-Haq’s damaging decade-long military regime in Pakistan. The Pakistani military, however, welcomed American backing to finance its involvement in the Afghan jihad against the Soviets as a means of gaining strategic depth in case of another confrontation with India. Pakistan’s patronage of jihadi proxies was motivated by the hope of using religious zeal to subvert demands for Pushtun nationalism on both sides of the contested colonial-era border demarcation known as the Durand Line, and it enabled proxy support to the insurgency in Indian-held Kashmir.

Saudi Arabia also provided significant financial and ideological support for the Afghan jihadi groups. Although the Saudis did not face any direct threat from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, their investment in supporting extremist militants offered the chance to forge a strategic alliance with the US and Pakistan. It also provided an opportunity to counter post-revolutionary Iran’s growing ambitions to project its influence among neighboring Muslim countries, which had significant Shi’a populations. Both Afghanistan and Pakistan became an arena for a violent Iran-Saudi tussle. Saudi-influenced Sunni Deobandi militants, trained to repel the Soviets from Afghanistan, also began attacking Shi’a minorities, in turn provoking retaliation by Iran-backed Shi’a militants, causing a spike in sectarian violence across both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

While American interest in Afghanistan withered after the Soviets decided to pull out their troops in 1989, Afghanistan itself became embroiled in infighting among different factions. Years of occupation and internal conflict drove millions of displaced Afghan refugees to seek refuge in Iran and Pakistan. Pakistan, with Saudi and Emirati backing, then began to support the Deobandi-inspired Pushtun Taliban to take over the reins of power in 1996. While the Gulf states and Pakistan felt that the Taliban’s myopic Sunni ideology would make them a convenient ally, the country’s ethnic minorities began to feel increasingly insecure, and many of them joined the multi-ethnic Northern Alliance to resist the Taliban. Iran and India provided joint support to this resistance movement to push back against Pakistani and Saudi support for the Taliban. The repressive policies of the first Taliban regime, including their suppression of women, and the outcry over their destruction of the ancient Bamiyan Buddhist statues in 2001 led to their international ostracization. Although no countries other than Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE officially recognized the Taliban regime, the international community mostly ignored the Taliban and continued to look the other way as they exerted their brutal vision of governance over the hapless Afghan citizenry until 9/11.  

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Pakistan again sided with the Americans in Afghanistan, but this time, it was to help support an American invasion to dismantle the religiously-inspired Taliban regime, whose leaders had been trained in Pakistani madrassas with US backing during the latter stages of the Cold War. Years of preceding American indifference had allowed Pakistan’s intelligence agencies to turn jihadi militants into the Taliban movement, and these same officials were now being tasked to undermine it. Despite increasing pressure to do more against the Taliban resistance, Pakistan remained unable to forge good ties with both the Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani governments. Islamabad thus adopted a differentiated policy of dealing with the Taliban. While it continued to grant refuge to the Taliban waging war within Afghanistan, it adopted a harsher stance against the Pakistani faction of the Taliban, the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which targeted the Pakistani state and its citizens. While this policy of distinguishing between “good” and “bad” Taliban caused much acrimony with the US-backed Afghan government, Pakistan’s decision not to sever ties with the Taliban ultimately proved useful. After years of multilateral and regional efforts to broker a peace deal, the Pakistani establishment played an important role in bringing the Taliban to the negotiating table with the US government in Doha in 2020.

Interestingly, the Qataris emerged as a major mediator between the Taliban insurgents and Western negotiators, a role which did not please the Saudis or Emiratis, especially at a time when they were increasingly at odds with Qatar over its growing desire to assert its individual identity. While the Doha peace deal between the US and the Taliban sidelined the Ghani government, it did provide the US-led NATO forces a desperately needed exit strategy.

Contending with Afghanistan after the US-led NATO withdrawal

As the Doha peace deal had been unable to provide a power-sharing formula, the US-backed Afghan government crumbled, and the Taliban quickly exerted their control across the entire country within days of the NATO withdrawal in August 2021.

Their mostly unopposed takeover enabled the Taliban to ignore the international demand to create an inclusive government. The “interim” Afghan government, which has now been in power for three years, is dominated by hardline Pushtun elements. Women have not been allowed to work or hold public office. The Taliban’s draconian attitude toward civil society and their unwillingness to allow girls to study beyond the sixth grade remain major impediments to gaining recognition as a legitimate government. Moreover, the Taliban are still struggling to contend with the Islamic State-Khorasan Province (ISKP), which portrays itself as the more legitimate champion of Islamic values than the allegedly “coopted” Taliban. The lingering threat posed by ISKP may have constrained the Taliban from showing more flexibility due to the fear of attrition of its more hardline elements. However, the Taliban themselves maintain ideological sympathies with several extremist groups, including the TTP and even al-Qaeda, which remains another issue of concern for neighboring countries, like India, Pakistan, China, and Iran.

A UN Security Council assessment concerning the situation in Afghanistan in June recognizes that the Taliban have transitioned from an insurgency to a de facto government, albeit one with a particularly inflexible model of governance. Despite their ruthlessness, the Taliban have managed to reduce violence in the country. They have also clamped down on corruption, reduced opium cultivation, and can generate sufficient revenues to keep their administration afloat despite significant international ostracization.

Although no country has yet recognized the Taliban officially, around a dozen regional states now have embassies in Kabul, and most of them have accredited Taliban diplomats within Afghan embassies at home. China, Pakistan, Iran, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE have all established de facto ties with the Taliban regime. While India and Turkey operate embassies in Kabul, their Afghan missions are only partially under Taliban control, as they also include former Afghan government officials. The UN has received regular requests for travel ban exemptions, many of which have been entertained, enabling Taliban leaders to travel to the UAE and Qatar to engage in dialogues with varied stakeholders.

Representatives of over two dozen countries and international organizations came to Doha at the end of June to meet with senior Taliban leaders as part of a UN-facilitated discussion. This interaction, commonly known as “Doha 3,” was the third part of an ongoing process initiated over a year ago in an effort to create a cohesive platform to deal with ground realities in Afghanistan. While the Taliban agreed for the first time to directly participate, their involvement did not yield any decisive outcomes, even though only non-contentious issues, such as facilitating business and boosting counter-narcotics measures, were on the agenda. Despite relegating discussions with Afghan women and civil society representatives to the sidelines of the main dialogue in order to ensure the Taliban’s participation, Western officials seemed reserved about conceding to Taliban requests to enable regional trade given concerns that it might primarily serve Chinese and Russian interests. Other critics of these Doha dialogues feel that they are not doing enough to try to hold the Taliban accountable for domestic human rights violations.

The humanitarian situation in Afghanistan remains dire, with more than half the country’s population (around 23.7 million people) estimated to be in need of humanitarian assistance. The Taliban have a limited ability to provide even the most basic services or to deal with increasingly complex challenges, such as climate-exacerbated stresses. The Taliban regime shows no signs of collapsing or being thrown out of power. Continued isolation will not help dislodge them either, but it will certainly continue to compound the misery of ordinary Afghans. It is thus useful to reconsider how major regional powers, including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and even Iran, can play a more proactive role in tempering the Taliban regime and addressing the dire needs of the long-suffering Afghan people.  

Future possibilities and challenges

Ideally, all regional and international actors with an interest in helping stabilize Afghanistan should have come together to create a cohesive plan to help exert a positive influence on the Taliban, and to channel not only more humanitarian support, but also cross-sectoral human development aid to the conflict-ravaged and still oppressed populace.  

However, there are few signs of an emergent cohesive international consensus on how to deal with Afghanistan under the Taliban regime. China and Russia have been cautiously increasing their interactions with the Taliban. Yet these transactional interactions are motivated by economic and strategic interests instead of being part of a broader effort to bring about sustainable development. Other regional players are not on the same page when it comes to interacting with the Taliban regime either. Pakistan’s relationship with the Taliban has deteriorated sharply due to their resistance to Pakistan fencing the de facto border between the two countries. Conversely, Pakistan is upset by the Taliban’s hesitation to clamp down on the TTP, and even the Baluch insurgents, who allegedly continue to be supported by India as well. Besides tensions on the border, Pakistan has undertaken some aerial strikes within Afghanistan. It has also deported at least half a million Afghan refugees and is now poised to undertake another phase of its refoulement drive.

Although Qatar has managed to carve out a diplomatic role for itself on Afghanistan, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) has been much less proactive. The GCC began to discuss the emergent situation in 2022, and it has provided some humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan, but there is no cohesive GCC approach to dealing with the country. Perhaps this is not only the fault of regional actors but also due to a conscious effort by the Taliban to deal with external stakeholders in a piecemeal manner. The Taliban may be trying to court different partners to exploit their mutual insecurities with an eye to extracting greater concessions. Consider, for instance, the recent Taliban announcement of wanting to invest $35 million in the Indian deep-sea port of Chabahar in Iran. Whether the Taliban will manage to make this sizeable investment remains unclear, but it does provide an example of an apparent attempt to manipulate Pakistan’s regional insecurities, and perhaps compel its government to be more receptive to mending ties.

Iran has its own set of bilateral challenges with Afghanistan. After the Taliban were ousted in 2001, Tehran managed to cultivate ties with the staunchly Sunni Taliban leadership, and it even provided some military support to the Taliban insurgency. However, Iran is quite upset with the resurgent Taliban regime’s attempt to dam the Helmand River, and there have also been some border clashes between the two countries over this water-sharing dispute.

The US itself has an ambivalent attitude toward enabling regional integration that could improve the economic situation of a Taliban-ruled Afghanistan and other regional rivals such as Iran. The US had granted India concessions in the past to invest in the Chabahar port in Iran, based on the rationale of creating more trade routes for Afghanistan, at a time when the US-backed Afghan government was still in power. However, India’s more recent deal to operate the Chabahar port for 10 years has prompted the threat of American sanctions. Whether the US will continue to allow India to operate this port, and how it will react to Taliban attempts to directly invest in Chabahar, remains to be seen. If the US decides to use some restraint, that could help improve Afghan and Central Asian access to Western markets. Without the looming threat of sanctions, Afghanistan could engage in trilateral cooperation with both Iran and Pakistan to try to boost trade, contend with cross-terrorism, and deal with the impending challenges of managing transborder rivers that are becoming increasingly stressed due to climate change. On the other hand, if the US continues to impede such regional synergies, the friction between these neighboring countries will only continue to grow and result in greater destabilization.

Syed Mohammad Ali is a non-resident scholar with MEI’s Afghanistan and Pakistan Program. Dr. Ali has extensive experience working with multilateral, bilateral, government, and non-government organizations on varied international development challenges.

Photo by WAKIL KOHSAR/AFP via Getty Images