Why Pakistan and Afghanistan are still fighting

By Elian Peltier and Zia ur-Rehman

Pakistan’s leaders are playing a big role on the global stage, traveling around the world to try to broker peace between the United States and Iran.

But while it plays peacemaker, Pakistan remains locked in a conflict of its own, battling its neighbor, Afghanistan, with no end in sight.

Since Pakistan declared an “open war” on Afghanistan in late February, the two countries have been clashing regularly, despite efforts by China to resolve the dispute by sending an envoy to both capitals and hosting talks last month.

As the violence escalated in March, Pakistan hit Afghan cities and military infrastructure with dozens of airstrikes. While the scale of violence has receded, the fighting is causing casualties on a nearly weekly basis, with hundreds of civilians killed in the past two months.

Neither country appears ready to back down.

“We were like a magnetic force with Pakistan,” Abdul Mateen Qani, the spokesperson for Afghanistan’s interior ministry, said in an interview in March. “We now repel each other, and this is not going to get better.”

On a visit to Pakistani forces this month, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif of Pakistan said the campaign against Afghanistan was continuing “with full resolve.”

“The Taliban regime in Afghanistan must take concrete and effective action against terrorist groups,” he said May 19, days after several attacks on civilian and military targets in northwestern Pakistan.

Pakistan has blamed militant groups based in Afghanistan for thousands of attacks in recent years and said that its military campaign in Afghanistan has reduced them.

In private, Afghan Taliban officials acknowledge that some Afghan militants are joining Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, the group responsible for most of the violence in Pakistan. But they say that while they share ideological ties, they can’t control the TTP’s leadership. They also deny hosting or facilitating the group and say the conflict with the TTP is Pakistan’s problem.

Besides airstrikes, Pakistan has retaliated against the continued attacks by closing its border and expelling Afghans en masse.

The United States has said that Pakistan has a right to defend itself — a stance that Afghan officials say they have interpreted as a green light for Pakistan to conduct its operations.

“The United States has de-prioritized Afghanistan and is supporting Pakistan in what it wants to do in Afghanistan,” said Amira Jadoon, an associate professor of political science at Clemson University and a South Asia security expert. “The Pakistanis are taking advantage of that.”

At least 372 Afghan civilians have died in the fighting and nearly 400 others have been injured, according to the United Nations’ mission in Afghanistan.

Most of the clashes have taken place along the 1,600-mile border between the two countries. At the Torkham border crossing in eastern Afghanistan, a market burned down after it was hit by a Pakistani strike in March. Nearby, a transit center for Afghans returning from Pakistan stood empty for a month after shelling damaged the facility.

By far the single deadliest incident occurred in mid-March in Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, when Pakistan hit a drug rehabilitation center with airstrikes that killed at least 269 recovering drug addicts and injured 172 others, according to UN figures.

The border closure has badly hurt the Afghan economy, which relies on Pakistan as a destination for agricultural exports and as a source of imports of other food products, construction materials and medical supplies.

Afghan pharmacists say they are facing a critical shortage of medicine for diabetes and other diseases. The Taliban government has ordered domestic pharmaceutical companies to ramp up production and has sought help from Russia and India to fill the gap.

“We are mostly dependent on foreign medicines,” said Parwez Khairi, a pharmacist in Kabul. “Afghanistan is a landlocked country and has always been, and continues to be, harmed by border disputes.”

Representatives from Afghanistan and Pakistan met for eight days in the city of Urumqi, in northwestern China, last month. But talks were marred by deep mistrust and what each side saw as the other’s unwillingness to compromise, according to a participant in the talks and three current and former Afghan and Pakistani officials with direct knowledge of the discussions.

A Pakistani security official dealing with Afghanistan affairs said that China had sought to use its close ties with both countries to bring them to the negotiating table last month, after mediation efforts by other countries had stalled.

But the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss high-level decisions, said that persistent terrorist attacks had prompted the Pakistani government to suspend the talks despite pressure from China to remain engaged.

The participant in the talks said the Urumqi meeting was the only time the two governments had spoken in months.

Pakistani officials say their Afghan counterparts are unwilling to commit, in writing, to reining in TTP and other groups.

Afghan officials have said that Pakistan wants them to take responsibility for all terrorist attacks in Pakistan, a demand they say is unrealistic. And Taliban officials say they believe Pakistan’s long-term goal is to topple their government, leaving them unwilling to lower their guard.