Analysis: Why have Pakistan’s ties with the Afghan Taliban turned frigid?

For two decades, they were close allies. Why are relations between Pakistan and the Taliban so tense now?

When the Taliban seized power in Kabul in August 2021, Pakistan’s Interior Minister Sheikh Rasheed Ahmed delivered a triumphant news conference at the Torkham crossing with Afghanistan.

He claimed that the Taliban’s swift ascendance to power would create “a new bloc” and the region would reach great global importance. Imran Khan, Pakistan’s prime minister at the time, equated the Taliban’s return to power with Afghans having “broken the shackles of slavery”.

For nearly 20 years, the Afghan Taliban fought a sophisticated and sustained revolt, confronted – at one point – by a United States-led coalition of more than 40 countries in Afghanistan. In that period, Taliban leaders and fighters found sanctuary inside Pakistan across the regions bordering Afghanistan. Taliban leaders also formed a presence in, and links with, major cities in Pakistan such as Quetta, Peshawar and later, Karachi.

Many Taliban leaders and many fighters are graduates of Pakistani Islamic religious schools, including the Darul Uloom Haqqania, where Mullah Muhammad Omar, the founder of the Taliban movement, reportedly studied. In Pakistan, the Taliban found an ecosystem fostering organic relationships across the spectrum of Pakistani society, enabling the group to reorganise and initiate a lethal uprising that began around 2003. Without Pakistan’s support and sanctuary, the successful uprising by the Taliban would have been highly unlikely.

Given this background, what explains the recent deterioration of bilateral relations, with the Pakistani military conducting air strikes inside Afghanistan this week – only the latest evidence of the tensions between Islamabad and the Afghan Taliban?