Old Habits, New Consequences Old Habits, New Khalid Homayun Consequences Nadiri Pakistan’S Posture Toward Afghanistan Since 2001

Home , 2001 uprising in Herat, Abdul Kabir, Abdul Rahim Wardak, Abdul Sattar (diplomat), Ahmed Rashid, Ajmal Khattak

Old Habits, New Consequences Old Habits, New Khalid Homayun Consequences Nadiri Pakistan’s Posture toward Afghanistan since 2001

Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Pakistan has pursued a seemingly incongruous course of action in Afghanistan. It has participated in the U.S. and international intervention in Afghanistan both by allying itself with the military campaign against the Afghan Taliban and al-Qaida and by serving as the primary transit route for international military forces and matériel into Afghanistan.1 At the same time, the Pakistani security establishment has permitted much of the Afghan Taliban’s political leadership and many of its military commanders to visit or reside in Pakistani urban centers. Why has Pakistan adopted this posture of Afghan Taliban accommodation despite its nominal participation in the Afghanistan intervention and its public commitment to peace and stability in Afghanistan?2 This incongruence is all the more puzzling in light of the expansion of insurgent violence directed against Islamabad by the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), a coalition of militant organizations that are independent of the Afghan Taliban but that nonetheless possess social and political links with Afghan cadres of the Taliban movement. With violence against Pakistan growing increasingly indiscriminate and costly, it remains un- clear why Islamabad has opted to accommodate the Afghan Taliban throughout the post-2001 period. Despite a considerable body of academic and journalistic literature on Pakistan’s relationship with Afghanistan since 2001, the subject of Pakistani accommodation of the Afghan Taliban remains largely unaddressed. Much of the existing literature identiªes Pakistan’s security competition with India as the exclusive or predominant driver of Pakistani policy vis-à-vis the Afghan

Khalid Homayun Nadiri is a Ph.D. candidate in the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

For helpful comments, the author thanks Walter Andersen, Saadullah Ghaussy, Touqir Hussain, Ishaq Nadiri, Avinash Paliwal, Omar Samad, Ian Talbot, Marvin Weinbaum, Constantino Xavier, the anonymous reviewers, and participants in the King’s College London workshop “India and Pakistan’s Contemporary Foreign Policy in Afghanistan.”

1. For conciseness, this article uses the imperfect but succinct term “Afghan Taliban” to include all Afghanistan-born individuals who carry out political and military duties on behalf of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. 2. This article employs the term “accommodation” to describe the practice of tolerating attacks by the Afghan Taliban on targets in Afghanistan from Pakistani territory.

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Taliban. By contrast, this article argues that Pakistan’s policy is the result not only of its enduring rivalry with India, but also of historically rooted domestic imbalances within Pakistan and the Pakistani state’s contentious relationship with Afghanistan. Three critical features of the Pakistani political system—the militarized nature of foreign policy making, ties between Pakistani military institutions and Islamist networks, and the more recent rise of grassroots violence—have either contributed to Pakistan’s accommodation of the Afghan Taliban or tempered its interest in expelling the movement’s leadership. Addi- tionally, mutual suspicion surrounding the disputed Afghanistan-Pakistan border and Islamabad’s long record of interference in Afghan politics have continued to divide the two countries, diminishing the prospects of cooperation. These determinants of Pakistan’s foreign policy behavior help to explain its accommodation of the Taliban movement despite its public withdrawal of support for Mullah Mohammad Omar’s government in 2001. They also reveal the prospects and limitations of resolving the many issues of contention that cut across Afghanistan and Pakistan today. The ªrst section of this article examines the historical trajectory of the Afghanistan-Pakistan relationship. The second section documents the various patterns of Pakistani accommodation of the Afghan Taliban and charts the evolution of relations between Kabul and Islamabad since 2001. The third section develops an explanation of Pakistan’s posture of accommodation toward the Afghan Taliban. The article concludes with an evaluation of the implications of this argument for structural explanations of foreign policy behavior and of the prospects for Islamabad’s future posture toward Afghanistan.

Afghanistan-Pakistan Relations in Historical Perspective

Historically, relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan have been contentious. Prior to the April 1978 coup d’état that brought to power the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), Afghanistan and Pakistan had supported opposition movements against each other and engaged in propaganda wars. Afghanistan sought to discredit Pakistan as a creature of colonialism and an artiªcial state, while Pakistan recurrently imposed punitive sanctions on the Afghan economy by closing the transit trade crossings with Afghanistan. Pakistan’s subsequent involvement in the armed conºict against the PDPA regime and the intra-mujahideen war in Afghanistan have produced a troubled relationship between the two polities, despite a brief period of close relations during the Taliban’s rule.

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Afghanistan and Pakistan’s contentious relationship can be traced, in part, to the territorial demarcation of the Afghan polity in the late nineteenth century. Faced with British and Russian pressure to cede control over outlying areas previously under Afghan administration,3 Abdul Rahman Khan, amir of Afghanistan (1880–1901), concluded an agreement in 1893 with Sir Henry Mortimer Durand, foreign secretary of British India, that drew a line indicat- ing the respective spheres of inºuence of Kabul and New Delhi. The Durand Line, as it came to be known, bounded Afghanistan into a buffer state between British and Russian power, but remained an unresolved division among the Pashto-speaking communities on both sides of the line of demarcation. By the early to mid-twentieth century, various ideas of a Pashtun community had become an object of political mobilization in British India by Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan’s Khuda-ye Khedmatgar movement and among Pashtun political circles in Afghanistan. These ideas of Pashtunistan gained salience in Afghanistan and Pakistan in the years leading up to the partition of the subcontinent.4 Consequently, in 1947 the accession of the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP, renamed Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in 2010) and Balochistan from British India to a newly formed Pakistan gave rise to an enduring rivalry with Afghanistan, which claimed these areas as part of Pashtunistan. Afghanistan and Pakistan experienced four episodes of acute contention over the following ªfteen years, particularly during the premiership of Sardar Daoud Khan (1953–63), a leading Pashtunistan advocate. The episodes involved Pakistani closure or semi-closure of the Torkham and Quetta transit points; mob attacks on diplomatic missions of both countries; and, in one instance, the mobilization of Afghan and Pakistani soldiers for possible war.5 The pattern of contentious relations was broken in the constitutional dec-

3. See Ludwig W. Adamec, Afghanistan’s Foreign Affairs to the Mid-Twentieth Century: Relations with the USSR, Germany, and Britain (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1974). 4. Ideas of Pashtunistan were often imprecisely conceived and differed among various constituen- cies. Its Afghan advocates called for the Pashtun areas of Pakistan (and, in some instances, the Baloch areas) to be combined into an independent territory named Pashtunistan, which would then have the option to join Afghanistan. Some Pakistani Pashtuns also advocated for the creation of Pashtunistan, but many others articulated a less revisionist demand for provincial reorganiza- tion and autonomy for the Pashtun-majority areas of Pakistan. See Paul Titus and Nina Swidler, “Knights, Not Pawns: Ethno-Nationalism and Regional Dynamics in Post-Colonial Balochistan,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 32, No. 1 (February 2000), p. 53; Rahman Pazhwak, Pakhtunistan: A New State in Central Asia (London: Royal Afghan Embassy, 1960); and Louis Dupree, “Ajmal Khattak: Revolutionary Pashtun Poet” (Hanover, N.H.: American Universities Field Staff, May 1976). 5. For more detail, see Khalid Homayun Nadiri, “The Social State: Varieties of Contentious Politi- cal Development in Afghanistan,” Ph.D. dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, forthcoming. The

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ade (1963–73) that followed, largely because Daoud and other advocates of the Pashtunistan issue were politically sidelined from the government. In early 1973, however, a confrontation between Islamabad and the Balochistan-based leadership of the National Awami Party developed into a nationalist insurgency, succeeded one month later by a coup d’état engineered by Daoud in Afghanistan. These events revived the Pashtunistan issue. During this time, Kabul began to provide material assistance and refugee status to several thou- sand Baloch guerrillas,6 reinforcing ongoing Pakistani efforts to establish greater proxy inºuence in Afghanistan.7 An “Afghan cell” was created inside Pakistan’s foreign ministry, which was responsible for developing contacts with anti-Daoud ªgures inside Afghanistan.8 Pakistani President Zulªkar Ali Bhutto provided sanctuary and operational training to members of the Afghan Islamist vanguard who had escaped a crackdown by Daoud’s government. The dissidents, including future mujahideen leaders Burhanuddin Rabbani, Ahmad Shah Massoud, and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, would organize an unsuccessful popular uprising in 1975 across multiple provinces in Afghanistan.9 In April 1978, a coup d’état by the Soviet-aligned PDPA greatly intensiªed Pakistani involvement in Afghanistan. With the rise of Afghan popular resistance to the PDPA government and the subsequent Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, Islamabad would become the organizational intermedi- ary between the Sunni Afghan political opposition and the United States and Saudi Arabia. As a result, Pakistani foreign policy, then ªrmly controlled by President and Chief of Army Staff Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq and coordinated by the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), acquired the potential not only to defeat the PDPA government and the Soviet Union,10 but also to

border closures during this period foreshadowed Pakistan’s closure of the Torkham border crossing in September 2010 and both the Torkham and Chaman posts in November 2011, following clashes between Pakistani and U.S.-NATO forces. 6. Titus and Swidler, “Knights, Not Pawns,” p. 62. 7. See Husain Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2005), pp. 167–169. 8. Khalid Mahmud Arif, Working with Zia: Pakistan’s Power Politics, 1977–1988 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1995). 9. Olivier Roy, “The Origins of the Islamist Movement in Afghanistan,” Central Asian Survey, Vol. 3, No. 2 (1984), pp. 122–124. 10. Diego Cordovez and Selig S. Harrison discuss how the close partnership between the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and ISI marginalized other key agencies—notably, the Pakistani foreign ofªce—during the decisionmaking processes for key aspects of the Afghan war. See Cordovez and Harrison, Out of Afghanistan: The Inside Story of the Soviet Withdrawal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 65.

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shape the substance and scope of Pakistan’s inºuence in Afghanistan and its long-term relationship with India.11 As the primary conduit of anti-Soviet resourcing and leading destination of the Afghan refugee population, Pakistan was able to shape the level of material assistance and manpower available to the political resistance in Afghanistan. The ISI capitalized on these conditions by systematically manip- ulating the ideological character of and balance of power within the anti- Soviet insurgency. Not only did it sanction Islamist groups,12 but it offered greater access to recruits and material resources to the more politically revisionist of these organizations.13 The ISI’s policy was a logical extension of Pakistan’s interests in Afghanistan, as conceived by the Pakistani security establishment. Afghan Islamist networks possessed organizational ties with counterparts in Pakistan; pursued a more rigid, transnational form of political Islam that was favorable to Pakistan;14 and were generally opposed to the secular orientation of Afghan elites supportive of Pashtunistan.15 In close cooper-

11. Mariam Abou Zahab and Olivier Roy, Islamist Networks: The Afghan-Pakistan Connection (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), p. 22. 12. Pakistan also banned other strands of the political opposition—traditionalist, liberal, monar- chist (including members of the former royal family), social democratic, and anti-PDPA leftist— from political organizing in Pakistan. As Nassim Jawad noted, “By the end of 1980 there were over 40 Afghan political parties, ranging from liberals, social democrats and nationalists to moderate and fundamentalist Islamic parties—all ofªcially registered with the Pakistani authorities. It was at this juncture, in early 1981, that the Pakistani authorities, after having screened and investigated the mandates and ideologies of all these parties, decided that with the exception of six ‘major Islamic’ parties (later to become seven), the remainder had to close their ofªces and abandon their activities. Since that time no other political parties and organizations have been allowed any political activity.” See Jawad, “Afghanistan: A Nation of Minorities,” Minority Rights Group Interna- tional Report 92/2 (London: Minority Rights Group International, February 1992), p. 20. See also Barnett R. Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan: State Formation and Collapse in the International System (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002), pp. 197–201. 13. The ISI offered the Afghan mujahideen parties access to recruits through several channels. For example, it shaped party recruitment by channeling refugee youth to mujahideen-run schools, particularly those operated by Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e-Islami, that also served as recruiting centers. See Farshad Rastegar, “Education and Revolutionary Political Mobilization: Schooling versus Uprootedness As Determinants of Islamic Political Activism among Afghan Refugee Students in Pakistan,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 1991, pp. 189–191. The ISI also supported the Islamist current within the political resistance by requiring new refugees to register with one of the seven formally recognized mujahideen parties to qualify for food rations. See Da- vid B. Edwards, Before Taliban: Genealogies of the Afghan Jihad (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). On access to material resources, see Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan, p. 199. 14. For example, protests organized in 1972 by the Islamist student organization of Kabul Uni- versity, Sazman-e Jawanan-e Musalman (Muslim Youth Organization), were critical of “claims concerning Pashtunistan and the partition of Pakistan,” according to Roy’s account of a speech de- livered by one of the group’s leaders, Habiburrahman. See Roy, “The Origins of the Islamist Move- ment in Afghanistan,” p. 119. Barnett Rubin also reports Islamist protests in 1970 and 1971 against Kabul’s pro-India posture. See Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan, p. 100. 15. See Cordovez and Harrison, Out of Afghanistan, pp. 162–164.

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ation with Jamaat-e-Islami, the orthodox Pakistani Islamist party founded by theologian Abul Ala Maududi, the ISI funneled arms and cash to its favored group in Afghanistan: Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e-Islami. The ISI also ex- tended comparatively large levels of assistance to other Afghan Sunni mujahideen groups, notably, Adbul Rasul Sayyaf’s Ittehad-e-Islami. At the same time, it penalized moderate groups perceived to be insufªciently amena- ble to Pakistani inºuence.16 After the 1988–89 withdrawal of the Soviet Army and the fall of the PDPA government in 1992, limited international and regional attention to Afghani- stan vitiated efforts to establish a power-sharing arrangement among the mujahideen groups and remnants of the fallen regime.17 The disintegration of the armed forces, divisions among the mujahideen groups, and the multiplicity of alliances between internal and external parties precipitated a violent contest for control of the state, materially and symbolically represented by Kabul.18 Jamiat forces, led by Ahmad Shah Massoud, seized control over much of the capital, while nominally allied mujahideen groups and former PDPA militias established footholds in their respective neighborhood bases within Kabul. Mean- while Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e-Islami lobbed rockets into Kabul from its Charasyab base outside the city. In the ensuing on-again, off-again ªghting, thousands of civilians were killed and much of Kabul was leveled. A subsequent effort in 1993 to establish a power-sharing arrangement broke down as soon as it was completed, with Jamiat forces and Hezb-e-Islami regularly clashing in the streets of Kabul. The Afghan government, ostensibly a broad-based coalition of the major mujahideen groups, was at war with itself. Although the Pakistani government adopted a policy of ofªcial neutrality regarding the mujahideen groups during this period, the ISI and the Jamaat continued to extend logistical and military support to Hezb-e-Islami as it fought the Rabbani-led government.19 By early 1994, however, Pakistan’s ofªcial position of neutrality had become increasingly difªcult to maintain. Po- litical differences between the Jamiat-led Kabul administration and Islamabad grew increasingly contentious, particularly as the Rabbani government began

16. Rizwan Hussain, Pakistan and the Emergence of Islamic Militancy in Afghanistan (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2005), p. 118. 17. Cordovez and Harrison, Out of Afghanistan. 18. For greater detail, see Barnett R. Rubin, “Afghanistan in 1993: Abandoned but Surviving,” Asian Survey, Vol. 34, No. 2 (February 1994), pp. 185–190; and Gilles Dorronsoro, “Kabul at War (1992–1996): State, Ethnicity, and Social Classes,” South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal,Oc- tober 14, 2007 (online edition), pp. 10–22, http://samaj.revues.org/212. 19. Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan, p. 271.

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to engage New Delhi. Islamabad criticized Rabbani for not stepping down from the presidency as called for under a previous agreement (despite the agreement having fallen apart before Rabbani’s violation of the accord took place), while the Jamiat-led Afghan government accused Islamabad of inter- fering in Afghanistan’s internal affairs.20 During this period, Pakistan’s civilian government began to exercise greater inºuence over Islamabad’s Afghanistan policy than in previous years, in part because of the absence of a direct security threat emanating from Afghanistan.21 The ISI was primarily concerned with counteracting the Bhutto government’s attempts to establish control over military appointments,22 and had become disappointed by the inability of Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e-Islami forces to capture Kabul after nearly two years of conºict with the Rabbani government. For these reasons, the coalition government led by the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) was able to chart a new course on Afghanistan. Naseerullah Babar, the minister of interior and a former adviser to Zulªkar Bhutto on Afghanistan affairs, became a driving force behind the early development of the Taliban movement in Afghanistan.23 In mid-1994, Babar iden- tiªed the Taliban as a group capable of establishing control over southern Afghanistan for the purpose of facilitating the Pakistani transit trade.24 Fromlate 1994 until mid-1995, the ISI and Jamaat continued to support Hezb-e-Islami even as the ministry of interior, in cooperation with its political ally Jamiat Ulama-e-Islam (JUI), developed its own relationship with the com- peting Taliban movement.25 By early 1995, however, the Taliban movement

20. Relations reached a low in February 1994, when three Afghans hijacked and commandeered a school bus traveling from Peshawar to Islamabad, demanding ransom and food supplies for Kabul. They were subsequently killed by Pakistani commandoes. In response, a mob sacked the Pakistani embassy in Kabul several days later, leading Pakistan to move its principal diplomatic mission to Jalalabad. 21. Hasan-Askari Rizvi, “Civil-Military Relations in Contemporary Pakistan,” Survival, Vol. 40, No. 2 (Summer 1998), p. 99. 22. Ibid. 23. Babar was a former Pakistan Army major general, advisor to Zulªqar Bhutto on Afghanistan affairs, and personal friend of the Bhutto family. 24. Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Islam, Oil, and the New Great Game in Central Asia (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002), pp. 27–29. 25. The Pakistani political establishment remained divided over support for the Taliban during this time. This division became particularly salient after the Taliban’s military defeat by Ismail Khan’s forces in Herat in 1995. Ahmed Rashid reports that the ISI advised the Taliban not to launch an attack on Ismail Khan, the Jamiat-e-Islami ruler of Herat, while the JUI and Pakistan’s trucking businesses (which were vested in the legal and illegal transit trade with Afghanistan) en- couraged the attack. See Rashid, “Pakistan and the Taliban,” in William Maley, ed., Fundamentalism Reborn? Afghanistan and the Taliban (New York: New York University Press, 1998), p. 78.

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had begun to receive decisive political, technical, and material assistance from the ISI. Combined with the Taliban’s exceptional cohesion in the face of a fractious Afghan government coalition, this support led to the Taliban’s rapid military conquest of a majority of Afghanistan’s territory between 1995 and 1998.26 As Afghanistan’s governing body, the Taliban maintained a close, multi- faceted relationship with Pakistan. Its leadership relied heavily on Islamabad in its interactions with foreign governments and donor agencies. At the same time, the Taliban maintained a multiplicity of connections with elements of Pakistan’s diffuse political system, including separate relationships with the JUI, ISI, the Bhutto government, inºuential businessmen, and the provincial governments of the NWFP and Balochistan.27 By maintaining ties to multiple power centers within Pakistan, the Taliban leadership protected itself from becoming dependent on a single political entity. The Pakistan government provided support for infrastructure projects in Kandahar that would prospec- tively connect Pakistani goods to Central Asian markets. Moreover, for the ªrst time in its history, Pakistan was allied with an Afghan government that did not maintain relations with India and that would quietly allow its territory to be employed by Kashmir-oriented militant groups supported by Islamabad. One result of this political conªguration was the growing radicalization of the Taliban movement and its deepening relationships with a range of autonomous militant organizations.28 Notably, Mullah Omar and much of the Taliban leadership developed a cooperative relationship, although characterized by elements of tension, with al-Qaida. Despite their different social origins and political objectives, as well as the absence of ties prior to 1996,29 the Taliban leadership continued to provide al-Qaida sanctuary in Afghanistan and developed limited political ties with Osama bin Laden in the later years of the Taliban government. The dangerous implications of this development would become all too apparent following the September 11 attacks, after which Pakistan’s relationship with the Taliban movement would enter a new, more opaque phase.

26. For explanations of Taliban military effectiveness during this period, see Fotini Christia, Alli- ance Formation in Civil Wars (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); and Abdulkader H. Sinno, Organizations at War in Afghanistan and Beyond (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008). 27. Rashid, “Pakistan and the Taliban.” 28. See Gilles Dorronsoro, Revolution Unending: Afghanistan, 1979 to the Present (New York: Colum- bia University Press, 2005), pp. 304–311. 29. Al-Qaida arrived in eastern Afghanistan prior to the founding of the Taliban.

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Pakistan’s Foreign Policy Behavior since 2001

In the days following the September 11 attacks, Pakistan publicly reversed its position toward the Taliban government. Under U.S. pressure, President and Chief of Army Staff Pervez Musharraf agreed to withdraw Pakistani diplomatic and material support for the Taliban government, prevent Pakistani volunteers from going to Afghanistan to join the Taliban movement, pursue al-Qaida personnel in Pakistan, and provide access to Pakistani facilities and intelligence for the U.S.-led military campaign in Afghanistan against al-Qaida and the Taliban.30 In return, the United States lifted the sanctions that it had applied to Pakistan after its Chagai-I nuclear tests in 1998 and pledged to provide sustained economic and security assistance to Islamabad. Although the Pakistan government publicly backed U.S. imperatives in Afghanistan, in private it contested those that it deemed to be against its interests. Pakistani Foreign Minister Abdul Sattar would later describe Pakistan’s policy toward the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan as a “‘[y]es-but’ approach [that] would allow Pakistan tactical ºexibility.”31 Commenting further on this approach, Sattar observed: “[W]e agreed that we would unequivocally ac- cept all US demands, but then we would express our private reservations to the US and we would not necessarily agree with all the details.”32 Despite ban- ning the Afghan Taliban movement from organizing in Pakistan in January 2002, the Pakistani security establishment would willfully tolerate the presence of its leadership on Pakistani territory, notably, in and around major urban centers. At the same time, Taliban violence in Afghanistan would increase dramatically, and ofªcial relations between Kabul and Islamabad would de- scend into hostile rhetoric and cross-border conºict. This section documents how Pakistani policy in Afghanistan has evolved both publicly and privately since 2001. After evaluating patterns of Taliban accommodation by Islamabad, it charts the evolution of relations between Kabul and Islamabad.

30. Dan Balz, Bob Woodward, and Jeff Himmelman, “Afghan Campaign’s Blueprint Emerges,” Washington Post, January 29, 2002. 31. Abdul Sattar, Pakistan’s Foreign Policy, 1947–2005: A Concise History (Karachi: Oxford Univer- sity Press, 2007), p. 243. 32. Ahmed Rashid, Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Paki- stan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia (New York: Viking Penguin, 2008). Marvin G. Weinbaum and Jonathan B. Harder, similarly, characterize Pakistan’s posture toward Afghanistan as a “two-track” foreign policy. See Weinbaum and Harder, “Pakistan’s Afghan Policies and Their Consequences,” Contemporary South Asia, Vol. 16, No. 1 (March 2008), pp. 25–38.

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varieties of taliban accommodation in pakistan Pakistan’s ambivalent position toward Afghanistan took form in the years im- mediately following the fall of the Taliban government.33 Early evidence of Pakistan’s posture of accommodation vis-à-vis the Afghan Taliban emerged in November 2001, when the Pakistan Army carried out a series of airlifts from the Kunduz area that evacuated not only Pakistani military ofªcers and intelligence personnel, but also Pakistani and Afghan members of the Taliban movement.34 With the disintegration of Taliban control over major regional centers, key political leaders of the movement sought refuge in Pakistani areas abutting Afghanistan, including the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), Balochistan, and the NWFP, while military commanders and foot soldiers largely returned to their home areas in Afghanistan and Pakistan. By early 2002, the Taliban movement had begun to organize an insurgency based in very different geographical areas. At the outset, military commanders and rank and ªle from the Afghan Taliban traveled to the sparsely populated border regions of the FATA.35 In these areas, the Afghan Taliban reportedly set up operational bases with the help of veteran, familial, and educational connections to communities in the FATA.36 This was particularly true of Jalaluddin Haqqani’s relatively autonomous section of the Taliban movement, which reestablished itself in the FATA agency of North Waziristan, abutting the south- eastern Afghan provinces of Paktia, Paktika, and Khost. The presence of Afghan Taliban cadres in relatively remote border areas presented a distinct challenge for Islamabad. In Waziristan, in particular, and the FATA, in general, the Pakistani state has historically exercised limited sover- eignty, manifest in the indirect forms of political rule that have prevailed since the area’s annexation by the East India Company in the mid-nineteenth century.37 Nonetheless, after the start of Pakistan Army operations in FATA in 2002, it became clear that Afghan Taliban cadres, particularly those belong-

33. For more detail, see Husain Haqqani, Magniªcent Delusions: Pakistan, the United States, and an Epic History of Misunderstanding (New York: PublicAffairs, 2013), pp. 310–314. 34. Seymour M. Hersh, “The Getaway,” New Yorker, January 28, 2002, http://www.newyorker .com/magazine/2002/01/28/the-getaway-2. 35. For ªrsthand accounts of this process, see Sami Yousafzai and Ron Moreau, “The Taliban’s Oral History of the Afghanistan War,” Newsweek, September 25, 2009, http://www.newsweek .com/talibans-oral-history-afghanistan-war-79553. 36. See Antonio Giustozzi, Koran, Kalashnikov, and Laptop: The Neo-Taliban Insurgency in Afghanistan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), pp. 92–110; and Olivier Roy, Islam and Resistance in Afghanistan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 37. See Joshua T. White, “The Shape of Frontier Rule: Governance and Transition, from the Raj to the Modern Pakistani Frontier,” Asian Security, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Autumn 2008), pp. 219–243.

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ing to the Haqqani organization, would not be a major target of Pakistani coercion. The army’s operations primarily targeted al-Qaida and other foreign ªghters located in the FATA, but conspicuously avoided the Waziristan areas in which Afghan and Pakistani cadres of the Taliban movement were based. Since the rise of the TTP insurgency in 2004, the Pakistan Army has conducted operations against Pakistani Taliban militants based in South Waziristan and Swat,38 but has refrained from taking targeted action against the Afghanistan- oriented Haqqani organization, notwithstanding its recent deployment to North Waziristan.39 The Afghan Taliban has also been active in Pakistan’s more accessible urban and peri-urban locales. Although the Taliban movement, particularly in the early phase of its insurgency, required access to the sparsely populated territory abutting the Afghanistan border,40 senior and midlevel Taliban cadres, including members of the Haqqani organization, have also regularly visited or resided in Pakistani cities and their environs to raise funds and recruits.41 In early 2002, Mullah Omar reportedly dispatched Mullah Dadullah and Mawlawi Sadiq Hameed to recruit madrassa students in Balochistan and Karachi to ªght in Afghanistan.42 Mawlawi Abdul Kabir, the former senior Taliban political and military administrator of the eastern provinces of Afghanistan, was also politically active in areas around Peshawar at this time. According to his nephew, Mawlawi Kabir moved freely between FATA, Quetta, and Haripur (a city in the Hazara region of the NWFP). Accompanied by “former Taliban governors, intelligence chiefs,” and Mawlawi Ghazi, a former adviser to Mullah Omar, Kabir was reportedly under the protection of Pakistani intelligence during this time.43 Former Taliban Minister of Defense Mullah Obaidullah was also active

38. Some Pakistan analysts have stated that the Pakistan Army was never deployed into the tribal areas prior to 2001. This is not correct. The First Punjab Regiment brieºy occupied Bajaur Agency in FATA in May 1961 after civilian-clothed Afghan troops entered Bajaur to support the Nawab of Dir and his son against the Pakistan-backed khan of Khar. The First Punjab Regiment was quickly withdrawn from the area after the Bajauris “violently objected to the presence of the regular Paki- stan army.” See Louis Dupree, Afghanistan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 540. 39. Saeed Shah, Safdar Dawar, and Adam Entous, “Militants Slip Away before Pakistan Offen- sive,” Wall Street Journal, July 17, 2014; and Jane Perlez, “Pakistan Is Said to Pursue Role in U.S.- Afghan Talks,” New York Times, February 10, 2010. 40. See Giustozzi, Koran, Kalashnikov, and Laptop, pp. 92–110. 41. Elizabeth Rubin, “In the Land of the Taliban,” New York Times, October 22, 2006; and Gretchen Peters, “Haqqani Network Financing: The Evolution of an Industry” (West Point, N.Y.: Combating Terrorism Center at West Point [CTC], 2012). 42. Giustozzi, Koran, Kalashnikov, and Laptop,p.37. 43. Kathy Gannon, “Al-Qaida Suicide Teams Train in Pakistan,” Associated Press, December 12, 2002; and Carlotta Gall, “Taliban Said to Get Aid in Pakistan; Suicide Attackers Cite Network of Contacts,” International Herald Tribune, February 15, 2006.

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in the Peshawar area in the years following the collapse of the Taliban government. According to a Taliban military commander, Obaidullah sought to rally former Taliban cadres to form a resistance movement and organized a meeting of former senior ministers and military commanders near Peshawar toward this end.44 In subsequent years, Taliban recruiters were reportedly active in Quetta,45 where they shuttled ªghters into Afghanistan’s southern provinces through the Chaman border crossing, as well as into the refugee camps east of Peshawar and the city of Dera Ismail Khan.46 Meanwhile Taliban ofªcials and ªghters established long-term residence in or around Pakistani urban centers. United Nations ofªcials in Kabul were able to locate and contact Mawlawi Kabir in the NWFP town of Nowshera, where he was reportedly residing in an up- scale house and driving a sport utility vehicle with a diplomatic license plate.47 Taliban sources have pointed to commercial businesses owned by Taliban oper- atives in Karachi,48 as well as the presence of thousands of on-leave Taliban ªghters visiting the Kharotabad section of Karachi and the Pashtunabad section of Quetta, as evidence of Pakistan’s posture of accommodation.49 In later years, Pakistani arrests of Afghan Taliban leaders and commanders suggest the possibility of a more serious effort to counter the movement. A closer examination, however, shows that Pakistani crackdowns on the Afghan Taliban have been limited in scope and have been largely concerned with checking the autonomy of the Taliban leadership or satisfying external demands for greater Pakistani effort. Until 2006, Pakistani authorities arrested only a handful of senior Taliban ofªcials—notably, former Deputy Foreign Minister Mullah Jalil in 2004 and Taliban spokesman Abdul Latif Hakimi in 2005.50 International pressure on Islamabad since 2006 has resulted in super- ªcial crackdowns, leading to the arrests of suspected rank-and-ªle members or

44. See Yousafzai and Moreau, “The Taliban’s Oral History of the Afghanistan War.” 45. John Lancaster, “Pakistanis Cross Border with Ease to Join Taliban,” Washington Post, October 20, 2003; and Carlotta Gall, “At Border, Signs of Pakistani Role in Taliban Surge,” New York Times, January 21, 2007. 46. Sami Yousafzai, “The Taliban’s New Weapon: Suicide Bombers,” Newsweek, April 15, 2007, http://www.newsweek.com/talibans-new-weapon-suicide-bombers-97279#. 47. Willi Germund, “Rentable Verhaftungen” [Cost-effective arrests], St. Galler Tagblatt, March 2, 2010. 48. Ron Moreau, “Taliban Leaders Taking Shelter in Karachi,” Newsweek, November 27, 2009, p. 16, http://www.newsweek.com/taliban-leaders-taking-shelter-karachi-76679. 49. Qaiser Butt, “Kharotabad: A Taliban Safe Haven,” The Express Tribune, October 17, 2011; and Rubin, “In the Land of the Taliban.” 50. Syed Saleem Shahzad, “Now Pakistan Rounds On the Taliban,” Asia Times Online, September 2, 2004; “Spokesman for Taliban Held in Balochistan,” Dawn.com, October 4, 2005, http://www

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temporary detainments of senior leaders. In 2006 and 2007, Pakistani authorities deported several hundred suspected ªghters to Afghanistan, although Kabul subsequently concluded that the suspects were not connected to the Taliban.51 In February 2007, Pakistani authorities arrested former Taliban Minister of Defense Obaidullah, coinciding with the arrival of a U.S. delegation led by Vice President Dick Cheney to pressure Pakistan to crack down on the Taliban.52 Obaidullah, a senior political and military leader in the Afghan insurgency, was released after nine months in detainment.53 In February 2008, he was rearrested by Pakistani authorities, this time in Lahore, but later released in a prisoner exchange of Pakistani military and diplomatic personnel captured by the Taliban.54 The next round of signiªcant Pakistani arrests of Taliban leaders occurred in 2010. Pakistani authorities arrested Mawlawi Kabir,55 as well as shadow governors Mullah Abdul Salam,56 Mullah Mir Muhammad,57 and Mullah Muhammad Yunos.58 They also arrested Mullah Abdul Ghani (also known as Mullah Baradar),59 the Quetta Shura’s second-in- command,60 and Seyyed Tayyeb Agha,61 adviser to Mullah Omar, in February and March 2010, respectively.

.dawn.com/news/159728/spokesman-for-taliban-held-in-balochistan; and Carlotta Gall, “Paki- stan Arrests Taliban’s Chief Spokesman from Afghanistan,” New York Times, October 4, 2005. 51. Giustozzi, Koran, Kalashnikov, and Laptop,p.23. 52. Carlotta Gall, “Pressed by U.S., Pakistan Seizes a Taliban Chief,” New York Times, March 2, 2007. See also Ronald E. Neumann, The Other War: Winning and Losing in Afghanistan (Washington: Potomac, 2009), pp. 153–154. 53. Sami Yousafzai, “Musharraf Frees Taliban Militants,” Newsweek, November 8, 2007, http:// www.newsweek.com/musharraf-frees-taliban-militants-96501. 54. Shahnawaz Khan, “Security Agencies Arrest Mullah Obaidullah Again,” Daily Times, Febru- ary 25, 2008; Aamer Khan, “Ex-Taliban Minister Swapped for Envoy,” Pajhwok Afghan News, May 20, 2008; and Jonathan S. Landay, “Why Hasn’t the U.S. Gone After Mullah Omar in Pakistan?” McClatchy Newspapers, November 16, 2008. 55. Pir Zubair Shah and Dexter Filkins, “Pakistani Reports Capture of a Taliban Leader,” New York Times, February 22, 2010. 56. Laura King and Alex Rodriguez, “Afghan Taliban ‘Shadow Governor’ Is Captured in Paki- stan,” Los Angeles Times, February 19, 2010. 57. Dexter Filkins, “In Blow to Taliban, 2 More Leaders Are Arrested,” New York Times, February 18, 2010. 58. Yunos was also reportedly the head of the “commission,” a Taliban body charged with moni- toring and evaluating the compliance of Taliban ªeld commanders with the movement’s layha (“rules” or “code of conduct” in Pashto). See Thomas Ruttig, “The Taliban Arrest Wave in Paki- stan: Reasserting Strategic Depth?” CTC Sentinel, Vol. 3, No. 3 (March 2010), pp. 5–7. 59. Mark Mazzetti and Dexter Filkins, “Secret Joint Raid Captures Taliban’s Top Commander,” New York Times, February 15, 2010. 60. The Quetta Shura is the leadership body of the Afghan Taliban and is responsible for making all major political, military, and stafªng decisions for the Afghan Taliban’s insurgency. 61. Rezaul H. Laskar, “Afghan Taliban Leader Agha Jan Arrested in Karachi,” Outlook India,

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Although these arrests appear to suggest that the Pakistani security establishment had decisively and abruptly reset its posture toward the Taliban, a closer look reveals greater continuity than change. The arrested Afghan Taliban ªgures had unilaterally sought or entered into negotiations with the Afghan government.62 As one Pakistani security ofªcial stated, “We picked up Baradar and the others because they were trying to make a deal without us.... We protect the Taliban. They are dependent on us. We are not going to allow them to make a deal with Karzai and the Indians.”63 A Pakistani intelligence ofªcer based in Peshawar told a German newspaper, “For us, the arrest[s] ha[ve] two advantages: we punish people who want to betray Pakistan, and can at the same time secure the trust of the United States. We have nursed and fed them and now they want some of those boards with Hamid Karzai in Kabul at the presidential table.”64 The timing of the arrests is also notable. As Thomas Ruttig observes, Mullah Yunos and Abdul Ahad Jehangirwal had been in Pakistani custody for several months before their arrests were publi- cized along with those of the other Taliban leaders.65 Accommodation of the Afghan Taliban’s leadership was also observable in subsequent U.S. efforts to establish contacts with the Afghan Taliban. In late 2011, for example, Pakistani intelligence arranged a meeting between U.S. ofªcials and members of the Haqqani organization.66 This and other ªrsthand reportage of generally unobstructed Afghan Taliban activity in Pakistani cities, and the selective detainment or arrests of members of the movement’s leadership, suggests a pattern of deliberate, dis- criminating accommodation by the Pakistani security establishment. That Afghan Taliban political cadres maintained a conspicuous presence in major population centers implies a conscious decision by elements of the Pakistani state to provide some measure of contingent sanctuary for the movement. It does not, however, suggest that the Afghan Taliban insurgency is based exclu- sively in Pakistan or that its expansion is attributable solely to the actions of

March 4, 2010, http://www.outlookindia.com/news/article/Afghan-Taliban-Leader-Agha-Jan- Arrested-in-Karachi/675825. 62. Dean Nelson and Ben Farmer, “Hamid Karzai Held Secret Talks with Mullah Baradar in Afghanistan,” Telegraph, March 16, 2010. 63. Dexter Filkins, “Pakistanis Tell of Motive in Taliban Leader’s Arrest,” New York Times, August 22, 2010. 64. Germund, “Rentable Verhaftungen.” 65. See Ruttig, “The Taliban Arrest Wave in Pakistan,” pp. 5–6. 66. Joby Warrick, “Clinton Conªrms U.S. Contact with Haqqani Network,” Washington Post, Octo- ber 21, 2011.

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the Pakistan government. A substantial body of journalism and academic research shows that the rise of the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan can be attributed at least partly to systematic failings by Kabul and the international community, including factionalism and corruption within the Afghan political system; capricious, incoherent, and unaccountable external resourcing; and the neglect of potential opportunities to incorporate senior Taliban cadres into the immediate post-2001 political order.67 Nor does it suggest that all compo- nents of Pakistan’s diverse political system have consented to the presence of the Afghan Taliban in urban or rural Pakistan.68 It does, however, indicate a pattern of Pakistani state accommodation of the Afghan Taliban that has had serious implications for stability in Afghanistan, and by extension Pakistan, and that has tested relations between Islamabad and Kabul in the post-2001 period.

eroding afghanistan-pakistan relations The ofªcial relationship between Pakistan and Afghanistan in the post-2001 era has been largely characterized by latent acrimony and persistent distrust surrounding the subject of the Afghan Taliban. Relations between Kabul and Islamabad have also been critically contingent on the posture of the United States, a nominal ally of both countries and—from the perspective of both capitals—an important determinant of their bilateral relations. Despite its overall contentiousness, the relationship between Kabul and Islamabad has evolved in many respects. The Bonn agreement, signed in December 2001, established a post-Taliban coalition of Afghan political ªgures with largely contentious histories with Islamabad.69 The bloc that emerged with the most signiªcant proportion of national power, Jabha-ye Muttahed-e Islami-ye Melli bara-ye Nejat-e-Afghanistan (the United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan or UF),70 had the

67. See Antonio Giustozzi and Niamatullah Ibrahimi, “From New Dawn to Quicksand: The Politi- cal Economy of Statebuilding in Afghanistan,” in Mats Berdal and Dominik Zaum, eds., Political Economy of Statebuilding: Power after Peace (New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 246–262. 68. Graeme Blair et al., “Poverty and Support for Militant Politics: Evidence from Pakistan,” Amer- ican Journal of Political Science, Vol. 57, No. 1 (January 2013), pp. 30–48; and Jacob N. Shapiro and C. Christine Fair, “Understanding Support for Islamist Militancy in Pakistan,” International Secu- rity, Vol. 34, No. 3 (Winter 2010), pp. 79–118. 69. James F. Dobbins, After the Taliban: Nation-Building in Afghanistan (Washington: Potomac, 2008), pp. 72–72. 70. Commonly but mistakenly known as the Northern Alliance, this was a loosely organized military confederation of disparate political formations. Many were rooted in the Persian-speaking areas of the country, but the UF also included commanders originating in the predomi-

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most contentious past with Pakistan and had taken control over much of the country, including the capital. Despite mutual efforts to resolve their differences,71 Pakistan continued to view the UF as a credible threat because of its substantial military gains and the political and economic relationship that Ahmad Shah Massoud’s Shura-ye Nazar had developed with New Delhi during the intra-mujahideen war of the 1990s.72 Islamabad viewed other delegations that participated in the Bonn talks as more cooperative, but did not consider them politically powerful. During this early period of political change, Pakistan nonetheless maintained cordial relations with the new Afghan government, led by Hamid Karzai, even if the constellation of forces present in the new order were largely autonomous from or hostile to Pakistani inºuence. Among much of the Pakistani security establishment, as in other regional capitals and in ISAF-sponsoring countries, the Taliban were viewed as a discredited political organization, isolated internationally and lacking in substantial popular support. This perception of a dispirited Taliban movement, along with a strong international mandate to rebuild Afghanistan, likely motivated Islamabad to refrain from advocating for the Taliban as a viable political force in Afghanistan. By the spring of 2003, however, it had become increasingly apparent that a reconstituted Taliban movement was using Pakistani territory, including urban centers, to organize an insurgency against Kabul. Despite Afghan and international appeals for greater cooperation on expelling or detaining Taliban cadres,73 President Musharraf and other senior Pakistani ofªcials repeatedly denied that members of the Taliban leadership were living in Pakistan or that

nantly Pashtun parts of Afghanistan. The UF’s disunity was underscored by the refusal of several UF-allied Pashtun and Hazara ªgures to sign the Bonn Agreement. See Timor Sharan, “The Dy- namics of Elite Networks and Patron-Client Relations in Afghanistan,” Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 63, No. 6 (August 2011), p. 116. 71. The Pakistan government and Burhanuddin Rabbani, the leader of UF-allied Jamiat-e-Islami, expressed interest in mutual cooperation prior to the Bonn talks, although whether that interest was genuine remains questionable. See, for example, Amir Zia, “Pakistan Says Ready to Welcome Rabbani, All Other Afghan Factions,” Associated Press, November 28, 2001; and Ahmed Rashid, “‘I Would Step Down to Help My Country,’” Daily Telegraph, November 24, 2001. 72. Established in 1984, the Shura-ye Nazar (Supervisory Council) was a network of military commanders with close ties to Massoud, many with familial origins in the Persian-speaking areas north of Kabul. Although many of the UF-allied Sunni leaders and commanders had accepted material support from Pakistan during the Soviet war in Afghanistan, they gravitated toward New Delhi and Tehran in the ensuing intra-mujahideen conºict because of Pakistan’s support for Hekmatyar’s forces. 73. Carlotta Gall, “A Pledge to Halt Taliban Raids from Pakistan,” New York Times, June 18, 2003; and Amin Tarzi, “Afghan Report,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, August 7, 2003, http://www .rferl.org/content/article/1340631.html.

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such a situation would be tolerated.74 At this time, the Afghan and Pakistani security forces also began to trade cross-border artillery and small-arms ªre over the presence of Pakistani border posts in eastern and southern Afghan territory.75 Beginning in April 2003, regular clashes between Pakistani and Afghan security forces occurred along the border areas of eastern Afghanistan.76 Intermittent clashes continued for several months, prompting the establishment of a Tripartite Commission composed of representatives from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the United States to ªnd ways to resolve the cross-border disputes and end the Taliban’s raids into Afghanistan.77 The Commission continued to convene regularly throughout the subsequent dec- ade, but the border hostilities continued.78 Most recently, a series of skirmishes broke out in the summer of 2014 in border areas located in the Afghan provinces of Kunar, Nangarhar, and Nuristan.79 In the immediate post-2001 period, rhetorical exchanges between Kabul and Islamabad tended to reference mutually friendly relations. But as Taliban violence escalated in Afghanistan, their statements became increasingly acerbic. Kabul and the international community criticized Islamabad’s reluctance to acknowledge the presence of Afghan Taliban leaders active in and around Pakistani cities and the activities of Haqqani cadres in North Waziristan. Statements issued by Musharraf and other Pakistani government ofªcials criticized the “limited representation” of Pashtuns in the Afghan government formed after the 2004 elections—charges that elided changes in the ethnic com-

74. Michael Kitchen, “Border Incursions Causing Strain between Pakistan, Afghanistan,” Voice of America News, August 26, 2003. 75. See, for example, Riaz Khan, “Pakistan Blames Afghan Forces for Firing Mortar Shells over the Border; Delegation Investigates Series of Minor Skirmishes,” Associated Press, July 29, 2003; Graeme Smith, “Rediscovering a Common Enemy; As Afghans Stop Fighting Each Other, Their Anger Turns Outward to Pakistan,” Globe and Mail, September 23, 2005; and Thomas Ruttig, “Trou- ble at the Goshta Gate: New Tensions and Old Wounds along the Durand Line” (Kabul: Afghani- stan Analysts Network, 2013). 76. Todd Pittman, “Pakistani Border Guards Exchange Fire with Afghan Forces,” Associated Press, April 17, 2003. 77. The Pakistani and Afghan delegations to the Tripartite Commission were led by Ashfaq Parvez Kayani (then the director general of military operations and future chief of army staff) and Zalmai Rassoul (then the Afghan national security adviser and future foreign minister), respectively. See Gall, “A Pledge to Halt Taliban Raids from Pakistan”; and Kitchen, “Border Incursions Causing Strain between Pakistan, Afghanistan.” 78. In May 2007, for example, a disputed incursion by Pakistani soldiers into Afghanistan’s Jaji District led to a clash between Pakistani and Afghan security forces. A follow-on skirmish occurred because of allegations of unprovoked ªre by both sides. See Sadaqat Jan, “Border Skirmish between Pakistani, Afghan Forces Wounds 2,” Associated Press, May 17, 2007. 79. Hasan Khan, “Pakistan-Afghan Ties Hit by Border Attacks,” AlJazeera.com, June 12, 2014.

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position of the government and the nature of ethnic identity in Afghanistan.80 Changes in the conªguration of the Afghan government, including the well- documented removal of several Panjsheri Shura-ye Nazar ªgures from senior government positions,81 as well as an increase in the share of ethnic Pashtuns without prior histories of antagonism toward Pakistan in key cabinet positions, did not yield a different Pakistani policy. The inclusion or elevation of an increasing number of Pashtun independents, as well as Pashtun former members of Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e-Islami, also had no impact on Pakistani policy.82 In subsequent years, Pakistan itself became the target of violent militancy originating from FATA and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province. By early 2004, Pakistani military operations against al-Qaida had begun to bring Islamabad into conºict with Pakistan-born Islamist cadres who supported the Afghan Taliban’s campaign against U.S. forces, but who were primarily concerned with punishing Islamabad for its cooperation with the United States and see- ing shariah law implemented in Pakistan’s FATA. Adopting the name Tehrik- e-Taliban Pakistan, the militant movement initiated a violent campaign against both the Pakistani government and citizenry. In response to rapidly intensify- ing TTP violence, the Pakistan Army initiated a series of cease-ªre agreements from 2004 to 2009 with the TTP leadership, further damaging Islamabad’s relationship with Kabul. These peace deals were ultimately unsuccessful, prompting TTP incursions into Swat, Shangla, and Buner Districts, and retaliatory Pakistani military operations to retake control of these areas. The resignation of President Musharraf in August 2008 and the election of a PPP-led government marked a return to civilian administration in Pakistan. It did not, however, effectively change Islamabad’s posture toward Kabul. Al- though the PPP government, led by President Asif Ali Zardari, sought a more cooperative relationship with Kabul, Islamabad’s Afghanistan policy remained ªrmly under the control of the Pakistan Army.83 Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, appointed chief of army staff in the ªnal year of Musharraf’s rule,

80. Conrad Schetter, “Ethnicity and the Political Reconstruction in Afghanistan” (Bonn: Centre for Development Studies, University of Bonn, 2002). 81. Notably, the appointment of Taj Wardak as minister of interior in June 2002, followed by Ali Jalali in January 2003, and of Abdul Rahim Wardak as minister of defense in December 2004. 82. Gran Hewad, “Another Hezb-e Islami U-Turn with More to Follow?” (Kabul: Afghanistan An- alysts Network, 2012); and Borhan Osman, “Adding the Ballot to the Bullet? Hezb-e Islami in Transition” (Kabul: Afghanistan Analysts Network, 2013). 83. Despite attempts by the PPP government to acquire greater control over the military, the armed forces continued to direct Pakistan’s national security strategy, including Afghanistan policy. The government of Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani sought to bring the ISI under the authority of the interior ministry, a move that was rescinded in less than twenty-four hours because

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adopted a less adversarial tone toward Kabul but did not signiªcantly change the substance of Islamabad’s accommodation of the Afghan Taliban. Instead, much of Islamabad’s attention was centered on the United States. Islamabad viewed the U.S. counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan and the corre- sponding increase in U.S. forces throughout 2009 and 2010 as impermanent measures.84 By 2010, when U.S. President Barack Obama announced the decision to withdraw U.S. combat forces by 2014, Pakistani military ofªcials sought to position Islamabad for a leading role in facilitating an eventual political settlement in Afghanistan. Initially muted, this position became more pro- nounced as the United States became increasingly supportive of a political settlement between Kabul and the Afghan Taliban. In meetings with U.S. ofªcials, Kayani underscored Pakistan’s intention and capacity to facilitate a peace settlement in Afghanistan,85 an objective that was increasingly accepted by the Obama administration but more cautiously received in Kabul. Nonethe- less, in 2010 and 2011 the U.S. government began to develop independent contacts with the Afghan Taliban and encourage governmental and extra- governmental Afghan efforts to advance a peace process, building on German and UN-sponsored discussions with Taliban representatives in Qatar in 2010.86 By the end of 2011, the United States’ counterinsurgency strategy had not decisively changed the balance of security in favor of the Afghan government. Moreover, Islamabad had shown an unwillingness to tolerate independent Kabul-Taliban contacts, evidenced in its arrests of Tayyeb Agha and Mullah Baradar. In response, the United States began to pursue a relatively autonomous diplomatic approach to ending the war in Afghanistan. Keen to avoid entangling itself in the contentious cross-border relationship, the Obama administration sought to open direct and sustained peace negotiations with the Taliban, based initially on a prospective exchange of prisoners. This effort drew criticism from both Kabul and Islamabad. Although Kabul supported U.S.-sponsored peace talks with the Afghan Taliban, it favored a process in which the Afghan government was given greater control over its tenor and substance. Islamabad also supported U.S. negotiations with the

of Pakistan Army opposition. See Omar Waraich, “Pakistan’s Spies Elude Its Government,” Time, July 31, 2008, http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1828207,00.html. 84. Vali Nasr, The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat (New York: Doubleday, 2013), p. 12. 85. Perlez, “Pakistan Is Said to Pursue Role in U.S.-Afghan Talks.” 86. For more detail, see Kai Eide, Power Struggle over Afghanistan: An Inside Look at What Went Wrong—And What We Can Do to Repair the Damage (New York: Skyhorse, 2012), pp. 278–295; and Ahmed Rashid, Pakistan on the Brink: The Future of America, Pakistan, and Afghanistan (New York: Penguin, 2012), pp. 113–136.

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Taliban, but sought a process in which Pakistan could directly protect its perceived security interests. After the breakdown of discussions between the United States and the Taliban in March 2012, the Obama administration adopted a different approach toward the negotiations. With the U.S. drawdown looming, and continued Pakistani intervention in U.S. and Afghan-initiated peace talks,87 Washington began to allot a more prominent role to Islamabad in the peace process. During late 2012 and early 2013, the Obama administration cooper- ated closely with Islamabad in efforts to restart the negotiations, raising Afghan government suspicions of a peace process in which it would largely be sidelined.88 The diplomatic efforts eventually led to the establishment of a Taliban political ofªce in Doha in June 2013, although the ofªce was closed as soon as it opened. In a ceremony marking the opening of the ofªce, Taliban representatives had displayed the name, ºag, and other symbols of the prior Taliban government, despite reported U.S. assurances to Kabul against such an occurrence.89 The incident conªrmed Kabul’s suspicions of a diminished role in peace talks, leading to its withdrawal from the negotiations. The Taliban movement, having been forced to remove the symbols of its prior rule, also walked away. Despite the contentiousness of Afghanistan-Pakistan relations since 2001, some areas of cooperation have emerged, notably on tractable economic matters that have little bearing on the political relationship between the two countries.90 The election of the Pakistan Muslim League–Nawaz government led by Nawaz Sharif in May 2013, moreover, has softened the sharp rhetoric between Kabul and Islamabad. It has also prompted the release of Taliban leaders from Afghan and Pakistani jails.91 Nevertheless, the persistence of Taliban violence in Afghanistan and the tepid Pakistani efforts to address it, not to mention

87. According to Ahmed Rashid, “The ISI had spent the year jailing up to 100 Taliban leaders and ªghters for daring to talk to the Kabul regime, the Americans or the UN.” See Rashid, “What 2012 Has Meant for Afghanistan,” BBC News, December 29, 2012. 88. Syed Talat Hussain, “Afghan Revelations: Pakistan-U.S. Secret Diplomacy Created Doha Roadmap,” Express Tribune, June 20, 2013. 89. Kate Clark and Borhan Osman, “Who Played Havoc with the Qatar Talks? Five Possible Sce- narios to Explain the Mess” (Kabul: Afghanistan Analysts Network, 2013). 90. For example, Afghanistan and Pakistan oversaw the implementation of the Afghan-Pakistan Transit Trade Agreement in June 2011, built on an accord completed in 1958. Pakistan has also ex- tended more than $330 million in development assistance toward educational, health, and com- munications projects in Afghanistan. See Publications Department, Embassy of Pakistan, Journey of Friendship: Pakistan’s Assistance to Afghanistan (Kabul: Embassy of Pakistan, 2010). 91. Ayaz Gul, “Pakistani PM Pledges Support for Taliban Talks,” Voice of America News, November 30, 2013.

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growing unrest in Pakistan, have overshadowed areas of cooperation. As a consequence, the relationship between Pakistan and the Afghan Taliban has remained largely unchanged since the extrication of the military from the Pakistan government and return to civilian rule in 2008.

Explaining Pakistani Policy

Islamabad’s accommodation of the Afghan Taliban is the product of its contentious relations with both India and Afghanistan, as well as historically rooted domestic imbalances within Pakistan. This argument accords not only with structural explanations of foreign policy behavior that identify security- seeking as a primary objective, but also with arguments that emphasize how domestic characteristics shape interests and strategy. Speciªcally, it recognizes Islamabad’s accommodation of the Afghan Taliban, and militant groups in general, as an extension of Pakistan’s limited conventional military capacity relative to India and its historically troubled relationship with Kabul.92 Struc- tural conditions alone, however, cannot explain Pakistan’s foreign policy behavior toward Afghanistan since 2001, given that its accommodation of the Afghan Taliban has threatened its internal and external security more than it has helped. Accommodation has created the political space for more revisionist and internally focused forms of militancy to expand within Pakistan, threat- ening Pakistan’s domestic security.93 It has also undercut Pakistan’s regional position by destabilizing its productive urban areas and discouraging foreign investment,94 as well as impeding Islamabad’s ability to project inºuence in Afghanistan other than through the Taliban, while offering negligible and temporary gains for Pakistani external security. Nevertheless, Pakistani foreign policy has not changed in practice. To make sense of this puzzling durability, this section highlights the importance of political imperatives at the domestic level and the persistence of distrust between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

92. See Daniel Byman, Deadly Connections: States That Sponsor Terrorism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); S. Paul Kapur and Sumit Ganguly, “The Jihad Paradox: Pakistan and Islamist Militancy in South Asia,” International Security, Vol. 37, No. 1 (Summer 2012), pp. 111–141; and Idean Salehyan, Rebels without Borders: Transnational Insurgencies in World Politics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2009). 93. See, for example, International Crisis Group, “Policing Urban Violence in Pakistan,” Asia Re- port No. 255, January 23, 2014; and Saba Imtiaz and Declan Walsh, “Extremists Make Inroads in Pakistan’s Diverse South,” New York Times, July 15, 2014. 94. Farhan Bokhari, “Violence Drives Business from Peshawar,” Financial Times, January 4, 2010; and “Karachi Violence Takes Economic Toll,” Agence France-Presse, April 8, 2012.

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the enduring india-pakistan rivalry Pakistan’s policy toward Afghanistan cannot be understood without grasping its historically contentious relationship with India. Unsettled territorial claims over Kashmir, divergent political identities, shared nuclear capabilities, and asymmetric conventional power have shaped Pakistan’s rivalry with its larger neighbor since 1947.95 After nearly six decades, threat perceptions of Indian military capacity are exceptionally potent and, consequently, have inºuenced Islamabad’s posture toward Afghanistan in the post-2001 period. India’s economic and political links with Afghanistan have grown sub- stantially since 2001. India has pledged approximately $2 billion in ofªcial development assistance to Afghanistan,96 encompassing infrastructure, com- munication, agriculture, and social development projects in every region of the country. It has also sponsored training and educational opportunities for Afghan students and civil servants in India. New Delhi solidiªed its political ties with Kabul by concluding the Agreement on Strategic Partnership in October 2011. Brokered over a ªve-month period, the agreement afªrms future strategic dialogue between the two countries; provides for the training, equipping, and capacity building of Afghan national security forces in India; and promises continued Indian civilian assistance and the expansion of trade ties. Pakistani suspicion of Indian inºuence in Afghanistan was evident as early as 2003, after New Delhi reestablished its diplomatic presence in Kabul, Jalalabad, and Kandahar, and opened consulates for the ªrst time in Herat and Mazar-e-Sharif.97 Islamabad perceived these actions as an effort to undermine Pakistani relations with Kabul. This was particularly true for the Jalalabad and Kandahar consulates, which Islamabad suspected were being used by New Delhi to funnel cash and arms to the Baloch irredentist movement in Pakistan.

95. Stephen P. Cohen, Shooting for a Century: The India-Pakistan Conundrum (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2013); T.V. Paul, ed., The India-Pakistan Conºict: An Enduring Rivalry (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); and T.V. Paul, “Why Has the India-Pakistan Ri- valry Been So Enduring? Power Asymmetry and an Intractable Conºict,” Security Studies, Vol. 15, No. 4 (October/December 2006), pp. 600–630. 96. Betwa Sharma, “A Conversation with: Indian Ambassador to Afghanistan Amar Sinha,” New York Times, November 8, 2013. 97. Contrary to popular accounts, India ªrst opened its consulates in Jalalabad and Kandahar in 1949. See Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India, Annual Report 1949–50, http:// mealib.nic.in/?pdf2476?000. Both consulates were closed in the spring of 1988 as the Soviet Union took steps to withdraw its forces from the country. The Indian embassy in Kabul was temporarily shuttered in February 1993 after the fall of the Najibullah government and escalation of the intra- mujahideen conºict. The embassy would later be reopened and closed several times until ªnally shutting its doors in September 1996, when Taliban forces entered Kabul.

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On July 7, 2003, Pakistani Prime Minister Zafarullah Khan Jamali claimed that the Indian consulates in Kandahar and Herat, along with New Delhi’s diplomatic ofªce in the Iranian city of Zahedan, were involved in the bombing of a Quetta mosque days earlier.98 On August 1, 2003, Pakistan’s foreign ministry alleged that “India’s Research and Analysis Wing is running espionage and terrorist operations aimed at Pakistan from India’s consulates in Jalalabad and Kandahar.”99 Interior Minister Faisal Saleh Hayyat made a similar charge a month later.100 Pakistani claims of Indian interference in Pakistani Balochistan via Afghanistan have grown following the escalation of violence in northwest Pakistan after 2005.101 Despite the controversy surrounding the Balochistan issue, Pakistani claims of joint Indian-Afghan support of the Baloch separatist movement are largely unsubstantiated. Although there has been evidence of Afghan accommodation of Baloch nationalist ªgures, such evidence suggests a remote relationship.102 Brahamdagh Bugti, the leader of the Baloch Republican Party, was present in Afghanistan after the Pakistan Army assassinated his grandfather and Baloch political leader, Akbar Khan Bugti, in 2006. There is little evidence, however, that Kabul was politically committed to Bugti’s presence in Afghanistan, having quietly supported his departure to Switzerland in October 2010. Attacks on Indian diplomatic missions and civilians reºect the contentiousness of the Pakistan-India relationship vis-à-vis Afghanistan. Many of these attacks have been attributed to the Afghan Taliban’s Haqqani organization and the historically Kashmir-oriented Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT). They include the bombings of India’s embassy in Kabul in July 2008 and October 2009, an attack on a Kabul guest house popular with Indian nationals in February 2010, the bombing of the Indian consulate in Jalalabad in July 2013, and the May 2014 attack on the Indian consulate in Herat. Government ofªcials in the United States, Europe, and the surrounding region emphasized the close involvement of Pakistani intelligence in these attacks, particularly the 2008 attack on the Indian embassy.103

98. “India Rejects Pakistan’s Charge on Quetta Blast,” Xinhua news agency, July 7, 2003. 99. Tarzi, “Afghan Report.” 100. “Pakistani Minister Accuses India of Using its Consulates in Afghanistan for Terrorism,” As- sociated Press, September 13, 2003. 101. See, for example, “India, Afghanistan ‘Deliberately’ Trying to Destabilise Balochistan, Musharraf Told US,” Asian News International, September 18, 2011. 102. “U.S. Embassy Cables: Karzai Admits to Sheltering Baloch Nationalists,” Guardian, December 1, 2010. 103. See Mark Mazzetti et al., “Pakistan Aids Insurgency in Afghanistan, Reports Assert,” New

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An extension of the India-centered interpretation of Pakistani foreign policy is the argument that Islamabad seeks “strategic depth” in Afghanistan— that is, the deployment of Pakistani personnel and matériel on Afghan territory for possible use in a conºict with India. This argument was plausible during the Taliban’s rule in Afghanistan, but it is difªcult to identify how such an objective would be achievable in the post-2001 era. Given the renewed strength of anti-Taliban political groups, changes in the Afghan political con- text, and the presence of powerful external allies of the Afghan government, strategic depth as originally conceived is an implausible proposition. Rather, Pakistan’s foreign policy statements and behavior in Afghanistan indicate that the conception of strategic depth has become de-territorialized, but remains closely linked to the perception of political inºuence relative to New Delhi. In the security sphere, Islamabad has been primarily concerned with blocking Indian inºuence in Afghanistan, particularly in areas abutting the Pakistani border, as well as with extending its own leverage over Kabul and among political elites in eastern and southern Afghanistan. For example, Pakistan has expressed strong opposition to arrangements that provide for the training of Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police ofªcers in India— although such arrangements have followed, not preceded, increasing insta- bility in Afghanistan. In the development ªeld, Pakistani government ofªci- als and journalists frequently express disappointment that India has out- paced Pakistan in providing economic assistance to Afghanistan.104 Pakistan’s stated desire for a “friendly” government in Kabul is a manifestation of this evolved conception of strategic depth as indirect inºuence instead of direct territorial access. As Chief of Army Staff Kayani stated in a press brieªng in February 2010, “We want a strategic depth in Afghanistan but do not want to control it....Apeaceful and friendly Afghanistan can provide Pakistan a strategic depth.”105 Indian inºuence in Afghanistan explains, in part, Islamabad’s perception of an unfavorable political environment since 2001. It does not, however, fully clarify why Islamabad has opted to accommodate the Afghan Taliban, particu-

York Times, July 25, 2010; and Christina Lamb, “Rogue Pakistan Spies Aid Taliban in Afghanistan,” Times (London), August 3, 2008. 104. See, for example, “Pashto-Language TV Station Interviews Pakistan’s President Musharraf,” Khyber TV, May 21, 2006. 105. Zahid Hussain, “Kayani Spells Out Terms for Regional Stability,” Dawn.com, February 2, 2010, http://www.dawn.com/news/852507/kayani-spells-out-terms-for-regional-stability.

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larly in light of the costs that this accommodation has carried for Pakistani internal and external security.

pakistani domestic imbalances The domestic contours of Pakistan’s political system have also shaped Islamabad’s decisionmaking.106 Three features, in particular, are important for understanding Islamabad’s policy toward Afghanistan. First, the predominance of the Pakistan Army in making Afghanistan policy has meant that Islamabad’s approach toward Kabul has aligned with a highly security- centered view of strategy. Second, Pakistan’s historical appropriation of Afghan Islamist groups has provided a familiar and inexpensive means of re- taining inºuence in an uncertain Afghan environment. Third, the emergence of more revisionist and militant strands of Taliban-connected Islamism in Pakistan’s border areas, most clearly manifest in the rise of the TTP, has further limited Islamabad’s muted interest in expelling the Afghan Taliban leadership from Pakistan. militarized decisionmaking. An important domestic source of Pakistani policy originates in the predominance of the Pakistan Army in making Afghanistan policy. The Soviet war in Afghanistan further increased the exclusivity of the Pakistan Army in formulating and implementing Islamabad’s foreign policy.107 It also broadly expanded the breadth and depth of Pakistani involvement in Afghan affairs. The absence of civilian control over Pakistani foreign policy has meant that Islamabad’s decisionmaking on Afghanistan has largely depended on the particular organizational culture of the Pakistan Army. Rooted in the norms, values, and experiences of the Pakistani military, this organizational culture closely comports with a hard realpolitik worldview that renders Afghanistan as a zero-sum conºict zone where the use of force remains a potentially effective way of acquiring inºuence and managing perceived threats vis-à-vis regional competitors and Afghanistan itself.108 Despite

106. For an extensive examination of the relationship between Pakistani domestic politics and foreign policymaking, see Mohammad Waseem, “The Dialectic between Domestic Politics and Foreign Policy,” in Christophe Jaffrelot, ed., Pakistan: Nationalism without a Nation? (New York: Zed, 2002), pp. 263–282. 107. The ISI participated in Pakistani policy decisionmaking on Afghanistan during the early 1970s; it came to dominate this decisionmaking after the Soviet invasion. See Hussain, Pakistan and the Emergence of Islamic Militancy in Afghanistan, pp. 97–98. In subsequent years, ISI control over the Peshawar-based resistance often took the form of patronage-based micromanagement. See Marvin G. Weinbaum, “The Politics of Afghan Resettlement and Rehabilitation,” Asian Survey, Vol. 29, No. 3 (March 1989), pp. 299–300. 108. For a discussion of how organizational or strategic culture can shape foreign policy behavior, see Alastair Iain Johnston, “Thinking about Strategic Culture,” International Security, Vol. 19, No. 4

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a variety of less security-centric perspectives in the foreign ofªce bureaucracy and political party system, the commanding position of the Pakistan Army has frequently led civilian institutions to play a conformist role in setting and implementing Afghanistan policy.109 In the years following the collapse of the Taliban government, Islamabad’s hard realpolitik approach toward Afghanistan came under signiªcant external stress. Keen to preserve its renewed relationship with the United States and establish its footing in a reformulated Afghanistan, the Musharraf government sought to develop diplomatic contacts with nascent Afghan political institutions. This effort could be seen in a series of high-proªle visits by President Musharraf, Prime Ministers Zafarullah Khan Jamali and Shaukat Aziz, and Foreign Minister Khurshid Kasuri, as well as in the participation of the Pakistan Army in the Tripartite Commission with the U.S. and Afghan militar- ies. Nonetheless, the Pakistan Army’s security-centric orientation toward Afghanistan has remained ªrmly intact in the immediate post-2001 period. Pakistani security elites have often declined to directly engage their Afghan counterparts on security cooperation matters,110 and they have dismissed privately conveyed concerns from Kabul about the presence of Afghan Taliban leaders in Pakistani cities and the border areas.111 The military’s more assertive thinking on Afghanistan has also led it to preserve its links with the Afghan Taliban, which it sees as a potentially effective means of securing inºuence in a new Afghan political system not predisposed toward Pakistan—a perception exacerbated by the belief that the United States has not been fully committed to Afghanistan. In the ªve years following the international intervention, U.S. assistance for critical security and economic priorities in Afghanistan was extremely limited, and American attention to the political situation in the country rapidly shifted to the Iraq War.112 This perception of

(Spring 1995), pp. 32–64; and Julian Schoªeld, “Militarized Decision-Making for War in Pakistan: 1947–1971,” Armed Forces & Society, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Fall 2000), pp. 131–148. For a discussion of organizational culture within Pakistan’s army, see C. Christine Fair, Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army’s Way of War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 109. Ijaz Ahmad Khan, “Understanding Pakistan’s Pro-Taliban Afghan Policy,” Pakistan Horizon, Vol. 60, No. 2 (April 2007), p. 156; and Fair, Fighting to the End, pp. 22–23. 110. On the Tripartite Commission, for example, Howard B. Schaffer and Teresita C. Schaffer report that “American participants felt that the Pakistanis saw themselves and the U.S. team as real military comrades, with the Afghan team in a subordinate position.” See Schaffer and Schaffer, How Pakistan Negotiates with the United States: Riding the Roller Coaster (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2011), p. 75. 111. Author interviews with Afghan security ofªcials and businessmen in Kabul and Jalalabad, April 2006. 112. Dobbins, After the Taliban.

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waning and irregular U.S. interest in Afghanistan contributed to, but did not by itself cause, the Pakistani military’s thinking to embrace accommodation of the Afghan Taliban as a strategic means of securing future inºuence in Afghanistan. The security-centered orientation of the Pakistan Army has become sharper in recent years, despite the fall of the Musharraf government and the return to civilian rule. As Aqil Shah writes, notwithstanding “blows to [the Pakistani military’s] public standing and without any formal-legal guarantees to preserve its interests once it had left power, the military was able to retain its core institutional privileges concerning control over its internal structure, national security missions, budgetary allocations, intelligence gathering, and so on.”113 Despite enjoying a strong political mandate and good relations with the Karzai government,114 the newly elected PPP-led administration exercised little inºu- ence over Afghanistan policy. At the same time, Pakistan’s new chief of army staff, Parvez Kayani, and the Pakistan Army leadership continue to view Afghanistan as a military contest in which the Afghan Taliban remains an instrument of inºuence. The Pakistani military’s prevailing perception of a coercion-intensive Afghanistan has coincided with its accommodative posture toward the Taliban. This view has only strengthened since the announcement in early 2010 that the United States would withdraw most of its combat forces from Afghanistan by 2014.115 Pakistan’s security-centric policymaking is also evident in its emerging efforts to advance a political formula that includes the Taliban in a future Afghan government. Although Pakistan has sought to facilitate a political settlement to the Afghan war, the military wants to avoid, as Steve Coll observes, “talks that they cannot control or predict.”116 As mentioned earlier, this pattern found expression in Pakistan’s detainment and eventual release of Mullah Baradar. The Pakistani security establishment reportedly deemed Baradar’s desire to negotiate directly with Kabul unacceptable, even if direct talks offered a potential step to a negotiated peace. Approximately three years later, the newly elected government of Nawaz Sharif announced that Baradar would be released, along with several other senior Taliban leaders, for the purpose of

113. Aqil Shah, “Constraining Consolidation: Military Politics and Democracy in Pakistan (2007– 2013),” Democratization, online edition, April 29, 2013, p. 2. 114. “Zardari and Karzai Agree to Forge New Relationship,” Dawn.com, January 7, 2009. 115. Nasr, The Dispensable Nation. 116. Steve Coll, “What Does Pakistan Want?” New Yorker, March 29, 2012, http://www.newyorker .com/news/daily-comment/what-does-pakistan-want.

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revitalizing negotiations with the Afghan government. So far, however, Baradar and other released Taliban leaders have not been permitted to engage in serious, independent discussions with Afghan political groups without Pakistani oversight, thus invalidating any residual inºuence Baradar may still have over the Taliban movement. It also remains clear that Pakistan has not prevented released Taliban leaders from actively or passively assisting the insurgency in Afghanistan. logrolling islamist organizations. Second, the Pakistan Army has remained organizationally accustomed to the practice of achieving security objectives in Afghanistan through militant groups, drawing on sociopolitical ties among cross-border Islamist networks.117 Historically, Pakistani security elites have used cross-border Islamist ties to obtain external security objectives and address internal political challenges connected to Afghanistan, a practice originating in the Kashmir conºicts of 1947 and 1965.118 Considered a politically inexpensive component of Pakistan’s policy toward Afghanistan in the early post-2001 period, these ties have presented an increasing challenge to Pakistan’s domestic security since 2005. Nonetheless, Pakistani security elites still perceive the Afghan Taliban as one of the few available actors that can extend Pakistani inºuence in Afghanistan. This historical pattern of the Pakistani state’s reliance on cross-border Islamist connections became ªrmly established during Daoud’s regime.119 From 1973 to 1977, the Bhutto government delegated authority to Naseerullah Babar, then inspector general of the Frontier Corps and subsequently NWFP governor, to oversee the military training of the Afghan Islamist vanguard for incursions into Afghanistan. The Bhutto government also enlisted the support of the Jamaat in the formulation and implementation of its policy toward President Daoud’s government.120 It invited Qazi Hussein Ahmed, then a

117. For a detailed discussion, see Zahab and Roy, Islamist Networks, pp. 19–22, 67–71. 118. See Roy, “The Origins of the Islamist Movement in Afghanistan”; and Olivier Roy, “The Taliban: A Strategic Tool for Pakistan,” in Jaffrelot, Pakistan, pp. 149–160. On Pakistan’s employ- ment of religiously motivated militant groups in Kashmir, see Shuja Nawaz, Crossed Swords: Paki- stan, Its Army, and the Wars Within (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 42–48; and Arif Jamal, Shadow War: The Untold Story of Jihad in Kashmir (New York: Melville House, 2009), pp. 45– 50. 119. Ties between Islamists in Afghanistan and Pakistan have existed since Afghanistan’s constitutional period (1963–73), however. See Mohammad Anwar Khan, “The Emergence of Religious Parties in Afghanistan,” in Fazal-ur-Rahim Khan Marwat and Sayed Wiqar Ali Shah Kakakhel, eds., Afghanistan and the Frontier (Peshawar: Emjay Books International, 1993), 1–21; and Roy, “The Origins of the Islamist Movement in Afghanistan.” 120. Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr, “International Relations of an Islamist Movement: The Case of the Jama’at-i Islami of Pakistan” (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1999).

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Jamaat principal in the NWFP branch who had established contact with the nascent Afghan Islamist movement, to consult with Islamabad on developments in Afghanistan and to advise the Islamists in exile.121 According to Babar, these ties among Islamabad, the Jamaat, and the Afghan Islamist movement would later form “the organisational network” that Zia-ul-Haq and the United States used to counter the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.122 The primary consequence of these developments was an expansion of militancy in the NWFP and a deepening of many of the relationships between Pakistani Islamist organizations and the Afghan refugee population. The Jamaat forged electoral linkages with the Peshawar refugee population, dispatched party members to the battleªeld in Afghanistan, and developed institutionalized relationships with the Afghan mujahideen leadership based in Peshawar.123 At the same time, the ISI was transformed into an organizational liaison among anti-Soviet capitals, the Pakistani political establishment, and the Afghan mujahideen parties, disseminating money, war matériel, and information.124 Other Islamist ties developed largely beyond the shadow of the state, both prior to and during the Soviet occupation. The JUI, Pakistan’s leading Deobandi party, developed strong ties with the Afghan refugee population in Balochistan and the NWFP in spite of its contentious relationship with the Pakistani establishment. Throughout the 1980s, thousands of Afghan students attended JUI-afªliated madrassas in Pakistan’s border areas, establishing the organizational chains that would later underpin the early Taliban movement. During the Soviet war, many future Taliban leaders, including Mullah Omar,

121. Qazi Hussain recounted the beginning of his relationship with Burhanuddin Rabbani after the latter’s assassination in September 2011: “I had a 40 years friendship with Rabbani...after mi- grating to Pakistan through the Momand tribal region during the Daoud Khan era, he stayed at my home for six months.” Quoted in Abdul Mueed Hashimi, “Rabbani Was Close to Reconcilia- tion with Hekmatyar: Qazi,” Pajhwok Afghan News, September 24, 2011. It should be noted, however, that exchanges between the Jamaat-e-Islami and the Islamist vanguard in Afghanistan were comparatively new during the 1970s. The Sunni Afghan Islamists had in prior years looked primarily to Egypt for religious-political inspiration and education. See Roy, “The Taliban”; and Asta Olesen, Islam and Politics in Afghanistan (Abingdon, U.K.: Routledge, 2013), p. 229. 122. A.H. Amin, “Remembering Our Warriors: Babar ‘The Great,’” Defense Journal, April 2001, http://www.defencejournal.com/2001/apr/babar.htm. 123. Qazi Hussain and the Jamaat maintained a particularly strong bond with Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e-Islami, with which they shared not only common objectives in Afghanistan but also an elitist party model, a modernist political orientation, and strong leader-to-leader relations. 124. See, for example, Marvin G. Weinbaum, “War and Peace in Afghanistan: The Pakistani Role,” Middle East Journal, Vol. 45, No. 1 (Winter 1991), pp. 71–85. It should be noted that the domestic rise of the ISI in Pakistan occurred during the presidency of Ayub Khan (1958–69), well before the So- viet war in Afghanistan. See Aqil Shah, The Army and Democracy: Military Politics in Pakistan (Cam- bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014), p. 101.

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were educated at Darul Uloom Haqqania, led by JUI leader Maulana Sami ul- Haq. Ties between the Taliban movement and the JUI were also strengthened through a shared relationship with the traditionalist-conservative Sunni cleri- cal network of Harakat-e Enqelab-e Islami. Mawlawi Nabi Mohammadi, the head of this network, maintained a long-standing relationship with his JUI counterpart, Maulana Mufti Mahmoud, and his son, Maulana Fazlur Rahman, who would succeed his father as a JUI leader, and who had led many of the cadres that would later form the Taliban. These shared ties would later become instrumental in Pakistan’s decision to align support for the Taliban and away from Hekmatyar’s forces during the intra-mujahideen war in Afghanistan. The JUI, having entered into an electoral coalition with Benazir Bhutto’s PPP, was an early proponent of swinging Pakistani support toward the Taliban. This realignment was also advanced by Bhutto family conªdante Naseerullah Babar, who had overseen the ªrst proxy incursion into Afghanistan twenty years prior.125 As minister of interior and the leading decisionmaker on Afghanistan affairs, Babar carried out a policy within a regional environment vastly different from prior decades, but that nonetheless employed ties between Pakistani and Afghan Islamists to achieve Islamabad’s proximate objective of inºuence in Afghanistan. These historical ties among the Pakistani state, Pakistani Islamist organizations, and allied Afghan groups shed light on Pakistan’s behavior after it allied with the U.S.-led intervention in Afghanistan. Although the Afghan Taliban has always possessed a largely autonomous worldview and an Afghanistan- centered set of objectives, its organizational presence in Pakistan and linkages with ordinary and elite Pakistanis provided a familiar and inexpensive means of inºuencing the Afghan political system. militancy from below. A third source of Pakistani policy is rooted in Islamabad’s management of the Sunni Afghan jihad (1978–92), and the patterns of religious organization and content that it generated in northwest Pakistan. The campaign to defeat the Soviet Union in Afghanistan led to the creation of hundreds of largely Deobandi madrassas throughout Pakistan’s border region and gave rise to a more diffusely organized and entrepreneurial cadre of ulama.126 Loosely connected to the scholarly Deobandi establish-

125. Notably, this realignment occurred in spite of the reluctance of the ISI and Jamaat to withdraw support for Hekmatyar, their favored partner. See Ijaz Khan, Pakistan’s Strategic Culture and Foreign Policy Making: A Study of Pakistan’s Post 9/11 Afghan Policy (New York: Nova Science, 2007). 126. For greater detail, see Joshua T. White, Pakistan’s Islamist Frontier: Islamic Politics and U.S. Pol-

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ment, this new class of ulama played a part in advancing more rigid, and sometimes militant, narratives of Islam in Pashtun society, a development that was reinforced by the inºux of large numbers of foreign ªghters into Afghanistan and Pakistan’s border areas. These developments also corre- sponded with a decline in the prominence of tribal authority in the FATA and Khyber Paktunkhwa.127 These more militant patterns of Islamism persisted into the post-Soviet period. The demise of the PDPA government and the increasing presence of Pakistan-sponsored militant groups in Afghanistan served to sustain radical tendencies in the border areas between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Kashmir- oriented militant organizations and Sunni sectarian groups maintained an organizational presence in this region,128 keeping the militant ºame alive in Pakistani Pashtun society.129 The Afghan Taliban movement, which partly originated out of the border-area Deobandi networks, also galvanized radical sentiment by enlisting seminary students in the border areas of Pakistan. Cross-border support for the Taliban movement would later be observed in the substantial share of Pakistani participants in Mullah Omar’s military effort.130 Border-region militancy would occasionally manifest itself in bouts of political violence against the Pakistani state, as demonstrated by the violent campaign organized by Tehrik-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM) in 1994 for the implementation of shariah in Malakand and Dir. The TNSM movement

icy in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier (Washington, D.C.: Center on Faith and International Affairs, 2008), pp. 31–32. 127. By contrast, the erosion of tribe-based solidarity had already begun to occur in Afghanistan by the early 1970s, when new forms of international and domestic ªnance were introduced into rural areas of the country. See Jon W. Anderson, “There Are No Khans Anymore: Economic Devel- opment and Social Change in Tribal Afghanistan,” Middle East Journal, Vol. 32, No. 2 (Spring 1978), pp. 167–183. 128. Notable groups included Harakat ul-Mujahideen and the parent organization of the LeT, Markaz Dawat wal Irshad. The primary sectarian organization was Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. 129. Zahab and Roy, Islamist Networks,p.48. 130. In 1998 the U.S. embassy in Islamabad estimated that between 20 and 40 percent of Taliban forces were Pakistani citizens. See U.S. Embassy (Islamabad), Cable, “Afghanistan: Evidence Not There to Prove Assertions That Pak Troops Have Been Deployed to Assist Taliban in the North,” August 6, 1998, Conªdential, National Security Archive, George Washington University, p. 5. Simi- larly, in July 2001 Human Rights Watch reported that “a retired senior Pakistani military ofªcer claimed in an interview with Human Rights Watch that up to 30 percent of Taliban ªghting strength is made up of Pakistanis serving in units organized by (Pakistani) political parties.” From 1994 to 1999, “an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 Pakistanis trained and fought in Afghanistan,” primarily in support of the Taliban movement. See Ahmed Rashid, “The Taliban: Exporting Extrem- ism,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 78, No. 6 (November/December 1999), pp. 22–35, at p. 27.

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would later dispatch more than 7,000 members to ªght alongside the Afghan Taliban after the start of the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan.131 Other, more ambiguous indications of support for revisionist Islamism, often coinciding with anti-Americanism, emanated from mainstream Islamist parties and other conservative groups,132 many based beyond the border areas, that convened the Pak-Afghan Defense Council (PADC) in December 2000. Led by Sami ul- Haq, the PADC, which comprised an array of political interests, including militant groups, Islamist electoral parties, and former military ofªcers, organized mass campaigns against international censure of the Taliban government.133 One of the more prominent protests was convened by Sami ul-Haq in Akora Khattak in January 2001 to demonstrate against the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 1333, which demanded an end to the use of Taliban- controlled territory for sanctuary and training by al-Qaida. These patterns of Pakistani support for Islamism in Afghanistan, and their second-order effects on extremism in the border areas, have limited Islamabad’s willingness to adopt a more decisive position on the Taliban in the post-2001 era. When the Musharraf government publicly reversed its support for the Taliban movement in 2001, it perceived a comprehensive change in Pakistani policy as politically costly because signiªcant sections of Pakistani society continued to support the goals of the movement, particularly in Pakistan’s border region. The electoral rise of the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) coalition in the NWFP and Balochistan offers evidence of these potential costs. Elected to ofªce on the basis of opposition to the U.S. intervention, astute alliance- making, and indirect support from the Musharraf government,134 the MMA government occupied an inºuential, if uneasy, position between the pro- Taliban elements of its diverse electoral base and the nominal commitment

131. Zahab and Roy, Islamist Networks,p.45. 132. It should be noted that these and other conservative alliances supporting Islamism in Af- ghanistan encompassed a wide variety of ideological and instrumental aims. 133. See Zahab and Roy, Islamist Networks, pp. 60–61. Similarly, Ijaz Khan observes that conservative and nonclerical support for the Afghan Taliban existed in the Punjab and Karachi. See Khan, “Understanding Pakistan’s Pro-Taliban Afghan Policy,” p. 155n. 134. The electoral victories of the MMA in NWFP and Balochistan were at least partly attributable to the Musharraf government’s efforts to undermine its political rivals—the PPP, the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz, and the Awami National Party—as well as to the withdrawal of criminal cases against several high-proªle MMA candidates, including Fazal Rahman. See Mohammed Waseem and Mariam Mufti, “Religion, Politics, and Governance in Pakistan,” Working Paper No. 27-2009 (Lahore, Pakistan: Lahore University of Management Sciences, 2009), p. 40; and Vali Nasr, “Military Rule, Islamism, and Democracy in Pakistan,” Middle East Journal, Vol. 58, No. 2 (Spring 2004), p. 203.

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of the federal government to a war against the Taliban. In the lead-up to the 2002 presidential election, the JUI groups, in particular, and other MMA- allied parties strengthened their combined hand by periodically mobilizing violent and nonviolent protests in Peshawar, Quetta, Karachi, and Lahore against the U.S. intervention.135 In government, the MMA adopted an ambiguous position on the Afghan Taliban. Its provincial administration and constituent parties—especially the JUI factions—provided rhetorical support and territorial accommodation for the Afghan Taliban insurgency while attempting to position the JUI and other Islamist parties as intermediaries between the Taliban leadership and both the Pakistani establishment and the United States.136 In the city of Quetta, for example, provincial ministers regularly praised Pakistani volunteers who died ªghting for the Afghan Taliban, and JUI madrassas frequently endorsed participation in the Afghan Taliban insurgency.137 Such actions stemmed, in part, from the conºicting MMA imperatives of maintaining electoral support among pro-Taliban voting blocs in Pakistan and preserving cooperative relations with Islamabad, upon which it relied to govern effectively.138 Party leaders allied with the MMA frequently issued public statements express- ing solidarity with the Taliban movement, while reminding observers of their inºuence with Taliban leaders, even though such inºuence was in decline.139 These dynamics were not lost on Islamabad. During the Musharraf era, the Pakistan Army was reluctant to decisively cut ties with the Afghan Taliban, believing that such a move would require a politically demanding, protracted process that would involve quieting or cracking down on domestic supporters within the border region and elsewhere in Pakistan.140 The Musharraf government was also keenly aware that such a move would undermine its compli-

135. See, for example, “Anti-U.S. Protests Continue in Pakistan, Three Dead,” Deutsche Presse- Agentur, October 9, 2001. 136. Deputy JUI leader Maulana Abdul Ghani, for example, frequently acted as an advocate for the Afghan Taliban after 2001. The Taliban recognized Ghani’s support, evident in the attendance of Taliban leaders at his funeral in Chaman in October 2011. See Syed Shoaib Hasan, “Rare Taliban Praise for Pakistan’s Maulana Abdul Ghani,” BBC News, October 27, 2011. 137. Rubin, “In the Land of the Taliban”; and Abubakar Siddique, The Pashtun Question: The Unre- solved Key to the Future of Pakistan and Afghanistan (London: Hurst, 2013), pp. 133–135. 138. Joshua T. White, “Conºicted Islamisms: Shariah, Decision-Making, and Anti-State Agitation among Pakistani Islamist Parties,” Ph.D. dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 2013. 139. See, for example, John Lancaster, “Pakistan Touts Control of Border; Afghans, Some Western Ofªcials Skeptical of Crackdown on Taliban in Restive Region,” Washington Post, September 2, 2003. 140. See John Ward Anderson and Molly Moore, “Rivalries Poison Political Efforts: Blueprint for New Afghan Government Remains Elusive,” Washington Post, November 1, 2001.

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cated relationship with the MMA, and thus enhance the fortunes of its civilian rivals in the PPP and the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz. For the JUI and many of the other party leaders participating in the MMA, moreover, rejecting the Afghan Taliban’s organizational presence in the Pakistani border region would threaten to alienate much of its electoral base. Similar political reticence was evident in Pakistan’s response to increasing internal violence organized by members of the TTP. By early 2004, the TTP had emerged as a political force connected to but distinct from the Afghan Taliban. Drawing on cadres that were socialized in FATA-based Deobandi madrassas and had participated in Afghan Taliban and TNSM military campaigns,141 the TTP shared important personal, communal, and ideological linkages with the Afghan Taliban. At the same time, the TTP focused its attacks on the Pakistani political system, targeting civilians, government personnel, and poli- ticians belonging to both secular and Islamist parties. Confronted with a growing insurgency and believing that a direct conºict with the TTP would be too costly, Islamabad entered into a series of ultimately unsuccessful peace agreements from 2004 to 2009. The majority of these bargains unambiguously failed to dampen TTP violence and contributed to the expansion of Pakistani Taliban violence by offering cadres respite and recognition.142 While the growing militancy in FATA and areas of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province has strengthened Islamabad’s resolve to militarily weaken the TTP, it has further deterred the government from expelling the Afghan Taliban, which it believes would lead the movement to target Islamabad. This perception has, in turn, led Islamabad to avoid a direct and systemic confrontation with the Afghanistan- centered Quetta Shura and Haqqani organization.

durable distrust between islamabad and kabul A third, and indirect, inºuence on Pakistani foreign policy lies in the historical legacy of distrust between Islamabad and Kabul. In the post-2001 period, unresolved differences between Afghan and Pakistani political elites have dampened Islamabad’s interest in pursuing greater cooperation with Kabul.

141. For example, Nek Mohammed, one of the initial organizers of the Taliban insurgency in Paki- stan, and subsequent TTP leader Baitullah Mehsud were both veterans of the Afghan Taliban military campaigns in Afghanistan during the 1990s. Maulana Fazlullah, the current TTP leader, participated in the TNSM insurrection in 1994, which was led by his father-in-law Suª Mohammad. 142. See Daoud Khan Khattak, “Reviewing Pakistan’s Peace Deals with the Taliban,” CTC Sentinel, Vol. 5, No. 9 (September 2012), pp. 11–13.

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Addressing the primary areas of distrust—the contentious border issue and Islamabad’s prior interventionism in Afghanistan—has been seen as politically difªcult and uncertain in the post-2001 Afghan environment, a task further complicated by Pakistan’s ongoing accommodation of the Afghan Taliban. Distrust between Islamabad and Kabul has its origins in two historically distinct strands, both of which have increased in intensity and complexity in the post-2001 period. First, the long-standing Pashtunistan issue remains a salient political matter for sections of the Pashtun population in Afghanistan, even if it no longer resonates on the Pakistani side of the border to the extent it once did.143 Since 2001 Pashtunistan has materialized in oblique terms, often in response to cross-border incidents between Afghanistan and Pakistan. When violent confrontations have intermittently erupted along the Durand Line, they have served as a powerful source of mobilization among sections of Afghan society. This could be seen in the events following border clashes between Afghan and Pakistani forces near Goshta District, when a mob at- tacked the Pakistani embassy in Kabul in July 2003.144 It was also observable in the aftermath of the Goshta incident in May 2013, with the occurrence of protests in Kabul, Jalalabad, and Kandahar, and extensive coverage in the Afghan media. Second, Afghan and Pakistani political elites remain divided over the legacy of Islamabad’s interventions in the intra-mujahideen civil war of the 1990s. Urban residents and northern territorial groups in Afghanistan have viewed the Pakistani establishment with suspicion because of its intensive political and military support for Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e-Islami and, later, the Taliban movement—both of which employed signiªcant levels of indiscriminate violence in subsequent military campaigns.145 Often poorly understood by Pakistani elites, Afghan distrust of the Pakistani political establishment

143. Despite possessing very different sociopolitical bases, all Afghan governments in the past century have understood the importance and sensitivity of the Pashtunistan issue. As a result, royal, Marxist-Leninist, mujahideen, and Taliban administrations have been either reluctant to rec- ognize the Durand Line or outwardly hostile to formal recognition. See Ruttig, “Trouble at the Goshta Gate.” Contrasting Afghan and Pakistani Pashtun perceptions of the Durand Line can be seen in remarks by Maulana Fazlur Rahman, the JUI factional leader, that the line should be recognized, as compared to negative reactions in the Afghan press. See, for example, “Maulana Fazlur Rehman Should Not Ignore the Facts,” Hewad, August 26, 2007. 144. David Rohde, “Hundreds of Afghans Attack Pakistan Embassy in Kabul,” New York Times, July 9, 2003. 145. Cadres loyal to other externally backed mujahideen organizations, including Sayyaf’s Ittehad-e-Islami, Mazari’s Hizb-e Wahdat-e-Islami, and Rabbani’s Jamiat-e-Islami were also responsible for indiscriminate killings of civilians. See Human Rights Watch, Afghanistan: Blood- Stained Hands—Past Atrocities in Kabul and Afghanistan’s Legacy of Impunity (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2005).

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was particularly strong among these communities because they were ex- posed to severe repression or violence by Pakistan-backed militant groups. Islamabad, in turn, has perceived Afghan distrust as an intrinsic response to Pakistan’s rivalry with India rather than as a response contingent on Pakistani policy. Focused on the perceived consequences of Afghan suspicion rather than its causes, Pakistani security elites have discounted Afghan misgiv- ings toward Islamabad, interpreting such views as largely ªxed and particular to the non-Pashtun communities of Afghanistan. Despite the diversity and ºuidity of public opinion in post-2001 Afghanistan, Islamabad has tended to misperceive the present political system in Afghanistan as rigidly opposed to Pakistan. Since 2001, distrust between Afghanistan and Pakistan has increased in intensity and scope, as broader segments of both societies have experienced either directly or indirectly indiscriminate Taliban-afªliated violence. Afghan elites and ordinary citizens alike see Taliban violence as the result of Pakistani assistance,146 complicating the ability of the Afghan and Pakistani political establishments to move toward a constructive relationship. Recent evidence of Afghan accommodation of TTP forces—notably, the discovery of an operation by Afghan intelligence to recruit Latifullah Mehsud, the TTP’s second-in-command, as an ally of Kabul in October 2013—has also deepened distrust between Kabul and Islamabad. Still, the scale of this development is not comparable to Pakistan’s own accommodative posture.147

Conclusion

Aqil Shah, in a study of Pakistani contentious politics, describes civil-military relations in Pakistan as “path-dependent with a vengeance.”148 This descrip- tion aptly summarizes Pakistani foreign policy toward Afghanistan in the post-2001 period. This article has sought to explain why Pakistan adopted a position that accommodated, instead of expelled, the Taliban movement after publicly withdrawing its support for Mullah Mohammad Omar’s govern-

146. This sentiment can be seen across ethnic, occupational, class, and generational groups. Au- thor interviews with laborers, skilled professionals, and community leaders in Kabul, Kandahar, Bamiyan, and Mazar-e-Sharif, July and August 2014. See also Omar Samad, “Perceptions of Poli- tically Engaged, Inºuential Afghans on the Way Forward” (Washington, D.C.: United States Insti- tute of Peace, 2013), pp. 7–9. 147. Matthew Rosenberg, “U.S. Disrupts Afghans’ Tack on Militants,” New York Times, October 28, 2013. 148. Aqil Shah, “Pakistan after Musharraf: Praetorianism and Terrorism,” Journal of Democracy, Vol. 19, No. 4 (October 2008), p. 18.

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ment. It concludes that Pakistan’s pre-2001 position of supporting the Afghan Taliban did not decisively change after 2001 because its internal imbalances and external relationships with India and the Afghan political system, as a whole, had not fundamentally changed. This explanation of Pakistani foreign policy behavior has implications for wider understandings of international politics. Pakistani accommodation of the Taliban has not only served to destabilize the Afghan political system, but also to undercut Pakistan itself. In doing so, Pakistani policy has departed from structural expectations of security-seeking behavior. To explain this devi- ation, the argument advanced in this article highlights a set of domestic-level imbalances that interact with structural conditions to make destabilizing behavior more likely. Organizational culture, domestic coalitions, and grassroots militancy have combined with external security considerations to explain Islamabad’s risky and ultimately destabilizing choice to accommodate the Taliban after 2001. The argument advanced in this article also has implications for the prospects of security in Afghanistan and Pakistan going forward. Despite Islamabad’s reported change in thinking, which seeks the incorporation of the Afghan Taliban into the Afghan political system, but not as a violent and hegemonic entity, little progress has been made toward a political settlement.149 The ongoing nature of Pakistan’s accommodation of the Taliban and its violent consequences in Afghanistan explain this outcome. Future prospects of ending the Afghan Taliban insurgency through a negotiated regional settlement, therefore, will be problematic as long as Pakistan maintains its posture of accommodation. Absent changes in the way that Pakistani strategy in Afghanistan is constituted and implemented—or changes in Afghan Taliban behavior—Islamabad will have limited success in convinc- ingly signaling a new Afghanistan policy. If a settlement of the conºict is to be achieved, greater Pakistani civilian control over the military and increased diplomatic efforts between Islamabad and Kabul will be required, as will increased capacity of the Afghan government. Incremental and iterative gains in Pakistani civilian inºuence and Afghan institutional and military capacity, although subject to great uncertainty, may constitute the initial steps through which regional cooperation can be achieved in the future.

149. For discussions of Pakistan’s “strategic shift,” see Frédéric Grare, “Is Pakistan’s Behavior Changing?” (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2013); and Moeed Yusuf, “Decoding Pakistan’s ‘Strategic Shift’ in Afghanistan” (Stockholm: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 2013).

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