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Old Habits, New Consequences Old Habits, New Khalid Homayun Consequences Nadiri Pakistan’S Posture Toward Afghanistan Since 2001 Old Habits, New Consequences Old Habits, New Khalid Homayun Consequences Nadiri Pakistan’s Posture toward Afghanistan since 2001 Since the terrorist at- tacks of September 11, 2001, Pakistan has pursued a seemingly incongruous course of action in Afghanistan. It has participated in the U.S. and interna- tional intervention in Afghanistan both by allying itself with the military cam- paign 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 command- ers to visit or reside in Pakistani urban centers. Why has Pakistan adopted this posture of Afghan Taliban accommodation despite its nominal participa- tion 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 po- litical 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 through- out 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. International Security, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Fall 2014), pp. 132–168, doi:10.1162/ISEC_a_00178 © 2014 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 132 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/ISEC_a_00178 by guest on 02 October 2021 Old Habits, New Consequences 133 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 coopera- tion. 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 sec- tion develops an explanation of Pakistan’s posture of accommodation toward the Afghan Taliban. The article concludes with an evaluation of the impli- cations 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 conten- tious. Prior to the April 1978 coup d’état that brought to power the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), Afghanistan and Pakistan had sup- ported 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 re- gime 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. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/ISEC_a_00178 by guest on 02 October 2021 International Security 39:2 134 Afghanistan and Pakistan’s contentious relationship can be traced, in part, to the territorial demarcation of the Afghan polity in the late nineteenth cen- tury. 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 com- munity 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 endur- ing 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 in- volved 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 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/ISEC_a_00178 by guest on 02 October 2021 Old Habits, New Consequences 135 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 insur- gency, succeeded one month
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