As the United States draws down its troops from Afghanistan, two overarching issues most concern strategic planners. One is the future prospects of violent nonstate actors (VNSAs), including the possibility that both the Taliban and al-Qaeda may experience a resurgence as the number of American forces declines. The other significant issue is the role that neighboring countries will play in Afghanistan’s future. Afghanistan’s neighbors have for years been positioning themselves to better assert their interests postwithdrawal, and to the extent that the United States maintains strategic interests in Afghanistan, it will have to navigate an increasingly complex landscape of state and nonstate actors.
The twin issues of VNSAs in Afghanistan and interference by that country’s neighbors are deeply connected historically, and they will continue to be tied for the foreseeable future. Pakistan has been a particularly important sponsor of insurgent and militant factions operating in Afghanistan in recent years, including the Taliban and the Haqqani Network (Dressler 2012; Waldman 2010). But strong—and, frequently, complex—relationships between the states of the region and VNSAs have far deeper roots than the U.S. war in Afghanistan, or even the Afghan-Soviet war. From the time of Pakistan’s creation, in fact, VNSAs played a defining role in the relationship between Afghanistan and Pakistan. In those early years the situation was the inverse of where it stands today: Afghanistan sponsored VNSAs in Pakistan that fought the government and threatened the integrity of the Pakistani state. Afghanistan pursued this set of policies in support of its demand for an independent “Pashtunistan,” an ethnic state that Afghan leaders argued should be carved out of Pakistani territory.
Afghanistan’s early aggression against Pakistan, which involved such unconventional means as the use of VNSA proxies and irregular forces dressed as tribesmen, looks strikingly similar to Pakistan’s later support for VNSAs in Afghanistan. This is no coincidence: Afghanistan’s Pashtunistan policies were critical in prompting Pakistan’s decisions to support violent Islamist groups in Afghanistan. After Pakistan took the initial step toward supporting violent Islamists, the relationship between Pakistan, Afghanistan, and a variety of VNSAs became increasingly complex. The December 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan prompted the United States and Saudi Arabia to channel enormous sums of money to Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) to support Afghanistan’s seven major mujahideen factions, both magnifying the presence and power of VNSAs in Afghanistan and intensifying their ties to the ISI. Pakistan in turn developed strategic doctrines that perceived Islamist VNSAs as a strategic asset. Lasting relationships between ISI officers and religious militants were forged on the bloody battlefields of the Afghan-Soviet war.
Further complicating the role of VNSAs in the region, Arab militants—including Osama bin Laden and the original core of what would become al-Qaeda—were also drawn to the Afghan-Soviet conflict. Bin Laden returned to Afghanistan after that war ended, in 1996, employing it as a safe haven for fighters affiliated with his organization and a host of other jihadist groups. Consistent with the strategic doctrines Pakistani planners had developed, Pakistan took advantage of the jihadist presence in Afghanistan during this period, leveraging these VNSAs to attack Indian interests. After the 9/11 attacks and the American occupation of Afghanistan, however, Pakistan increasingly lost control of its Frankenstein monster. The Tehreek-e-Taliban-e-Pakistan is engaging in insurgent warfare against the Pakistani state, and several military campaigns over the past decade and a half show the limits of Pakistan’s ability to contain VNSAs in its own territory.
Pakistan will continue to support a variety of unsavory VNSAs in Afghanistan when the American drawdown is complete. But although Pakistan will momentarily become one of the stronger actors in Afghanistan, the very source of its strength—its long-standing sponsorship of VNSAs—is also the cause of its underlying weakness. Pakistan’s initial course as the United States draws down appears predictable, but its weaknesses could ultimately cause Pakistan to dramatically shift its policies, or even collapse.
Afghanistan’s eastern border was settled in 1893. Known as the Durand Line, the border was named after its architect, Sir Henry Mortimer Durand. At the time the Durand Line was drawn, Britain had considerable strategic interests in the region, with British India the jewel in the colonial crown. Afghanistan’s amir, Abdur Rahman, vehemently opposed Britain’s proposal for the Afghan-Indian border, which would force him to relinquish “his nominal sovereignty over the Pashtun tribes” outside the border (Barfield 2010: 154). Historically, the idea of being “Afghan” was tied to being from the Pashtun ethnic group. As James Spain, a former cultural affairs officer at the American embassy in Karachi, has written, the Durand Line thus left “half of a people intimately related by culture, history, and blood on either side” (1954: 30). In addition to dividing the Pashtuns, the Durand Line deprived Afghanistan of access to the Arabian Sea, thus rendering it landlocked. Britain used the threat of economic embargo to force Abdur Rahman to agree to the border: Abdur Rahman depended on British subsidies and was in particular need of them at the time to fuel his internal war against the Hazaras. (He was in the process of expanding the power of Afghanistan’s central government by conquering the country’s non-Sunni areas.)
Afghanistan has never accepted the Durand Line’s legitimacy, but it had little ability to challenge a global superpower like Britain. From Afghanistan’s perspective, then, regional dynamics changed significantly after British India was partitioned into the independent states of India and Pakistan—particularly because the disputed Pashtun regions were in Pakistan, the weaker of the two new states. Afghanistan had long been an independent state by the time Pakistan was created in 1947, and there was no particular reason to think Pakistan—an agglomeration of ethnic groups with little uniting them besides the Islamic faith—would last. Further, Pakistan was born of an extraordinarily bloody partition with India, producing an enduring archrivalry. Thus, just as many Indian leaders thought the newly forged state of Pakistan wouldn’t survive (Haqqani 2005: 10), so did many Afghan politicians. This perception of Pakistan’s weakness spurred Afghanistan to forge an aggressive strategy to recover its lost Pashtun territory.
Afghanistan immediately made its hostility to the new state clear. It was the only country to vote against Pakistan’s admission into the United Nations, arguing that Pakistan’s northwest frontier “should not be recognized as a part of Pakistan until the Pashtuns of that area had been given the opportunity to opt out for independence” (Hasan 1962: 16). This was a reference to a continuing Afghan demand that its neighbor should allow Pashtuns in the northwestern part of the country to vote on whether they wanted to secede and become an independent state.
The demand was framed in legal and ethical terms. Afghan advocates called the proposed independent state “Pashtunistan,” meaning “land of the Pashtuns.” Though Afghanistan’s Pashtunistan demands were framed as supportive of Pashtun national independence, they were in fact irredentist. If Pashtunistan came to exist, it would be fragile and essentially defenseless and could not remain independent for long. The historical linkage between the Pashtuns and Afghanistan would likely dictate a merger of Pashtunistan into Afghanistan. And even if Pakistan never agreed to the creation of Pashtunistan, Afghanistan had staked its claim to that area in case the Pakistani state failed.
Though the proposed “Pashtunistan” fluctuated in size over time, it frequently encompassed about half of West Pakistan, including areas inhabited by the Baluch ethnic group. (At Pakistan’s founding, it was divided geographically into West Pakistan and East Pakistan; the latter is known today as Bangladesh.) Making the Baluch a part of this proposal ensured that, if Pashtunistan became part of Afghanistan, Afghanistan’s newly constituted borders would again provide access to the Arabian Sea.
From a legal perspective, Afghanistan’s protestations regarding the illegitimacy of its border with Pakistan were rather weak. Though Afghanistan claimed the border had been drawn under duress, the country’s representatives had confirmed the demarcation multiple times, including in agreements signed in 1905, 1919 (at the conclusion of the Third Anglo-Afghan War), 1921, and 1930 (Hasan 1962: 15). Yet the weakness of Afghanistan’s legal case was largely beside the point, given Afghan elites’ feelings of connection to the Pashtun areas and the strategic benefits Afghan planners saw in expanding the country’s territory.
Less than a decade after Pakistan’s birth, James Spain noted that “relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan have come to be centered on one issue,” Pashtunistan (1954: 35). Afghanistan’s decision to make this border dispute central to the two states’ relations would prove fateful. During this period, Kabul launched a series of low-level attacks against Pakistan, maintaining some degree of deniability throughout, just as Pakistan would later do when it sponsored VNSAs that struck Indian, Afghan, and U.S. targets. On September 30, 1950, Pakistan’s northern border was attacked by Afghan tribesmen, as well as regular Afghan troops, who crossed into Pakistan thirty miles northeast of Chaman in Baluchistan (Associated Press 1950b). It didn’t take long for Pakistan to repel this rather crude invasion, as its government announced that it had “driven invaders from Afghanistan back across the border” after just six days of fighting (Associated Press 1950a). Afghanistan claimed that it had been uninvolved, that the attackers were just tribesmen spontaneously agitating for an independent Pashtunistan. However, its denials lacked credibility.
Tensions between Afghanistan and Pakistan rose again in 1955, when Pakistan announced that it was consolidating its control over its tribal areas. Afghan prime minister Muhammad Daoud Khan criticized Pakistan’s actions over the airwaves of Radio Kabul on March 29, 1955. At the time, although Muhammad Zahir Shah was Afghanistan’s nominal monarch, Daoud held the real power in the country. Peter Tomsen, a scholar of the region and former special envoy to the Afghan mujahideen, describes Daoud, a career military man who was single-mindedly devoted to the Pashtunistan cause, as characterized by “an autocratic style” and “supreme self-confidence” (Tomsen 2011: 89). Following Daoud’s denunciations of Pakistan, government-inspired demonstrations flared up in Kabul, Kandahar, and Jalalabad. S. M. M. Qureshi of the University of Alberta noted that “Pakistan flags were pulled down and insulted and the [Pashtunistan] flag was hoisted on the chancery of the Pakistan Embassy in Kabul” (Qureshi 1966: 105). The two countries withdrew their ambassadors, and relations weren’t fully restored until 1957.
The next crisis in Afghanistan-Pakistan relations came in 1960–1961. In late September 1960, an Afghan lashkar (irregular militia) dispatched by Muhammad Daoud Khan crossed into Pakistan’s Bajaur area. Pakistan announced that the lashkar “clashed with loyal tribesmen and fled after suffering heavy casualties” (Reuters 1960b). Conventional Afghan military resources, including tanks, massed on the Afghan side of the border (Guardian 1960). Eventually “a major battle” broke out between the two sides, with Pakistan bombarding Afghan forces with its airpower (Reuters 1960a). Rather than escalating the conflict, this quelled hostilities, at least for the moment. But in May of the following year, forces from both sides clashed in the Khyber Pass area. Pakistan announced that regular Afghan forces had attacked Pakistani border posts, and Pakistan’s air force strafed Afghan positions (Associated Press 1961). Pakistan also stepped up police patrols and roadblocks. The New York Times noted that “relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan appear to have reached a new low, and no relief is in sight” (Grimes 1961).
After a new set of skirmishes broke out in the fall of 1961, Afghanistan and Pakistan formally severed diplomatic relations (Reuters 1961). Pakistan blocked trade routes into Afghanistan, damaging the landlocked state. This temporarily pushed Muhammad Daoud Khan from power. Even while his country suffered economically, Daoud inexplicably demanded that the monarch, Zahir Shah, expand Daoud’s powers. Daoud angrily resigned after Zahir Shah said no (Tomsen 2011: 96). With Daoud out of power, the shah of Iran helped mediate a détente between the two neighbors in 1963. The resulting peace lasted about a decade, until Daoud deposed his cousin, King Muhammad Zahir Shah, on July 17, 1973.
Upon assuming power, Daoud immediately set out to reignite the border dispute by fomenting unrest in Pakistan’s tribal areas. His regime provided sanctuary, arms, and ammunition to Pashtun and Baluch nationalist groups. Pakistan saw this as a significant challenge, as its Baluch regions were already in “virtual revolt” (R. Hussain 2005: 78). Even as Daoud fomented ethnic insurgency in Pakistan, his regime simultaneously condemned Pakistan before the United Nations as “genocidal” in its treatment of ethnic minorities. This escalation came at a time when Pakistan had already lost nearly a third of its territory with the secession of East Pakistan in 1971. Rizwan Hussain writes that Afghanistan’s support for ethnic insurgents “posed the greatest threat to Pakistan’s integrity since the secession of East Pakistan” (2005: 78). Such provocation demanded a response.
Pakistani president Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a secular reformist who often unwittingly empowered the country’s Islamists, fashioned a two-prong strategy to confront Afghanistan. The first prong was to suppress nationalist uprisings in Pakistan, and the second was a “forward policy” that supported Islamist VNSAs in Afghanistan (a policy that mirrored the way Afghanistan had supported nationalist VNSAs in Pakistan). Bhutto likely didn’t envision Pakistani support for militants as more than a short-term measure. Peter Tomsen argues that even though the young Islamists that Pakistan sponsored were assured that attacking Afghanistan could “spark a general uprising,” Bhutto actually “knew the scattered, small-scale military operations would fail” (Tomsen 2011: 107). However, Bhutto thought they could nonetheless serve their purpose by producing a crisis that would cause Afghanistan’s government to reach out to him for assistance in clamping down on the perpetrators. By solving the crisis that he had covertly produced, Bhutto planned to improve relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Though Bhutto seemingly had no more than a short-term vision for this Machiavellian scheme, his decision had lasting consequences. Bhutto’s policies resulted in personal relationships between Pakistani military intelligence officers and Islamic militants that would last for decades. Afghan Islamists who received covert Pakistani aid during this early period of support included Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Burhanuddin Rabbani, both of whom were destined to become important figures during the Afghan-Soviet war and beyond (Emadi 1990).
On December 27, 1979, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan began with Operation Storm-333, in which Soviet special forces attacked the Taj-Bek palace and killed Afghan leader Hafizullah Amin (Feifer 2009). Throughout the Muslim world, Soviet actions engendered an immediate backlash. In January 1980, Egypt’s prime minister declared the Soviet invasion “a flagrant aggression against an Islamic state,” and said it showed the Soviet Union was “but an extension of the colonialist Tsarist regime” (BBC 1980). By the end of the month, foreign ministers of thirty-five Muslim countries, as well as the Palestine Liberation Organization, passed a resolution through the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) declaring the invasion of Afghanistan a “flagrant violation of all international covenants and norms, as well as a serious threat to peace and security in the region and throughout the world.” Afghanistan’s Soviet-installed regime was expelled from the OIC, the delegates of which urged all Muslim countries to similarly withhold recognition from that government and sever their relations with it. At the time, the Christian Science Monitor described this condemnation of Soviet actions as “some of the strongest terms ever used by a third-world parley” (Dorsey 1980).
Several states channeled aid to the Afghan mujahideen fighting the Soviets. They became the beneficiaries of the largest U.S. covert aid program since the Vietnam War, with American support (totaling around $3 billion) matched dollar for dollar by Saudi Arabia. The United States also provided supplies and weaponry, including Stinger missiles that helped negate the Soviet airpower advantage. This aid was channeled to the mujahideen through Pakistan’s ISI. Though there were advantages to this arrangement—it helped obscure America’s role in the conflict—one consequence is that it bolstered connections between Pakistani intelligence and Islamist VNSAs.
In addition to drawing states into the conflict in support of the Afghan mujahideen, the Soviet invasion also prompted thousands of Arabs to flock to South Asia to aid the Afghan cause. Many Arabs who traveled to the region provided humanitarian aid, but there was also a contingent of Arab foreign fighters (Hafez 2008). Osama bin Laden transitioned from being part of the former group, a humanitarian worker and financier of mujahideen, to proving himself on the battlefield. He traveled to Pakistan in the early 1980s, where he initially occupied himself by “providing cash to the relatives of wounded or martyred fighters, building hospitals, and helping the millions of Afghan refugees fleeing to the border region of Pakistan” (Riedel 2008: 42). After his first trip to the front lines in 1984, bin Laden developed a thirst for more action, and established a base for Arab fighters near Khost in eastern Afghanistan, where the Soviets had a garrison. Although the exploits of fighters affiliated with bin Laden were irrelevant to the broader war, his involvement launched him to prominence in the Arab media as a war hero (Coll 2004: 163).
Al-Qaeda was founded in August 1988, in the waning days of the Afghan-Soviet war. At the time, bin Laden and his mentor Abdullah Azzam agreed that the organization they had built during the conflict shouldn’t simply dissolve when the war ended (National Commission on Terrorist Attacks 2004: 56). Rather, they wanted the structure they had created to serve as “the base” (al qaeda) for future efforts. Both the deepening relationship between Pakistan and Islamist groups and the enduring presence of Arab militants would greatly complicate the role of VNSAs in the Afghanistan-Pakistan relationship.
Two points are worth making about Pakistan’s evolving relationship with Islamist VNSAs. The first is that the Afghan-Soviet war occurred at a time when the Pakistani military was undergoing significant changes, both from the very top and also among the rank and file. General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq deposed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto as Pakistan’s leader in a July 1977 coup. In addition to being a religious man, Zia was “closely connected to several Islamists by virtue of his social and family origins” (Haqqani 2005: 112). During his period of rule, Zia changed Pakistan’s military culture in several ways. He incorporated Islamic teachings (such as S. K. Malik’s The Quranic Concept of War) into military training, added religious criteria to officers’ promotion requirements and exams, and required formal obedience to Islamic rules within the military (Z. Hussain 2007). These top-level changes came at a time when the demographics of the officer corps were shifting. The first generation of Pakistan’s officers came from the country’s largely secular social elites, while many new junior officers hailed from the poorer northern districts. Pakistani journalist Zahid Hussain notes that “the spirit of liberalism, common in the ‘old’ army, was practically unknown to them. They were products of a social class that, by its very nature, was conservative and easily influenced by Islamic fundamentalism” (2007: 20).
The second point is that, as Pakistan’s support for Islamist VNSAs grew during the course of the Afghan-Soviet war, its strategic doctrine came to embrace such support as a crucial means of advancing the country’s interests. Ever since Pakistan’s creation, its rivalry with India has been one of its key strategic priorities, and Pakistani planners came to believe that supporting Islamist groups in Afghanistan would give them “strategic depth” against India. Another benefit of supporting Islamist groups was their potential to defuse the Pashtunistan issue: groups whose primary identification was religious were less likely to support ethno-nationalist causes.
Though observers universally expected Afghan leader Mohammad Najibullah’s government to fall shortly after the Soviet Union withdrew its troops in 1989, the regime outperformed expectations for several years. One reason for its success was a major blunder in March 1989, as 15,000 mujahideen fighters—egged on by ISI chief Hamid Gul—attacked the city of Jalalabad. They were decisively crushed by the Afghan army, aided by the more than four hundred Scud missiles fired by Soviet advisers. The scope of mujahideen losses—around 3,000 dead—without an inch of territory to show for it swung momentum toward Najibullah, who was previously viewed as a dead man walking.
A second reason for Najibullah’s success was his soft-power strategy, in which he rebranded himself as a devout Muslim and ardent nationalist, and used a traditional tool of influence in Afghanistan—patronage networks—to neutralize foes (Barfield 2010). The combination of the Soviet departure and Najibullah’s patronage caused many former mujahideen to defect to join the government, while still others agreed to ceasefires (Barfield 2010). Though it is impossible to state the number of “irreconcilables” with precision, outside observers considered them a relatively small portion of fighters.
But though Najibullah’s regime remained more stable than expected for several years, his strategy depended on continuing Russian support—and after the Soviet Union dissolved in December 1991, that support dried up. Najibullah’s regime quickly collapsed, and the country descended into civil war. The Taliban emerged from this chaotic milieu. The group grew rapidly after its founding in 1994, not only because it boasted effective fighters, but also due to the backing of Pakistan’s ISI, which helped “uneducated Taliban leaders with everything from fighting the opposition Northern Alliance to more mundane tasks like translating international documents” (Schaffer 2001). By 1996 the Taliban had captured both Kabul and Kandahar.
Bin Laden ended up returning to Afghanistan around this time. After the end of the Afghan-Soviet war, he had lived briefly in Saudi Arabia before relocating to Sudan in 1991, where he began sponsoring terrorist attacks against U.S. targets. As a result of pressure from American and Saudi intelligence services, bin Laden was expelled from Sudan (Riedel 2008: 56). At the invitation of mujahideen leader Yunus Khalis, bin Laden returned to Afghanistan, the country where he had first made his reputation (Stenersen 2013: 72). The Taliban agreed to protect bin Laden from his many enemies, explaining in one statement: “If an animal sought refuge with us we would have had no choice but to protect it. How, then, about a man who has given himself and his wealth in the cause of Allah and in the cause of jihad in Afghanistan” (Atwan 2006: 54). Al-Qaeda established a network of training camps used not only by its own soldiers but also a variety of other transnational jihadist groups.
Some of the groups that trained and found refuge in Afghanistan received Pakistani sponsorship and concentrated their militant activities on an issue of great interest to Pakistan, opposing the Indian presence in the disputed Kashmir region. Pakistan saw pre-9/11 Afghanistan as advantageous to it in other ways, too. As this chapter has explained, the government in Kabul had been hostile to Pakistan ever since its founding, and the period of Taliban rule is the only one since Pakistan’s creation that Afghanistan had a strong relationship with Pakistan and an adversarial one with India.
After al-Qaeda executed the devastating 9/11 attacks, U.S. deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage gave Pakistan an ultimatum: in then-President Pervez Musharraf’s words, “we had to decide whether we were with America or with the terrorists . . . [and] if we chose the terrorists, then we should be prepared to be bombed back to the Stone Age” (Musharraf 2006: 201). Armitage’s threat, along with material incentives, prompted Musharraf to announce a dramatic about-face on the issue of VNSAs, declaring on January 12, 2002, that “no Pakistan-based organization would be allowed to indulge in terrorism in the name of religion” (Z. Hussain 2007: 51). He announced the ban of five jihadist groups that day, including Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed.
Pakistan’s Continuing Support for Jihadist Groups
However, this striking reversal didn’t last. The various factors driving Pakistan’s support for violent Islamist groups in Afghanistan were simply too tangled a web. In addition to the strategic calculations behind Pakistan’s support for these groups, strong personal relationships had developed between Pakistani officers and the VNSAs they supported. Furthermore, the government of Pakistan does not operate as a unified actor. One schism is between the civilian government and the military: Musharraf is only one of several Pakistani military leaders who executed a coup against a civilian government. But there are also divisions within the military. The most notable is the distinct role of the ISI, which is often described as a “state within a state.” The ISI has been the lead Pakistani actor in supporting jihadist groups, and its policies in this regard are well documented (Gartenstein-Ross 2009). But there are divisions even within the ISI. The most obvious internal split is between the S wing, which liaises with militant Islamist groups, and the C wing, which interfaces with foreign intelligence services. The two wings are reportedly often at odds because their missions are almost diametrically opposed.
So when one says that Pakistan supports jihadist groups, what does this mean? There are multiple possibilities. One possibility is that both Pakistan’s civilian government and ISI support a particular jihadist group. A second possibility is that Pakistan’s support is official government policy, but the civilian government provides only an implicit green light, with no oversight—similar to a black budget. A third possibility is that Pakistan’s support is an ISI policy that flouts the civilian government’s wishes: the civilian government doesn’t want the ISI to adopt a set of pro-jihadist policies, but it does so anyway, pursuant to orders from ISI leadership. A fourth possibility is that the policy is carried out by “rogue elements” within ISI who are supported by neither the civilian government nor ISI at an official level (though ISI’s leadership may give the so-called rogue elements an implicit green light while trying to maintain its own deniability).1 And a fifth culprit is an outer ring of supporters for jihadist militancy who are no longer part of ISI, yet maintain influence within it. Retired ISI officers from the S wing with connections to militancy who have remained influential following their retirement include former ISI head Hamid Gul, who in 2003 declared that “God will destroy the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan and wherever it will try to go from there.” In late 2008, the United States sent a secret document to Pakistan’s government linking Gul to the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and India has demanded his arrest in connection with the Mumbai attacks (Abbasi 2008; Wax and Lakshmi 2008).
One data point that illustrates the nonunified nature of Pakistan’s government is a May 2011 incident in which Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari covertly sent a letter to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, asking for U.S. help in disbanding the ISI’s S wing (Nelson 2011; Shah 2011). The fact that Zardari reached out to the United States for assistance in changing ISI’s internal dynamics, rather than simply taking action on his own, shows that the civilian government isn’t in a position of uncontested authority. The disunity within Pakistan’s government often made it difficult for American policy makers to determine which level of Pakistan’s government sanctioned support for jihadism. This in turn impeded an effective U.S. response when it became obvious that, contrary to Musharraf’s assurances, jihadist groups continued to both operate inside Pakistan and also receive state support.
The factors outlined in this chapter will continue to drive Pakistan’s support for militant Islamist groups in Afghanistan after the U.S. drawdown. Even if the civilian government wanted to reduce or end the country’s sponsorship of Islamist VNSAs, the ISI’s investment in this set of policies ensures that they will continue absent dramatic changes.
VNSAs in the Afghanistan-Pakistan Relationship
The role of VNSAs in the Afghanistan-Pakistan relationship has grown increasingly complex, and they have become increasingly difficult for any state to sponsor without significant risk. While Pakistan seemingly viewed the proliferation of jihadist groups in South Asia as an unalloyed advantage prior to the 9/11 attacks, today these VNSAs pose a clear threat to the Pakistani state, even as its sponsorship of jihadist groups has continued.
The dangers for Pakistan are clear in its relationship with the Tehreek-e-Taliban-e-Pakistan (TTP). Established in 2007, TTP is “an umbrella organization for Pakistani militant groups” in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, which was formerly known as the North-West Frontier Province (Stenersen 2013: 78). About thirteen militant groups were part of TTP at the time of its founding (Laub 2013). Although Pakistan was still supporting Islamist militant groups focused on Afghanistan at the time, it had also engaged in periodic military offensives against these groups in its own territory. These included a campaign in 2004 against Nek Muhammad Wazir’s forces and several hundred foreign fighters west and north of Wana that culminated in the Shakai agreement ending the hostilities; and an early 2005 campaign against fighters commanded by the South Waziristan-based Baitullah Mehsud and Abdullah Mehsud (Mahsud 2013: 190).
Since TTP’s formation (announced by Baitullah Mehsud, the antagonist in Pakistan’s 2005 campaign), it has had an adversarial relationship with the Pakistani state, one that has only grown worse. TTP’s rise to prominence was followed by a massive escalation in violence, as various networked militant groups grew into a full-blown insurgency against the Pakistani government. In early 2014, TTP sparked concerns about worsening violence in several areas of the country. In Karachi, for example, where TTP “was largely responsible for a 90 percent spike in terrorist attacks” in 2013, insurgents began to take control of neighborhoods, giving rise to “concerns that one of the world’s most populous cities is teetering on the brink of lawlessness” (Craig 2014).
In contrast, the Pakistani state’s relationship with the Haqqani Network (HQN)—a militant group led by Jalaluddin Haqqani and his son Sirajuddin—is more similar to its traditional support of jihadist VNSAs through which it extended its reach into Afghanistan. Pakistan, however, is increasingly aware of how this support intersects with its domestic vulnerabilities. During the 1980s HQN, which was part of the anti-Soviet insurgency, benefited from the various actors working to oppose the Soviet presence in Afghanistan, establishing a relationship with the ISI and receiving support from American and Saudi intelligence (Dressler 2010). As the Taliban made gains in Afghanistan in the mid-1990s, Jalaluddin Haqqani decided to throw his military might behind them, and he led his forces into several battles with Ahmad Shah Massoud’s men.
Since the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan, HQN has been a powerful contributor to the insurgency. Though it has a cooperative relationship with several jihadist groups that have turned against the Pakistani state, Pakistan views HQN as more of a strategic asset—and, as will be discussed momentarily—has even sought to leverage HQN’s relationships with some of the anti-Pakistan jihadist groups. The U.S. Department of State believes that HQN has “several hundred core members,” but is able to draw on a much larger pool of fighters, described as “upwards of 10,000” (U.S. Department of State 2013).
Jeffrey Dressler observes that Pakistan sees sponsorship of HQN as offering it several strategic benefits:
The Haqqani Network’s territorial control of the southeast could provide the Pakistanis with much needed “strategic depth” in case of a full-scale breakout of hostilities across Pakistan’s eastern border with India. Additionally, given Pakistan’s concerns of increased Indian involvement in Afghanistan, the Haqqani Network is a tool to target strategically Indian political, diplomatic and economic interests in Kabul and elsewhere around the country. Furthermore, by helping to dissuade anti-Pakistan insurgents, such as Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP), from launching attacks on Pakistani security services and instead reorienting some of their focus on Afghanistan, the Haqqanis are assisting in the campaign to quiet military tensions in Pakistan’s tribal frontier, though they have not been successful in doing so. (Dressler 2012: 12)
Thus, even in the case of HQN—which serves to advance traditional Pakistani interests in Afghanistan, such as strategic depth and undermining India—Pakistan has a great deal of domestic concerns, hoping that its relationship with other jihadist factions can quell their anti-Pakistan activities. This illustrates a basic fact about the complex role that VNSAs now play in the Afghanistan-Pakistan relationship: Even though Pakistan’s relationship with these actors puts it in a very strong position in Afghanistan as the United States draws down, Pakistan is also vulnerable. There are reasons to think the country might simply implode, as in addition to its domestic insurgency, Pakistan suffers also from rising food prices, rising energy prices, and a growing public realization of the state’s incapacity (Perlez 2011).
Pashtunistan no longer plays the central role in Afghanistan-Pakistan relations that it once did: Pashtuns from the FATA and settled areas of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa have no desire to join Afghanistan. Indeed, a recent survey of FATA residents that inquired how the area should be governed found that “becoming part of Afghanistan was the most unpopular choice” (Ballen, Bergen, and Doherty 2013: 251). However, Afghanistan’s use of VNSAs to advance its Pashtunistan agenda set in motion a strategic course for both countries that has had a tremendous impact—not only on their relationship, but with unexpected ripples that can be said, with no exaggeration, to reach all corners of the globe. Similarly, Pakistan’s support for jihadist VNSAs, which was prompted by Afghanistan’s Pashtunistan policy, initially could be said to advance Pakistani interests in a rather Machiavellian yet straightforward way. Now, however, one of Pakistan’s major concerns as it continues to support jihadist VNSAs is its hope that the VNSAs it continues to sponsor will dissuade other VNSAs that it helped to empower from attacking the Pakistani state.
There is a powerful lesson here about unintended second-order consequences. At this point, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and their neighbors will have to live with the consequences of the succession of VNSAs that have been spawned over the course of four decades. Jihadist VNSAs will not be decisively defeated anytime soon, and it’s a virtual certainty that some variety of VNSAs—not necessarily transnational jihadists, but at least warlords, smugglers, and ethnically aligned militias—will remain a permanent facet of the landscape for the foreseeable future.
The views expressed here should not be attributed to the Leadership and Development Education for Sustained Peace (LDESP), Naval Postgraduate School (NPS), or the U.S. Department of Defense.
1. The United States responded to a couple of incidents in which the ISI was implicated—the November 2008 Mumbai “urban warfare” attacks and the July 2008 bombing of India’s embassy in Kabul—as though rogue elements of ISI were to blame, though many commentators believe this approach let Pakistan off too easy.
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———. 1950b. “Pakistan Says Afghans Launch War.” October 4.
———. 1961. “Regular Afghan Army Battles Pakistanis in Khyber Pass Area.” May 21.
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