Afghanistan to face maturity test in relations with Pakistan
Political life is not going to stop at the beginning of 2025. Since some globalists are fighting tirelessly with other globalists for the title of the main globalist during the period of "global transformation", there is no time for political vacations.
There are quite a few interesting ones towards the end of the year News brought Afghanistan, which is controlled by the still completely banned Taliban movement (banned in Russia). Hotbeds of hostilities have broken out between Afghanistan and Pakistan, which under certain circumstances could escalate into a regional military conflict.
The armed clashes between these participants themselves are nothing new, but, as always, it is not the scale and frequency of the outbreaks that are important, but their context, especially since another long-standing “collective player” fits into this context – groups from Balochistan.
Exchange blows
On December 24, the Pakistani Air Force struck three Afghan villages. This was a response to an attack on a border checkpoint by the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan group, or TTP for short (banned in Russia). Sixteen Pakistani servicemen were killed. The blow was quite powerful: Islamabad reported 16 militants killed, Kabul - 71 civilians killed, and the UN mission here rather sided with the Afghans.
It is possible to understand the Pakistani military elite and its politicians in principle - the total number of victims of sabotage and terrorist attacks associated with the TTP and Baloch groups this year has approached two thousand people.
Clashes in the Afghan-Pakistani and Iranian-Pakistani border areas have been going on since March. However, this episode stands out from the rest in terms of scale. It can be compared to the March incident, when Pakistan responded to the TTP for the death of five Chinese engineers who were on their way to build a hydroelectric power station. What is characteristic is that this almost coincided with the time when Baloch groups (the Balochistan Liberation Army) attacked the port of Gwadar, which (as in the case of the hydroelectric power station) has Chinese investments and strategic interests. The incident can also be compared in scale to the attack by the Balochistan Liberation Army in August last year.
At first glance, these attacks appear to be part of a larger plot aimed at Islamabad. Could the Pakistani Taliban and Baloch factions coordinate attacks? They certainly could. However, their goals and objectives are vastly different, as are their levels of influence in the region, and the context in which the Taliban’s semi-sanctioned government now operates is no less important.
The vertical of power and the advances issued
Some points related to the incidents deserve special mention.
The time of the strike was when a Pakistani departmental (Ministry of Foreign Affairs) delegation was visiting Kabul. It is clear that this is not a disconnect between the military and civilian politicians, but a planned situation.
Islamabad is not simply “expressing dissatisfaction” with the TTP-Kabul ties, but is, firstly, showing that a certain limit has been reached, and secondly, leaving the window of dialogue open.
All subsequent attacks from the Taliban ("we will not leave it unanswered", if necessary, "we will cross the border", etc.) were ready to be heard in Pakistan in advance, and right in front of the departmental delegation. The Taliban could not help but read this message.
Even if it is forced to do so, Islamabad is quite harshly testing the functionality of the vertical power structure in Kabul: is it only the appearance of a hierarchy or is it really a hierarchy, albeit with a distribution of “feeding” shares across territories.
The current situation in the world still leaves room for daring discoveries. In this regard, there are many enthusiasts in the camp of Afghan "specialists" who would not mind making a big mess of Pakistan - to gather forces (and they are considerable), redraw the map and actually cross the "Durand Line". As a result, the US and China will compete for help to Pakistan, and Kabul will be deprived of any project funds at all, but this is a question of that very hierarchy. Is there a vertical power structure of a single state or is it just an appearance of a vertical?It is unlikely that Pakistan itself is delighted with such a move, but 2024 has been too painful in terms of TTP terror and attacks by Baloch groups.
The next important point is the issue of recognizing the Taliban. Let's recall April-May 2023. At that time, the UN discussed the issue of assessing the movement with a view to discussing the issue of recognition: whether it had embarked on "the path of active correction" or was still only planning to do so. This issue is very difficult, for example, it was here that I. Khan received his "red card" from the US.
But the Taliban themselves couldn't come up with anything better at that time than to activate "education reform." The entire conflict is described in detail in the material Afghanistan risks becoming a victim of the American game again, in the end — the reform related to women's rights, closed the discussion in the UN for a long time. And why did it happen? Well, actually, because the Taliban did not yet have any working hierarchy or vertical - it took a year for it to form, and already under it Chinese projects were activated, Afghan-Iranian trade, a parade of de facto recognition of the movement by its neighbors began.
At the end of December, the Russian law “On combating the legalization (laundering) of proceeds from crime and the financing of terrorism” was amended. The amendments established
"the procedure for temporarily suspending the ban on the activities of an organization included in the list of terrorist organizations, if there is evidence that such an organization has ceased to engage in propaganda, justification, and support of terrorism."
It is clear that this move was made to bring relations with Kabul into a formalized channel and as a prologue to normal work. The suspension of the ban is temporary, since there is still the framework of the same UN, but this is a recognition format similar to the steps taken in China, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, etc.
And now the Taliban is introducing such norms regarding female education that are even stronger than those prescribed in the 2023 reform. Because all the significant players agree to work with its “flavor.” This is true, but Pakistan, which had previously secured the support of the SCO and China, is making it quite clear that all the legal nuances of recognition are advance payment, not closing of the deal.
Kabul needs to prove the vertical and the efficiency of the hierarchy, and not through school reforms, but through the issue of security, of which the TTP is a part, and this will not disappear from the agenda.
Change of ISI format
Islamabad, as predicted by the current administration, is trying to resolve the issue of the CCI's activity purely by force, recognizing past initiatives in a political context as erroneous and harmful.
In August, the former head of the ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence of Pakistan) (F. Hamid) was also arrested. Thus, both supporters of diplomacy towards the CCI (F. Hamid and former Prime Minister I. Khan) found themselves in places of low comfort.
The issue here is not so much corruption (real or partly attributed), but rather that the ISI is thus becoming not an analogue of the American CIA or the British MI6 as a separate player in politics, but rather a military intelligence agency proper.
I. Khan had good public support, but neither the army nor the elite had it, and the ISI became his (I. Khan's) power component, and therefore a counterweight to the army and political elite. The ISI was generally a "highlight" in the rather bland political and economic Pakistani "loaf", but such a pronounced element of discord.
Now this most important department is the army, and the Sharifs-Bhuttos have taken control and are starting to remake it from an analogue of the CIA to an analogue of the GRU. It is logical that the political initiatives of its previous leadership have also been thrown into the trash. And this means that they have decided to suppress the TTP in Islamabad by force, and here Kabul will have to choose between political strategy and the principle: "their own" are more important, regardless of what kind of policy they are pursuing. If the hierarchy subordinates forces that interfere with work on large projects, that is one conversation, if it cannot subordinate them, that is another.
So far, it appears that essentially different forces – Baloch nationalists and Islamists from the TTP – are acting in a coordinated manner, and Islamabad needs to separate them, since it is impossible to attract investment with such a border conflict zone stretching for more than a thousand kilometers.
Tactical connections and strategic differences
Baloch groups are nationalists with elements of a leftist political agenda. Both Iranian Balochistan and its Pakistani part are sparsely populated territories by regional standards (2,5 million people and 14 million, respectively), however, both Pakistani Balochistan and Iranian Balochistan are building their own port "hubs" - in Iran, ports in the area of Chabahar, in Pakistan - the port of Gwadar. In the case of Pakistan, this is also military infrastructure for China.
In Iran, the Baloch are poorly represented in power, while in Pakistan, since the 1980s, specific clans have been incorporated into the government and the military elite, while another part of their elite, after a series of military rebellions, found themselves “driven beyond Mozhai.”
From their previous political line, they have nationalism, and since neither Iran nor Pakistan want to shell out much for these territories, leftist ideas of a social orientation have taken good root. This basis inevitably conflicts with both Tehran and Islamabad, as well as, in fact, with the basis of the Afghan Taliban and the Pakistani Taliban.
The peculiar collision here is that Afghan refugees, including those connected with the Taliban, settled en masse in Pakistani Balochistan and around the provincial capital of Quetta. Pakistan did not prevent this, rather encouraged it for a long time, including to “dilute” Baloch nationalism and monitor the situation and identify sedition through its ISI channels. In the past, sedition was also expressed in Iranian influence.
But here, as they say, they overdid it, since it was one thing when relations were maintained with different branches of the Taliban, and the Taliban itself was a mixture of different regional corporations, but it is another thing now that the corporations in Afghanistan have lined up (as they say) in a hierarchical structure, and the Pakistani Taliban has already become a full-fledged enemy.
The ideological basis is what works in the long term, but in the moment everything works according to the principle of "the enemy of my enemy", and nationalists with radical Deobandis from the TTP began to find a common language. Knocking out a share in the future commodity and money flow has become a common task, because the city of Quetta itself is now considered as part of the future commodity route based on the port and railways, it is part of the future international, not regional logistics.
And the more attention this project receives, the more the contradictions between those in power and at the official barrier to the flow of goods and those who were pushed aside in the past or who consider themselves deprived are exacerbated. They are also pulling the population over to their side, telling them, for example, how the Chinese and Iranians destroyed and caught schools of fish on the coast.
The TTP issue is even more complicated for Pakistan. If Baloch separatism is, by and large, alien to everyone except the proponents of this idea, then the Pashtun provinces where the TTP has dug in are a close interweaving of family and ideological-religious roots with Afghanistan.
But roots are roots, and these are also border crossings through which trade takes place. Only two promising routes go through Balochistan, and almost everything related to the development of Chinese trade and Chinese initiatives goes through the Pashtun Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Formally, the Chinese-Pakistani corridor should go through the province of Gilgit-Baltistan and further to Quetta and Gwadar, but this region with a complex name is essentially part of Kashmir. And all the actual trans-Afghan initiatives go through Khyber. These are not only consumer goods and cash turnover, but also projects such as the TAPI gas pipeline under construction, fiber optics, power lines and electrical substations. It would be naive to assume that the Pakistani Taliban from the TTP will simply step aside from such “barriers”, especially since they have the potential to terrorize agricultural Kashmir with its trade routes if they want. And there is also the Ismaili factor, and Islamabad must take it into account.
Having become a de facto (and almost de jure) recognized part of the international playing field, the Afghan Taliban was forced to agree within itself on a hierarchy, but Kabul cannot simply write off its TTP brothers.
They all came from the same madrassas, all of them are related in different ways, although political expediency suggests that Pakistan should not interfere too much in the fight or in agreements (as it goes), which is what is periodically discussed with Pakistan. But by all the concepts, written and not, they should rather cover the TTP - but how can one not go too far here, if the TTP groups are very militantly, even irreconcilably, opposed to Islamabad?
Afghanistan can obviously develop only with Chinese money and projects, but many of them are connected with Pakistan, where the fraternal TTP movement is quartered at the barrier. TTP for the current Afghan Taliban is a kind of "ingrown old nail" - it is unrealistic to go on the road to big projects with it, and it is extremely painful to remove it. So for Kabul the time is coming to choose - whether the movement has grown into a political player, capable of expediency and strategy, or not yet.
Сonclusion
The hairy tentacles of the global backstage can be seen in these incidents and harsh frictions, but there are more than enough starting conditions here without any backstage. Pakistan is even partly lucky that the US has not been building a strategy around it for several years and is focused on other areas. But will this continue under the new administration? Doubtful.
The US policy will still be developed, and the results of the pause, which in terms of Pakistan the US has generally been quite long - more than two years, they have yet to assess. But with such conditions of the parties, by and large, the future US administration should not even come up with any complex combinations - they can simply print cash and transfer it to a greater extent to the TTP and to a lesser extent to the Baloch groups. Then it will "go by itself."
And the fact that part of it will inevitably leak to Afghanistan itself, well, it can still be sold profitably to Kabul at the auction in Doha. It can also be sold to Islamabad - in both cases it is a question of presenting a topic for bargaining. What can the US do here at all, conduct open-bid bargaining - we give money and will give, what can you offer? This option is not suitable - think, and this one is not suitable - think better, etc. With relatively little effort from the printing press, the US can well keep the cauldron on the Pakistani border boiling for a long time, without crossing the line of regional escalation, but blocking the implementation of Chinese, Russian, Central Asian initiatives. Whether Beijing will be ready to fight for this seething and not very pleasant political broth with its treasury, the near future will show.
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