Strategic Depth

Pakistan's intelligence services created the Taliban to ensure strategic depth against India. Thirty years later, India is the Taliban's most vocal diplomatic partner, and Pakistan is bombing the government it helped build.

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In Kunar province, on the Afghan side of a border no Afghan government has ever recognized, a young man named Sajid told the AFP news agency what his brother said before the airstrike.

“I will stay and look after the house.”

He was killed near the mosque while trying to leave. Not fighting. Not carrying a weapon. Moving between a house and a mosque in a village where Pakistani jets had arrived before dawn. Sajid gave the reporter one detail more: his brother had been married a few months.

In Girdi Kas village, Bihsud District, Nangarhar Province, twenty-three members of an extended family had sheltered in a single house. Eighteen were killed. Five were pulled from the rubble. In eastern Afghanistan, where state institutions have never fully reached, the extended family is the institution — the unit of survival, law, memory, and care. What Pakistan’s military described as “intelligence-based, selective operations” selected a house with twenty-three people in it during Ramadan.

On February 6, a suicide bomber detonated inside the Khadija Tul Kubra mosque in Islamabad during Friday prayer. Thirty-two people died. One hundred and seventy were wounded. The Islamic State – Khorasan Province claimed responsibility. Pakistan’s military alleged the planning took place in Afghanistan.

On February 22, Pakistan launched airstrikes into Nangarhar and Paktika provinces. At least seventeen people were killed in Bihsud district alone. Afghanistan’s Defence Ministry called the strikes a breach of international law and said they hit a religious school and residential homes.

On February 27, Pakistan’s Defence Minister Khawaja Mohammad Asif posted on X: “Our patience has now run out. Now it is open war between us.”

The escalation from mosque bombing to open war took twenty-one days. The structural dynamics underneath it have been accumulating for 133 years.

The border Pakistan’s jets crossed was drawn in 1893.

Sir Mortimer Durand, a British diplomat, and Abdur Rahman Khan, the Emir of Afghanistan, signed a single-page agreement — seven articles — establishing a 2,640-kilometre line through Pashtun territory. It was not a negotiation between equals. Britain had fought the Second Anglo-Afghan War and controlled the approaches. The line was designed to manage a buffer zone during the Great Game, and it split Pashtun tribes, families, and trade routes down the middle.

When Pakistan was established in 1947, Afghanistan cast the sole vote against its admission to the United Nations. The only member state to oppose. The objection was not about Pakistan’s existence. It was about the line — Afghanistan argued the Durand agreement had been imposed under duress by the British and did not bind a new state. The vote was withdrawn days later under diplomatic pressure. The objection written into the UN record that day has outlived every government in either country since.

No Afghan government — monarchy, republic, communist, mujahideen, or Taliban — has ever formally recognized the Durand Line as an international border. Pakistan has been fencing it since 2017. The fence does not change what is not recognized.

In the 1990s, Pakistan found a use for the territory on the other side of the line.

The doctrine was called strategic depth. Pakistan’s military establishment — particularly the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate — sought a friendly government in Kabul. The logic was geographic: Afghanistan must serve as a buffer on Pakistan’s western flank, so that in any war with India, Pakistan would not face enemies on two fronts.

The instrument was the Taliban. After Pakistan’s earlier proxy, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, failed to take Kabul and lost public support through indiscriminate shelling of the city, the ISI shifted its backing to a movement of Pashtun religious students trained in Deobandi madrassas across Pakistan’s tribal areas. The ISI armed them, supplied them, and channelled young fighters into their ranks. In 1996, the Taliban captured Kabul. Pakistan was one of three countries to recognize the new government. Strategic depth was achieved.

For five years, Afghanistan served its purpose. A client state on the western border. India shut out. The buffer held.

When the Taliban returned to power in August 2021 — after twenty years of American occupation ended with the same group in the same palace — Pakistan’s strategic establishment initially treated it as vindication. The Americans had left. The client was back.

The client had changed.

The Taliban had spent two decades fighting a superpower. It owed its survival to its own organizational resilience, not to ISI direction. It had its own diplomatic relationships, its own revenue streams, its own governance structures. And it harbored, on Afghan soil, the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan — a Frankenstein offshoot that shared ideology and personnel with the Afghan Taliban but directed its violence inward, at the Pakistani state.

After the Taliban takeover, TTP attacks more than tripled. Monthly attack averages rose from 14.5 in 2020 to 45.8 in 2022. By 2023, terrorist attacks within Pakistan had surged 73 percent over the twenty-one months since August 2021. The organization Pakistan’s intelligence services had midwifed was now sheltering the organization bombing Pakistan’s mosques, military outposts, and border towns.

Pakistan asked the Taliban to expel the TTP. The Taliban refused. It offered to mediate — between Pakistan and its own insurgency, on Afghan soil, with the Taliban as arbiter. The patron had come to its creation asking for help. The creation offered to manage the patron’s problem on its own terms.

While Pakistan bombed its creation’s territory, India opened its doors to it.

In January 2025, Taliban Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi met India’s Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri in Dubai. In October, Muttaqi spent a week in New Delhi — the first high-level Taliban visit to India since 2021. He remained on the UN sanctions list; India secured him a travel exemption. He met Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar. India announced it would upgrade its technical mission in Kabul to a full embassy. The Taliban was permitted to operate consulates in Mumbai and Hyderabad. India shipped food, medicine, and vaccines after a November earthquake.

The strategic logic is the logic of the enemy’s enemy. India wants to prevent Pakistan and China from dominating Afghanistan. The Taliban wants to reduce its dependence on Pakistan. Neither side shares ideology — a BJP-governed Hindu-majority state and a Taliban-governed Islamic emirate have nothing in common except a shared adversary. The relationship is strategic, not principled. Both sides understand this.

When Pakistan struck Afghanistan in February, India was the only country in the world to condemn it. The Ministry of External Affairs called the strikes “another attempt by Pakistan to externalise its internal failures” and affirmed its commitment to “Afghanistan’s sovereignty, territorial integrity, and independence.”

Neither the United Nations nor any other country issued a condemnation.

Pakistan’s Defence Minister Asif responded by calling Afghanistan “a colony of India.”

Here is the structure.

Pakistan created the Taliban to control Afghanistan as a buffer against India. The Taliban, in power, harbors the TTP, which attacks Pakistan. Pakistan bombs Afghanistan to destroy the TTP. India — Pakistan’s primary adversary — embraces the Taliban diplomatically, deepening the very autonomy Pakistan’s strikes are meant to punish.

Four bodies. Pakistan, Taliban, TTP, India. Each one’s action strengthens its adversary’s position. Pakistan’s bombs push the Taliban closer to India. India’s embrace gives the Taliban less reason to cooperate with Pakistan on the TTP. The TTP benefits from the chaos. Pakistan bombs harder. More civilian casualties. More international isolation. Deeper Taliban-India alignment. Less cooperation on the TTP. More TTP attacks. More bombings.

Abdul Basit of the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies put it plainly: “The more Pakistan will strike in Afghanistan, the more Kabul and TTP will come closer.”

Strategic depth — the doctrine that Afghanistan must be controlled as a buffer against India — has become strategic encirclement. The buffer is the adversary’s partner. The tool built to secure the western flank is the platform from which the eastern adversary projects influence. The architecture Pakistan designed to contain India in the 1990s is the architecture India is using to contain Pakistan in the 2020s.

Asif screaming “colony of India” recognizes the relationship. He recognizes it because Pakistan invented it. The patron-proxy architecture is being replicated against its creator, using the same mechanisms, the same proxy, the same unrecognized border. The accusation is not wrong. It is projection — and projection is recognition.

I should be honest about what this analysis does not resolve.

The India-Taliban alignment is tactical and potentially fragile. Chatham House explicitly asked: can this rapprochement last? India and the Taliban have no ideological common ground. If India demands concessions on women’s rights, counterterrorism cooperation, or TTP extradition — anything that tests Taliban sovereignty — the alignment could dissolve. India’s geographic isolation from Afghanistan, with no shared border and access only through Iran or Central Asia, limits what it can offer beyond diplomatic weight and humanitarian aid.

But even a tactical alignment has already crossed the threshold that matters. The damage is done regardless of whether the relationship endures. Asif is not arguing against a durable alliance. He is reacting to the sight of his country’s creation in his adversary’s embrace. And the alignment’s fragility does not help Pakistan. It means the instrument Pakistan built is unpredictable in multiple directions simultaneously — the worst characteristic a proxy can have.

Pakistan’s bombs landed on a pre-existing catastrophe.

The World Food Programme reported that more than half the districts affected by the fighting were already at emergency levels of hunger before the first strike. Four of the hit provinces were experiencing critical levels of acute child malnutrition. After the strikes began, WFP suspended emergency food distributions, school feeding programmes, and livelihood support across the affected areas. Approximately 160,000 people lost access to food assistance they were already receiving.

Sixty-six thousand people have been displaced. In Kunar province — where Sajid’s brother was killed — thousands of families fled villages where violence prevented access to markets, clinics, and water. The strikes that Pakistan calls selective hit communities where the infrastructure of survival was already a house, a mosque, a distribution point, and an extended family large enough to fill all three.

I think strategic depth was always a fantasy dressed as doctrine. The idea that you can control another country as a tool of your own security — through proxies, through intelligence operations, through decades of cultivated dependence — and that the tool will remain a tool, is a specific delusion shared by every patron state that has tried it. The United States learned it in Afghanistan over twenty years. Iran learned it with Hezbollah and the militias it can no longer fully direct. Russia is learning it in Syria. The proxy acquires interests. The tool develops preferences. The creation outgrows the creator.

Pakistan’s version is distinguished by the completeness of the inversion. The patron’s creation found a new patron who is the patron’s adversary. The architecture of control became the architecture of encirclement. The buffer became the bridge. And the people inside the architecture — the twenty-three in a house in Girdi Kas, the brother who stayed to look after it, the 160,000 who lost their food assistance, the families in Kunar fleeing with nothing — absorb the cost of strategic abstractions they had no part in designing and cannot escape.

Sajid’s brother did not stay because of the Durand Line, or strategic depth, or the four-body problem between nuclear-armed states. He stayed to look after a house. The house is rubble. The doctrine that put a target on it is 133 years old and has never once consulted the people who live on either side of it.

Sources

- Solen