How Pakistan and the Taliban, former allies, slid into ‘open war’

“Our patience has run out”, Pakistan’s Defence Minister Khawaja Asif wrote in a social media post on Friday (February 27, 2026). “Now it is open war between us and you.” Mr. Asif’s remarks came after Pakistan carried out air strikes on Kabul and Kandahar, Afghanistan’s two largest cities, and Paktia, a border province. The strikes were launched hours after Afghan troops attacked Pakistani border posts. Those attacks, in turn, followed earlier Pakistani strikes this week, which Islamabad claimed were carried out in retaliation for recent terror attacks inside its territory.

These incidents, along with the allegations and counter-allegations, underscore the increasingly combustible nature of relations between Islamabad and Kabul. Until a few years ago, Pakistan and the Afghan Taliban were close allies. The Taliban’s top leadership was based in Pakistan’s Quetta while it fought U.S. troops and the previous Afghan government. But four years after the Taliban captured Kabul and established its Islamic Emirate, the former allies have become bitter adversaries. What went wrong between Islamabad and the Taliban?

When the Taliban were an insurgent movement, they relied on Pakistan’s support to sustain their fight against U.S. forces and the U.S.-backed Islamic Republic government in Kabul. Pakistan, wary of India’s growing influence in Afghanistan, viewed the Taliban, a long-time ally, as a vehicle for extending its influence in the neighbourhood. When the Taliban captured Kabul in August 2021, then Prime Minister Imran Khan famously declared that Afghans had finally “broken the shackles of slavery”. Pakistan believed the Taliban’s return to power would restore its “strategic depth” in South-Central Asia. But the Taliban’s rise reshaped regional dynamics, defying Pakistan’s calculations. Islamabad-Rawalpindi soon found itself confronting three distinct challenges.

People read morning newspapers covering the headline story about the overnight cross border fighting between Pakistan and Afghan forces, at a stall in Peshawar, Pakistan, on Friday, Feb. 27, 2026.
| Photo Credit:
AP

Border clashes

The first is the Durand Line, the 2,640-km border established between British India and Afghanistan in 1893 and inherited by Pakistan. No Afghan government since the collapse of the monarchy in 1973 has accepted the line, which cuts through the tribal heartland of the region. The Taliban, too, have refused to recognise the boundary drawn by Mortimer Durand, a British diplomat, and Abdur Rahman Khan, the Emir of Afghanistan.

The border dispute was not an issue between the Taliban and Pakistan when the former was an insurgency. But when the Taliban became the state, the long-standing inter-state dispute between Afghanistan and Pakistan moved to the centre of bilateral relations. If Pakistan expected the Taliban to behave as a client partner, it miscalculated. The Taliban sought to assert their autonomy, leading to growing tensions. Border skirmishes became frequent, at times, such as in October 2025, escalating into serious clashes.

Taliban soldiers carry a box containing weapons, following exchanges of fire between Pakistan and Afghanistan forces, near Torkham border in Afghanistan, on February 27, 2026.
| Photo Credit:
Reuters

The other Taliban

The second is the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), also known as the Pakistani Taliban. The TTP and the Afghan Taliban are organisationally different but ideologically aligned. The Afghan Taliban wanted to expel U.S. troops from Afghanistan, defeat the Islamic Republic’s security forces, capture Kabul and turn the country into an Islamic Emirate. They achieved their objectives in August 2021. The TTP, for its part, aims to replicate the Afghan Taliban’s success, at least in Pakistan’s tribal regions.

While the Pakistani military supported the Afghan Taliban, it has long viewed the TTP as a serious security threat. The Afghan Taliban’s return to power in 2021 inevitably strengthened the TTP. Initially, the Afghan Taliban brokered a truce between the Pakistani military and the TTP, but the ceasefire collapsed in 2022 and hostilities resumed. In the years since, the security situation in Pakistan’s border regions has deteriorated sharply, with attacks occurring almost daily. According to the Pak Institute for Peace Studies, at least 400 people, most of them security personnel, were killed in TTP attacks across Pakistan last year, one of the most violent years in a decade. Pakistan accuses the Afghan Taliban of harbouring the TTP, an allegation Kabul denies. Islamabad says it will carry out strikes inside Afghanistan targeting TTP camps. But Kabul says such attacks violate Afghanistan’s sovereignty and has warned of retaliation, perpetuating a cycle of violence.

The India factor

The third challenge Pakistan faces is the Taliban’s warming ties with India. New Delhi had highly strained ties with the Taliban when the group was in power in the late 1990s. But the Taliban 2.0 have shown greater flexibility in improving ties with India and New Delhi has reciprocated. Last year, India hosted the Taliban Foreign Minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi. Last month, the Taliban appointed an envoy to lead their diplomatic mission in Delhi. Though India has not formally recognised the Taliban, it is clear that engagement between Delhi and Kabul is deepening. This, too, has complicated Pakistan’s strategic calculations. On Friday, Mr. Asif, Pakistan’s Defence Minister, said the Taliban had become a “proxy for India”.

Pakistan supported the Taliban in the hope of securing strategic depth. Instead, it now finds itself dealing with a Taliban leadership which it thinks poses security, cross-border and geopolitical challenges to Islamabad-Rawalpindi.

Published – February 27, 2026 06:11 pm IST