If foreign policy came with a warranty, Pakistan would be filing a claim. After decades of cultivating influence in Afghanistan, Islamabad has discovered that the Taliban, once restored to power, did not return the favour. Instead, they returned something far more traditional to the region: ambiguity, autonomy, and armed men who refuse to recognize borders drawn by someone else’s empire.
This diplomatic unravelling would be dramatic enough on its own. What makes it genuinely entertaining—if you are watching from Washington or Beijing—is how thoroughly it has dismantled two great-power assumptions: that Pakistan could manage Afghanistan, and that Afghanistan could be safely filed away as “someone else’s problem.”
Pakistan’s strategic imagination long rested on the idea of “strategic depth,” a phrase that sounds impressive until tested against geography, ideology, and human behaviour. The theory assumed a friendly—or at least compliant—regime in Kabul that would secure Pakistan’s western flank. What emerged instead was a Taliban government that views Pakistan less as a patron and more as an inconvenient neighbour with an overdeveloped sense of entitlement.
The rupture became impossible to ignore when the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan found space, comfort, and continuity on Afghan soil. Pakistan expected gratitude; it got plausible deniability. It expected obedience; it got sermons about sovereignty. The Durand Line, that old colonial scar Pakistan insists is an international border, was treated by the Taliban as a philosophical suggestion rather than a legal fact. Fences were cut, tempers flared, and airstrikes followed. Kabul protested loudly, Islamabad fumed quietly, and trust quietly expired.
For the United States, this feud has been a postscript no one wanted to read. Washington exited Afghanistan hoping to downgrade the country from a consuming obsession to a manageable footnote. The strategy rested on a comforting illusion: that Pakistan would handle the mess, that counterterrorism could be conducted remotely, and that regional instability could be politely ignored so long as it didn’t generate headlines in English.
But when Pakistan itself becomes insecure, American counterterrorism math stops adding up. Intelligence cooperation becomes selective. Borders leak. Militants exploit diplomatic silence. The much-advertised “over-the-horizon” strategy begins to look less like a military doctrine and more like a motivational slogan. Washington didn’t escape Afghanistan; it outsourced its problems to a relationship now collapsing in real time.
China’s discomfort is quieter but no less severe. Beijing arrived in the region with confidence that infrastructure could substitute for politics. Roads, railways, and pipelines were meant to pacify landscapes that history had stubbornly refused to calm. Pakistan was the linchpin, the reliable partner that would keep things orderly while Chinese capital flowed westward.
Sour Pakistan–Taliban relations have turned that assumption into a liability. Instability along the Afghan frontier seeps directly into the security environment of the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor. Chinese engineers now require extraordinary protection. Investment timelines stretch. Costs rise. Worse, the chaos inches uncomfortably close to Xinjiang, where Beijing’s tolerance for uncertainty is famously low. Economic logic, it turns out, does not intimidate armed ideology.
What both Washington and Beijing miscalculated was not the Taliban’s ideology—it was their independence. The Taliban did not fight for decades to become a subcontractor for regional stability. They fought to rule, to decide, and to ignore external expectations with theological confidence. Pakistan assumed leverage where there was only history. The United States assumed disengagement where there was only delay. China assumed economics could tame belief.
India, watching this unfold, has chosen the most subversive strategy of all: patience. As Pakistan’s influence in Kabul diminishes, New Delhi has found space for quiet engagement—humanitarian aid, limited diplomacy, and development outreach that does not rely on illusions of control. In a region addicted to dramatic gestures, India’s restraint has become an unexpected advantage.
The future of Pakistan–Taliban relations is unlikely to deliver clarity. In the most optimistic scenario, both sides settle into a cold, transactional coexistence—enough cooperation to avoid catastrophe, not enough trust to claim stability. Violence simmers, borders open and close unpredictably, and global powers reassure themselves that things could be worse.
The more probable future is chronic dysfunction: persistent militant attacks, diplomatic sparring, selective cooperation, and constant recalibration by Washington and Beijing. Afghanistan remains unstable, Pakistan remains exposed, China remains cautious, and the United States remains concerned but peripheral.
The worst case is also the most familiar: a major terrorist attack, followed by escalation, refugee flows, suspended investments, and renewed global anxiety over a region everyone claimed they were finished with.
The larger lesson is unkind but clear. Proxies age badly. Exit strategies rarely mean exit. And infrastructure does not substitute for legitimacy. Pakistan tried to manage history. America tried to escape it. China tried to pave over it. Only the Taliban accepted it as inevitable—and acted accordingly.
In South Asia, hubris does not disappear. It simply changes sponsors.
