Islamabad has more to gain from controlling the Taliban’s opponents than from helping them achieve victory.
By Abdul Naser Noorzad, researcher in politics and geopolitics, especially for Sangar
Pakistan’s new game with the anti-Taliban resistance raises serious doubts, regardless of the angle from which it is examined. Islamabad’s history of supporting the Taliban and opposing Afghanistan’s republican system, combined with its growing concern over India’s expanding influence in Afghanistan, only deepens these suspicions.
Pakistan’s apparent effort, at this new stage of the game, to use the resistance as leverage to keep the Taliban under control, achieve intelligence and military-political objectives, and secure strategic depth deserves particular attention.
Pakistan is by no means eager to overthrow the Taliban regime — a regime whose rise to power it helped facilitate at considerable cost across the security, political, and economic spheres. The collapse of such a regime would not serve Islamabad’s interests. However, the desire to maintain a balance against emerging threats and preserve control over an instrument such as the Taliban may lead Islamabad to explore different dimensions of this geopolitical game.
Using the resistance as leverage to extract strategic concessions from the Taliban and contain threats such as Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) is one of the key aspects of this policy worth examining. Under such circumstances, Islamabad is likely to employ every available means to prevent the TTP security threat from expanding.
From the perspective of Pakistan’s military establishment, supporting the anti-Taliban resistance may represent not so much an opportunity as an attempt to lure these groups into a trap. Dependence on weapons supplies and financial assistance could create conditions for the sudden withdrawal of support and a self-serving deal with the Taliban in Kabul. Such an arrangement would jeopardize the resistance’s plans, invested resources, and strategic objectives.
For approximately the past year, reports have circulated about efforts by Pakistan’s military to bring various resistance groups, their commanders, and individuals associated with these movements to Islamabad, establish offices and bases for them, and bring them together under a possible plan to strike the Taliban.
Given Pakistan’s simultaneous use of several political cards, these efforts suggest that Islamabad may resort to a wide range of methods and instruments to provoke divisions and further fragment these groups.
At the same time, competition among different resistance factions for greater resources, financial assistance, and weapons could foster destructive rivalries. Ultimately, such competition may weaken the Taliban’s opponents and turn them into instruments of Islamabad’s future political maneuvering.
Pakistan could therefore benefit from several consequences of this rivalry: exploiting the existing situation to intensify pressure on the Taliban, shifting political costs and security risks onto anti-Taliban resistance groups, encouraging divisions and weakening these factions over time, and attempting to maintain control over both sides in order to balance competing threats and its own interests simultaneously.
For these reasons, this new approach should be examined as a possible scenario and an analytical hypothesis rather than necessarily as evidence of a lasting shift in Pakistan’s strategy. Although it may generate short-term optimism, an understanding of Pakistan’s policies — particularly its history of intelligence maneuvering in Afghanistan over at least the past four decades — suggests that Islamabad may prioritize its strategic interests and its ability to control the course of events over the fate of the resistance groups.
Furthermore, understanding security-related power games requires appreciating the rules of political competition—rules that resistance groups appear not to have taken sufficiently seriously.
If the anti-Taliban resistance fails to fully understand the broader objectives of regional and extra-regional powers in their struggle for influence, falling into such traps could once again drag it into the vortex of regional turmoil, leading to its weakening or even complete collapse.
