by GEORGES LEFEUVRE
While Pakistan is acting as mediator to end the war between the US, Iran & Israel it doesn’t seem ready to open a dialogue with neighbouring Afghanistan.
“In the Afghan war, enter Sir Mortimer Durand” was the title of a story on 24 October 2012 by Myra MacDonald, then Reuters bureau chief in India. That was nine years before the Taliban took over the country again, and the Afghan-Pakistani border, known as the Durand Line, named after Sir Mortimer Durand, was already heating up, for reasons quite like today’s.
Mollah Fazlullah, head of the Movement for the Enforcement of the Sharia (Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi) had wrought bloody havoc in Pakistan’s Swat valley until the army ousted him along with his fighters in June 2009. Fazlullah fled to the Afghan province of Kunar and from there he would launch regular attacks on that famous Durand Line.
In the same way, the Pakistani Taliban of the TTP (Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan), forcefully evicted from Waziristan province in 2014, crossed the Line and joined forces with the Afghan Taliban, helping them regain power in 2021. Job done, they went back to their home ground, on both sides of that Durand Line, where they launch daily attacks on the federal forces’ border posts inside the former tribal areas and throughout the province of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KP), but also along the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC): there they attack Chinese workers, from the high valley of the Indus, where two big hydro-electric dams are being built, to Gwadar port, also being built by China in Baluchistan on the Sea of Oman.
An explosive combination
But since 2022 the novelty is the ad hoc alliance between the very Islamist TTP and the very secular Baluchistan Liberation Army (BLA). In its annual report, “DHAK 2024”, published by The Balochistan Post on 2 January 2025, the BLA declared itself “ready to work with any entity against the common enemy for mutual benefit,” targeting only what it calls the “Pakistani occupation of Baluchistan”, presenting a range of targets it has in common with the TTP: the army, the federal administration, and the CPEC.
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