In the last days of October 2025, the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan flared up again: over 18 dead and hundreds injured in clashes between armies and militiamen, which then returned with a fragile 48-hour ceasefire. A new episode that confirms how old and still unresolved the tensions between Kabul and Islamabad remain.
Located between the Indian Ocean, the Indian subcontinent, ex-Soviet Central Asia and the greater “Broader Middle East”, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan share a border line (the so-called “Durand Line”) 2,640 kilometers long which has been a source of friction and discord for over 130 years. But it is not just borders and territorial claims that make relations between Kabul and Islamabad complicated. For decades the Pakistanis have meddled in internal Afghan affairs by expertly playing the game of “divide and conquer” between the various factions that competed for power in order to obtain precious levers of power that would allow them to achieve the “Finlandization” of their turbulent neighbor.
The beginning of problems between Pakistan and Afghanistan: territorial claims
On 12 November 1893, at the end of the first phase of the Second Anglo-Afghan War, the emissaries of the Emirate of Afghanistan and the British Empire signed the document establishing the so-called “Durand Line” (named after Sir Henry Mortimer Durand, diplomat of His British Majesty who was then part of the administrative body of the Indian Civil Service, i.e. the colonial civil administration British in India), the international border between the Afghan state and the “British Raj”, i.e. the Indian Empire dominated by London. Although this border was reaffirmed on 8 August 1919 with the signing of the “Anglo-Afghan Treaty of 1919” which put an end to the Third Anglo-Afghan War, in reality the Afghans never truly accepted it, denouncing on more than one occasion its oppressive nature for them.
A direct consequence of the establishment of the “Durand Line” was the separation of the Pashtun people, who today find themselves in the peculiar situation of constituting the dominant ethnic group in Afghanistan but retain the absolute majority of their demographic basin in Pakistan, where however they are a minority in the face of the excessive power of the Punjabis (the true “Pakistanis” of the collective imagination). Not only that; the establishment of the “Durand Line” deprived Afghanistan of the possibility of having an outlet to the sea, an element that contributed greatly to confining “the land of the Afghans” to the circle of the poorest and most underdeveloped countries in the world.
For these reasons, several great Afghan leaders of the past, such as King Mohammad Zahir Shar, President Mohammad Daoud Khan and the general secretary of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, Mohammad Najibullah Ahmadzai, have tried several times to call into question the status quo by making territorial claims against the provinces of Gilgit-Baltistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and, above all, Baluchistan, predictably meeting the firm opposition of Pakistan, which succeeded the “British Raj” in control of the former western provinces of the British colony.
Islamabad and the Taliban: different twins
Pakistan began to interfere in the internal affairs of Afghanistan starting in 1973, after a coup in Kabul led to the abolition of the monarchy and the establishment of the republic. Pakistani infiltration and influence operations saw a dramatic escalation during the two-year period 1978-79 with the rise to power of the communists, the outbreak of the civil war and the subsequent internationalization of the conflict following the Soviet invasion. However, the Soviet retreat in 1989 and the subsequent fall of the communist regime in 1992 did not lead to the end of the civil war which actually took a turn for the worse.
It was then that Pakistan managed to achieve its greatest success in foreign policy by favoring the conquest of power over much of the Afghan territory by the Taliban movement, financed, armed and ideologically influenced by Islamabad. Pakistan’s direct or indirect support for the Taliban has never waned since then, not even when following the events of 11 September 2001 an international coalition led by the United States of America intervened militarily for a period of 20 years in Afghanistan in a miserably failed attempt to install a pro-Western government there.
How come there is a war between Pakistan and Afghanistan: The current situation
In the aftermath of the second seizure of power by the Taliban, which took place on 15 August 2021, numerous international observers went so far as to hypothesize a new slide of Afghanistan into Pakistan’s geopolitical orbit. Unlike the 90s, however, the “new Taliban” have demonstrated an unusual resourcefulness on the international stage, greatly irritating those who had long been their “curators” within the political and military establishment of the “Country of the Pure”.
However, what really contributed to poisoning the feelings between Kabul and Islamabad was the support, sometimes overt and sometimes covert, that the Taliban began to provide to the independence movements of Balochistan and to the militant group of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), more commonly known as the “Pakistan Taliban”. The latter, headquartered in eastern Afghanistan, were repeatedly subjected to increasingly violent Pakistani military reprisals, the last of which occurred on the night between 8 and 9 October 2025, and which was followed by border clashes of a certain importance.
It is therefore not surprising if the sum of all these opposing interests has caused in recent years, and especially starting from 2024, a resurgence of the conflict around the Afghan-Pakistani border which, although not yet degenerating into open war, has nevertheless inaugurated a new hotbed of instability in the already quite complicated international panorama.
