A Promise Pakistan Has Heard Before

Afghanistan’s Ambassador to Pakistan, Sardar Ahmad Shakeeb, stood at the National Defence University in Islamabad this week and said what Pakistan has waited more than four years to hear, stating that Kabul will not allow Afghan soil to be used against Pakistan. Good sentence. Also a familiar one, and that is the trouble with it.

Pakistan does not need reassurance. It needs results. Since the Taliban took Kabul in 2021, Pakistani soldiers, policemen and civilians have paid in blood for the gap between what Afghanistan promises and what it actually does. The mosque bombing in Islamabad. The Bajaur attack. The checkpoint bombing that killed fifteen people, twelve of them soldiers, just weeks ago. The Tehreek e Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has moved across that border with a freedom no serious government would tolerate from its neighbour. Pakistan did not pick the fight that followed, including the strikes on TTP camps, the “open war” declaration, the sealed crossings, the accelerated deportations. Kabul’s own conduct made restraint impossible.

So when the ambassador asks for “greater direct engagement” and wants Pakistan’s allegations to be “specific,” backed by “concrete information” on individuals and networks, it is fair to ask what more Kabul thinks it needs. Pakistan has named the groups. It has tracked the camps. It has struck the hideouts it identified on Afghan soil. The Taliban’s answer, each time, has been denial rather than investigation. That pattern has cost Pakistan four years and thousands of lives to see through.

Give the ambassador his due on one point, though. Geography does not forgive either side its mistakes. The two countries share a border, a Pashtun population that straddles it, decades of trade dependency and generations of refugee flows both ways. A purely military response can suppress a threat; it can not dissolve one. Shakeeb is right that dialogue matters. He is wrong to imply it has been absent. Islamabad has floated joint border mechanisms, intelligence-sharing and direct high-level talks since 2021. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif told Kabul flatly, only weeks ago, to choose between Pakistan and the TTP. That is about as direct as engagement gets. The offer was never missing. The follow-through was.

That is also why his call for Pakistan to “engage directly with Afghanistan over its own security concerns” needs pushing back on. Pakistan’s concern is not vague. It is one terrorist group with deep ties to the Taliban regime, operating from Afghan territory. Framing that as a mutual grievance, as if Pakistan objecting to cross-border terrorism and Afghanistan objecting to strikes on terrorist camps sit on equal moral footing, is a framing Islamabad should not accept. One side wants its neighbour to stop hosting the people killing its soldiers. The other wants to keep hosting them in peace.

None of this argues against talking. Pakistan should, and has been trying to for years. What it can not do is let talk stand in for enforcement, which is roughly what has happened for most of the last four years. If Kabul genuinely means to deny the TTP sanctuary, rather than simply deny that the sanctuary exists, there is a straightforward way to show it by handing over the networks Pakistan has already named, dismantling the camps its strikes have already found, and open the door to verification that would make further Pakistani strikes unnecessary. That is not a big ask between neighbours. It is the least one state owes another when its territory is being used to kill that neighbour’s people.

Pakistan has shown through repeated ceasefires and repeated offers that it would rather settle this politically than militarily. What it should not do is confuse a speech in Islamabad with a change on the ground in Kabul. The ambassador’s words are a decent opening line. They will mean something once TTP fighters stop crossing the border to kill Pakistanis, and not before.