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Tom Hussain

A ceasefire between Afghanistan’s Taliban regime and Pakistan, agreed after intense clashes last month, is hanging by a diplomatic thread, following a wave of suicide bombings in Pakistan and disputed claims that it retaliated with cross-border drone strikes on Tuesday.
With both countries vowing vengeance, analysts say regional states acting as mediators – Qatar and Turkey, and Iran and Russia – have only a narrow window of opportunity to prevent another round of hostilities.
Otherwise, tensions between the South Asian neighbours could degenerate into prolonged proxy warfare, creating space for transnational terrorist groups based there, particularly Islamic State-Khorasan (Isis-K), to regenerate and plot overseas attacks.
According to Omar Samad, a former Afghan ambassador to Canada and France, the “dangerous cat-and-mouse game” between Islamabad and Kabul has entered “the advanced retaliation stage”. Tensions could easily escalate before mediators had time to react or intervene, he told This Week in Asia.

On the other hand, either or both Islamabad and Kabul could be “using the new escalation to prod and enable mediation”, said Samad, currently a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank.
Kabul has not yet acted on its threat of “a necessary response [to] be taken at the proper time” for the air strikes it alleges Islamabad carried out on targets in three eastern Afghan provinces – Khost, Kunar and Paktika – where several thousand Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) insurgents are encamped, according to UN assessments.
“These hostile actions by Pakistani forces achieve nothing,” Afghan government spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said in a social media post on Tuesday. “They only prove that operations driven by flawed intelligence inflame tensions and expose the ongoing failures of Pakistan’s military regime.”
After each of the three TTP suicide bombing attacks in Pakistan this month, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif promised to hunt down the Afghanistan-based plotters. Each attack could easily have become mass-casualty incidents, had the terrorists not been thwarted by security forces.


But Islamabad has strongly denied Kabul’s claims that it conducted air strikes against targets in Afghanistan on Tuesday. “Whenever Pakistan attacks someone, it announces it,” Pakistan’s chief military spokesman Lieutenant General Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry told reporters in Islamabad.
“It appears the ceasefire is now being honoured in the breach,” said Michael Kugelman, senior South Asia fellow at the Asia-Pacific Foundation of Canada.
Pakistan’s denial of carrying out fresh strikes “may be meant to protect the integrity of the truce”, he told This Week in Asia. “But the strike and likely retaliations to come will make it all the more difficult to hold.”
Regional help
For the time being, Pakistan appears to prefer engaging with regional neighbours to avert the collapse of the shaky ceasefire agreed with Afghanistan in October under mediation by Qatar and Turkey.
Defence Minister Khawaja Mohammed Asif, in a television appearance on Tuesday, said he expected regional states to intervene to prevent a war.
“It won’t take long,” Asif said. “Otherwise, they [the Taliban regime] will be isolated and their total isolation will ultimately result in a collapse.”
Turkey and Qatar are reportedly preparing to co-host a third round of talks in Istanbul over the establishment of a ceasefire monitoring mechanism, following two failed attempts to achieve a breakthrough earlier this month.

A separate initiative launched last week by Iran and Russia was boosted by the timely arrival of Iran’s National Security Adviser Ali Larijani in Islamabad on Monday, as the violence and rhetoric escalated.
With neither side in any mood to budge, analysts fear Pakistan could seek to covertly support anti-Taliban regime Afghan groups in retaliation for Kabul’s refusal to stop cross-border TTP attacks.
“It would be tempting for the military brass in Pakistan to use … rogue anti-Taliban elements looking for a sponsor as a nuisance or a proxy to add to the pressures,” Samad said.
But if Pakistan “formally turns on the Taliban” and starts creating and backing armed anti-Taliban groups, Kugelman said that could lead to “internal conflict risks and the type of conditions that terror groups thrive on”.
Instability creates opportunity
Already, Isis-K is taking advantage of the instability created by the current conflict, according to terrorism expert Lucas Webber.
Cross-border clashes, mutual accusations over safe havens and disrupted security cooperation had weakened government control in the borderlands, giving Isis-K “more space to move fighters, seek refuge and reorganise while continuing to target both countries”, said Webber, a senior threat intelligence analyst at Tech Against Terrorism, a UN-supported advisory organisation.
He said renewed turbulence and shifting security priorities could also give the terror group opportunities to adapt and recover parts of its propaganda infrastructure, following a spate of arrests in the aftermath of Isis-K attacks in Iran, Russia and Turkey early last year, as well as foiled plots in Europe.
As Kabul concentrates greater military and intelligence resources on managing the crisis with Islamabad, Webber said Isis-K might “find space to resume planning and enabling external operations”, including attacks against international targets and foreign nationals in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Despite such ramifications, neither side “feels weak or strong enough, emboldened or disheartened enough to blink [first] and rely on diplomacy as the only option left”, former Afghan diplomat Samad said.
“Whether theirs is an ulterior strategic motive that is not apparent yet”, he said. “That could range from regime change in Afghanistan to great power rivalries and even prodding Pakistani vulnerabilities.”

According to former senior White House adviser on South Asia Joshua T. White, Pakistani leaders will increasingly have to deal with “the intense public pressure that is generated from TTP attacks on Pakistani civilians”.
Afghanistan’s Taliban leadership, meanwhile, was relatively less vulnerable to public pressure, he said.
“The challenge with this conflict is that the Taliban government in Afghanistan simply does not respond to the same threats and inducements that would be ordinarily compelling for other governments,” said White, now a professor of international affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington.
According to Kugelman, “the best we can hope for” is that Afghanistan and Pakistan agree to respect the ceasefire.
“This wouldn’t address the root cause of the crisis, but at least it would keep violence down and limit the risk of wider destabilisation”, he said.


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Pakistan

Can mediators stop Afghan-Pakistani war as ‘cat-and-mouse game’ enters retaliatory phase?

Residents clear debris from houses destroyed in air strikes in Khost, Afghanistan, on Tuesday. Photo: EPA

Afghan residents stand near remnants of a mortar shell at a house damaged by an air strike in Jige Mughalgai, Khost province, on Tuesday. Photo: AFP

A Pakistani serviceman arrives at the site of a suicide attack outside the border force headquarters in Peshawar on Monday. Photo: AFP

A child looks out from a tent provided by China for returning Afghan families in Kabul on Sunday. Photo: Xinhua

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Alhaj Nooruddin Azizi, Afghanistan’s minister of commerce and industry, during a week-long visit to New Delhi on Monday. Photo: AFP

An Afghan man walks near a damaged house after an alleged Pakistani air strike in Kunar province on Tuesday. Islamabad has denied carrying out any attacks. Photo: AFP

People search the debris of damaged buildings in the aftermath of an earthquake in Samangan province, Afghanistan, on November 3. India has provided Afghanistan with humanitarian help in times of crisis. Photo: Reuters

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Pakistani counterterrorism commandos stand guard at the site of a suicide blast outside a court in Islamabad on Tuesday. Photo: Getty Images/TNS/AFP

Pakistani soldiers stand guard at the cadet college that was attacked by suspected militants near the Afghan border in Wana, South Waziristan, Pakistan, on Thursday. Photo: EPA

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Security forces clash with TLP supporters during an anti-Israel protest near Lahore, Pakistan, on October 10. Photo: EPA

A Pakistani policeman fires tear gas shells to disperse TLP supporters on October 10. Photo: EPA

TLP supporters clash with security forces as they march to the US embassy in Islamabad on October 10. Photo: EPA

Security forces arrest a TLP supporter as they attempt to disperse a weeks-long protest outside Islamabad in November 2017. Photo: EPA-EFE

Supporters of Mumtaz Qadri gather during a protest in Lahore, Pakistan, in April 2016. Photo: EPA

TLP supporters march towards the US embassy in Islamabad during an anti-Israel protest on October 11. Photo: EPA

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The INS Mahe is one of a new class of small corvettes specifically designed to operate in coastal and littoral zones. Photo: Handout

The launch ceremony for the first Hangor Class submarine built for the Pakistan Navy in Wuhan, China, last year. Photo: Pakistan Navy

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Prolonged proxy warfare could create space for terrorist groups such as Isis-K to regenerate and plot overseas attacks, analysts warn


Prolonged proxy warfare could create space for terrorist groups such as Isis-K to regenerate and plot overseas attacks, analysts warn.


Can mediators stop Afghan-Pakistani war as ‘cat-and-mouse game’ enters retaliatory phase?

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Prolonged proxy warfare could create space for terrorist groups such as Isis-K to regenerate and plot overseas attacks, analysts warn

Prolonged proxy warfare could create space for terrorist groups such as Isis-K to regenerate and plot overseas attacks, analysts warn