‘Everything will be okay’ with Afghanistan. It still isn’t.

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I remember sitting across from the commander of the Kabul front of the Afghan Taliban for an interview in September 2009. His nom de guerre was Saifullah Jalali, and he spoke with the calm assurance of someone who believed time was on his side.

“We are ready,” he told me. “We have a shadow government in all provinces. When the time comes, we will take over.” Kabul was still under the internationally backed Afghan government. The Taliban were insurgent fighters.

After the interview, we had a conversation, part of which was about their relations with Pakistan. “No more trust,” he said, and spoke of the arrests of Taliban leaders after 2001 and of Pakistan not being a trusted ally after it “shifted course and joined the US-led war in Afghanistan.”

“When we return,” he said, “relations will be based on interests, not trust.”

Nearly two decades later, those words feel uncannily accurate.

The Taliban did return. They did take Kabul in 2021. And today, relations between Islamabad and Kabul are once again tense: Pakistan accuses the Taliban government in Kabul of allowing the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) to operate from........

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