WHILE the world is fixated, rightly so, on the war in the Gulf, another conflict closer to home is largely going unnoticed. True, the level of devastation in the hostilities between Pakistan and Afghanistan is nowhere near that in Iran. But, in many ways, it is a far more perplexing conflict. Given the long-standing animosity pitting Iran against the US and Israel, President Donald Trump’s exit from the nuclear weapons agreement in his first term, and US military build-up near Iran weeks before the attack, the American-Israel strike, say experts, was a matter of ‘when’ and not ‘if’. On the other hand, the 2021 Taliban takeover in Afghanistan was celebrated as a success of two decades of Pakistan’s covert foreign policy. Yet, just a few years later, heavy fighting between the two has broken out. This is surprising given that, historically, the Pakistani state has perceived the threat along its western border from communist and nationalist groups, not religious movements.

Since independence, the state has had a complicated relationship with nationalist groups in the smaller provinces and has largely been suspicious of them. Given that the main Pakhtun nationalist party at the time of independence, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan’s Khudai Khidmatgar, campaigned against KP (then NWFP) joining Pakistan, advocating instead for the creation of Pakhtunistan, it is not difficult to see where this scepticism comes from. However, since then, Pakhtun nationalist groups, including Ghaffar Khan’s own party, have moved towards advocating for more autonomy within the larger federal structure than........

© Dawn