Opinion | For Modi, Pakistan Is A Problem Best Weakened, Not Broken

Pakistan is under pressure from three directions: western frontier, its south-western province, and its own balance sheet. New Delhi should resist the temptation to push too hard.

On the night of 16 March, Pakistan’s air force struck Kabul. Islamabad described the operation as precision strikes targeting what it called ‘Afghan Taliban regime terrorism-sponsoring military installations’ in the capital and in Nangarhar. The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan put the toll at 143 killed and 119 wounded. Taliban figures ran higher still — their deputy spokesperson claimed roughly 400 dead, with 250 wounded.

The strikes were not an aberration. They were the escalating consequence of a strategic miscalculation that began decades earlier in Rawalpindi. In the 1990s, Pakistan’s military establishment cultivated, armed, and delivered the Afghan Taliban to power. The reasoning was straightforward: a client government in Kabul would provide strategic depth against India and foreclose Afghan support for Pashtun nationalism along the Durand Line — the 2,611-kilometre border that no Afghan government has ever formally recognised, and that Kabul has, since 1947, treated as a colonial imposition signed with British India, not with Pakistan. What Rawalpindi received, instead, was a movement that refuses to be owned.

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The central friction is the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan — the TTP, or Pakistani Taliban — which has found sanctuary in Afghan territory and launched a sustained campaign of violence inside Pakistan. Islamabad demanded that the Afghan Taliban take military action against the group. Kabul refused, insisting that no TTP militants operate from its soil. During failed peace talks in Istanbul in November 2025, Pakistan reportedly pressed further, asking for a religious fatwa declaring armed operations inside Pakistan impermissible. The Afghan Taliban gathered clerics in December and produced one, but it applied only to Afghan nationals and made no direct reference to Pakistani militants. It was, in substance, a rejection dressed in the language of compliance.

Pakistan responded with bombs. In late February 2026, Defence Minister Khawaja Asif formally declared what he called ‘open war’ on Afghanistan. The calculation was, that Pakistan’s far superior conventional military strength would force Taliban concession. However, it ignored a fundamental dynamic: the Taliban have thrived in every armed conflict they have entered.

Pakistan’s aggression has furnished the Kabul regime with something it had long struggled to earn: popular legitimacy as defenders of the Afghan nation. And crucially, the Taliban are structurally incapable of meeting Islamabad’s demands. To move militarily against the TTP would mean turning weapons on ideological allies and trampling the founding principles of a movement whose identity is inseparable from loyalty to its own. In 2001, the Taliban........

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