We are two Pakistanis who served in Afghanistan, and we write as peace advocates. We want a prosperous, stable Afghanistan at the heart of Asia, a country whose people live with dignity and whose land is an economic crossroads rather than a battlefield. We believe the great majority of Afghans want the same. When the Taliban took Kabul in August 2021, many in Pakistan hoped for a friendly neighbour and a quiet western frontier. The opposite has happened. The old dispute over the Durand Line, the colonial-era boundary drawn in 1893 that splits the Pashtun tribal regions between the two states, has returned. No Afghan government, the Taliban included, has ever fully and formally accepted that line, and the grievance is again feeding cross-border violence.

Yet the century-old narrative behind it is increasingly rejected by educated Afghans themselves. If a shared language were enough to merge states, the United States and Canada would be one country, more than twenty Arabic-speaking states would be one, and the eighteen Latin American republics where Spanish is official would be one. Borders are settled by treaty, trade and mutual respect, not by ethnic nostalgia. The Taliban also overlook a basic fact. Afghanistan’s Pashtuns are estimated at 15 to 26 million, while 38 to 43 million Pashtuns live in Pakistan as citizens of their own state, and most of them will never accept this model of governance.

Under the Taliban’s authoritarian, theocratic emirate, Afghanistan has become one of the gravest human rights crises in the world. More than 20 million Afghans, the vast majority of the population, depend on humanitarian aid. Girls are barred from school beyond age twelve, women are shut out of most work and cannot travel without a male guardian, and strict dress and voice codes are enforced on them. International bodies describe this as gender persecution, and many call it gender apartheid. Independent journalism has been crushed through arbitrary arrests, broadcast bans and the........

© The Friday Times