Strategic suicide, not strategic depth: Why Pakistan’s ‘jihadi chickens’ in Afghanistan have come home to roost

History enlightens. But it can also bewilder, especially when selectively analysed and interpreted.

Afghanistan is perhaps the most striking example of how selective readings of history can produce flawed strategic conclusions. Two anecdotes, separated by more than two millennia, offer a revealing lens into the Afghan psyche and the persistent misunderstandings surrounding it.

The first story is a sort of legend. The storyline may be a figment of imagination, but the message definitely contains a kernel of truth. As the story goes, Alexander of Macedon, stuck in Afghanistan for three years after sweeping successes across Anatolia, Mesopotamia and Persia, received a scathing letter from his mother mocking him for his failure to subdue a rugged frontier. Alexander responded by sending a sack of Afghan soil, instructing her to spread it across her palace floor. Soon, Macedonian nobles walking upon it began to bicker and fight among themselves. Whether apocryphal or not, the story presciently captures a powerful imagery of Afghanistan as a land of endless internal discord, with tribes divided, loyalties fractured and authority contested.

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The second story, rooted firmly in modern political history, tells the other half of the truth. On March 5, 1948, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan asked the great Pashtun (Pathan) leader, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, in the Constituent Assembly: “Is Pathan the name of a country or that of a community?”

“Pathan is the name of the community and we will name the country Pakhtoonistan,” Ghaffar Khan responded, adding: “I may also explain that the people of India used to call us Pathans and we are called Afghans by the Persians. Our real name is Pakhtoon. We want Pakhtoonistan and want to see all the Pathans on this side of the Durand Line joined and united together in Pakhtoonistan.”

Years later, in 1975, his son Wali Khan distilled this layered identity with absolute clarity when he reminded a Pakistani journalist how he was “a 6,000-year-old Pashtun, a thousand-year-old Muslim, and a 27-year-old Pakistani”, neatly summarising layered identities in which Pashtun ethnicity and culture preceded both religion and modern nationhood.

Taken together, these two stories reveal a fascinating paradox. Afghans quarrel endlessly among themselves. But they resist instinctively centralised authority and fiercely defend collective identity. Both division and unity coexist, not as contradictions, but as twin pillars of Afghan socio-political culture. There is unanimity among Pashtuns of all classes and creeds that the Durand Line is an illegitimately drawn British border perpetuated by Pakistan since 1947.

Pakistan’s strategic establishment, however, preferred to focus on only the first half of this dual reality. Observing Afghanistan’s internal divisions and rivalries, Pakistani policymakers concluded that Afghan factions could be manipulated, divided and controlled through patronage, coercion and even bribery. Recall what the then Prime Minister of Pakistan, Nawaz Sharif, mockingly observed about the American failure to get Osama bin Laden. Sharif joked that the Americans had unnecessarily wasted their money on cruise missiles aimed at the Saudi fugitive when all they needed was to send “a few men into Afghanistan with briefcases full of dollars, and they would have got the job done”, as Steve Coll writes in Ghost Wars.

It was within this ideological framework that Pakistan supported the rise of the Taliban during the 1990s. The expectation was straightforward: a friendly regime in Kabul would neutralise Pashtun nationalism, secure Pakistan’s western flank, and create “strategic depth” against Bharat. Support came from across Pakistan’s political spectrum. Ironically, even leaders considered liberal participated in nurturing the Taliban’s rise.

The ‘liberal’ Benazir Bhutto, for instance, recalled in detail her role in assisting the rise of the Taliban. “I became slowly, slowly sucked into it,” she remembered. “It started out with a little fuel, then it became machinery”, followed by spare parts for tanks and choppers captured by the Taliban. Soon the ISI started pushing for trade concessions for the Islamist militia and those assisting them directly or indirectly. In the end, money started flowing, directly from the Pakistani treasury, as Bhutto recalled.

The phenomenon continued even when Pakistan, under Gen Pervez Musharraf, had joined the US-led war on terror. Writing about Gen Musharraf and many other ‘liberal’ Pakistani generals, Coll notes: "Jihad was not a calling; it was a professional imperative. It was something he did at the office. At quitting time, he packed up his briefcase, straightened the braid on his uniform, and went home to his normal life.”

Things could have worked for Pakistan had Pashtuns not been so deeply rooted in their ethnicity and culture. They might still have worked had the Pakistanis been sympathetic to the Afghan cause and not treated them as a colonial extension of Pakistan — “strategic depth”, as they call it disdainfully. The Pakistani rulers thought they could woo Pashtuns of Afghanistan while alienating those residing within Pakistan. They forgot that, unlike many other converted peoples, these people were Pashtuns first and Muslims second.

Even the Taliban, while espousing an austere religious ideology and maintaining close ties with Pakistan, consistently refused to recognise the Durand Line as an international border. Their refusal underscored a deeper truth: Pashtun identity could not be subordinated permanently to geopolitical-ideological-religious designs. Religion, ideology and alliance work only till they don’t come in the way of traditional Pashtun notions of ‘Zan’, ‘Zar’ and ‘Zameen’ (woman, gold/wealth and land).

While Pakistan pursued dominance, Bharat adopted a quieter, less dramatic approach. New Delhi invested not in militias but in roads, hospitals, dams and schools. Its engagement sought legitimacy among people rather than leverage over factions. This distinction mattered. Afghanistan remembers who builds and who manipulates, who respects and who humiliates.

Simultaneously, Bharat recalibrated its broader regional posture. The era of unilateral restraint gave way to reciprocity-backed deterrence. Terrorism invited military response rather than fatalistic patience. The Narendra Modi government buried the ‘Aman ki Asha’ mirage for good and responded to terror attacks with Uri and Balakot — the latest being the much successful Operation Sindoor, where Pakistan was pushed to seek a ceasefire within 96 hours of resolute military operations.

The cumulative result has been an unexpected reversal. What Pakistan once envisioned as strategic depth has increasingly become a strategic nightmare. Relations between Islamabad and Kabul have deteriorated sharply, marked by border tensions and military skirmishes.

The Afghanistan saga shows how history’s tragedy often lies not only in ignorance but also in selective understanding. Like the blind men describing an elephant through isolated impressions, policymakers who grasp only fragments of Afghan reality construct strategies destined to fail. Today, Pakistan faces the consequences of such massive misreading, as its military is engaged in an intense battle with Afghanistan — and it may be just the beginning of a never-ending war that could end with the very disintegration of Pakistan.

As clashes flare along the Durand Line, it’s obvious that Pakistan’s ‘jihadi chickens’ in Afghanistan have come home to roost. And this turn of events should surprise no one.

(This is Part 1 of a two-part series. The next part will examine how Bharat, too, misunderstood Afghanistan for much of its post-Independence history, and how those miscalculations cost New Delhi badly, including in Kashmir.)

(The views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)