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Region Beset with Border Battles; "Lines" not Borders Feed the War Machine in Afghanistan, Pakistan and India
As fighting escalates between Pakistan and Afghanistan a cacophony of militant groups on both sides of the border are gaining space.
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In tit for tat border attacks dozens of Afghan and Pakistani police, border guards and army officers have been killed. Pakistan says it’s winning, claiming control of a dozen Afghan border posts and Afghanistan boasts of repelling attacks and killing Pakistani security officers. A cease fire has begun but it’s unlikely to be long lasting.
The lager south Asian region is doomed to forever skirmishes, battles and outright war as long as disputed “lines”, and not internationally recognized borders, separate countries, either in whole or in part. These disputed “lines’ provides armies with a cause, sustains relentless conflict and feeds a forever burgeoning militant producing machine.
To the east there exists the Line of Control, between India and Pakistan and to the west the Durand Line, between Pakistan and Afghanistan. None of the countries involved recognize the “lines”, and all claim territory from the other as their own, occasionally resorting to battles, and on occasion full on war, to assert their ownership.
In the East, India and Pakistan have fought three wars over the former princely state of Kashmir, which is divided between the two countries by the Line of Control . Both Pakistan and India claim the divided area in its entirety. They also both possess nuclear weapons, and have come dangerously close to using them. The risk of a nuclear confrontation is real and deadly for the region and beyond.
To the West, the Durand Line has kept Afghanistan and Pakistan in a state of perpetual animosity with Afghans insisting the ethnic Pashtun portions of Pakistan belong to them. Pakistan’s army recently finished construction on a fence that runs the entire 2,640 kilometers of their shared border with Afghanistan, seeking to establish the “line” as the permanent border, imposing restrictions, like passport control, on Afghans seeking to come to Pakistan. Before the fence was built Afghans and Pakistanis crossed at will.
Over the decades the unencumbered crossing between the two neighbors greatly facilitated two-way militant traffic and large scale smuggling. Hundreds of footpaths crisscross the mountains that run along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Successive Afghan governments have refused to even consider making the Durand Line the international border and the Taliban are no different , saying neither the newly built fence, nor the Pakistani military outposts would be allowed to stay.
Since the Taliban’s return, Pakistan has accused Afghanistan of making good on that promise with the help of anti- Pakistan militants, known as the Tehreek -e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), who live in large numbers in Afghanistan. More than 1,000 Pakistani security forces have been killed in militant attacks along its border since the Taliban’s return in 2021.
The neighbors clash regularly, and it is accompanied by routine border crossing closures that hurt the economies of both nations, shutting down a robust cross border trade. In recent weeks, however, the situation has drastically deteriorated as have the ferocity of attacks, with the Taliban using tanks and Pakistan using aerial bombing.
The Taliban deny aiding the TTP in their attacks against Pakistan’s military.
Still, the TTP is but one of several militant groups that have found space in Afghanistan, according to a report last year by the United Nations Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring team.
Others include the Islamic State in Khorasan Province, and Al Qaida in the Subcontinent, the Baluchistan Liberation Army, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, the Chinese Uighurs of the East Turkestan independent movement and Jamaat Ansarullah.
There are also many smaller, less known groups. who have found space in Afghanistan, like the Islamic Jihad Group, the Khatiba Imam al Bukhari group, Jaysh al-Fursan and Jamaat-ul-Ahrar. The United Nations Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring team periodically releases reports, which are a compilation of information gathered and supplied by U.N. member states. The report does not purport to verify the information provided.
An unintended consequence of ignoring the depth of the problem posed by the disputed “lines vs borders” has been the use of non-state actors or militants to carry out covert attacks against one another. As the U.N. report shows there are plenty of these militant groups in the area, including a deadly number in Pakistan. The Islamic State, for example, has found a foothold in Pakistan’s troubled southwestern Baluchistan where large tracts of the province are controlled more by militants than the government.
The international community has slammed Pakistan for its use of militants against India . Several of the militant groups are the creation of the Pakistani military machine. But Pakistan is not the sole offender, who is using militants to do its covert dirty work. From neighbor Afghanistan, India has used anti-Pakistan groups to foment further unrest in Pakistan’s Baluchistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provinces that border Afghanistan. And Afghanistan has harbored anti-Pakistan militants for years, including during the 20-year U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan.
In 2018, at the height of Afghan President Ghani’s rule, Aslam Baluch a Baluch Liberation Army (BLA) leader, who took responsibility for an attack on the Chinese Consulate in Pakistan’s southern city of Karachi, was blown up in a suburb on the outskirts of Afghanistan’s southern Kandahar city, some say by a car bomb gone wrong. He and several other BLA members died. The BLA is demanding an independent Baluchistan.
They have had space in Afghanistan’s southern Kandahar for years to operate against Pakistan just as the Taliban had space in Pakistan to operate against the Afghan National Forces and the U.S.-backed government.
Afghans, with very few exceptions, believe that Pakistan helped the Taliban return to power in 2021. Pakistan has rebuffed the accusation and invariably responds by asking how a single country could aid in the defeat of the militaries from more than 42 countries, including the U.S.
But indeed Pakistan did allow Afghanistan’s Taliban to use its territory to headquarter its leadership and provided Pakistani hospitals to treat its wounded throughout most of the 20-year U.S.-led invasion. Still they were never really friends. Afghanistan’s Taliban did not trust Pakistan, nor Pakistan them.
Afghans and Indians have long blamed Pakistan for the rise of Islamic militancy in the region, but in fact both Pakistan and the United States deserve blame. Back in 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, America jumped in and joined with Pakistan’s dictator Gen. Zia-ul Haq to do battle in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union. Ronald Reagan was the U.S. president at the time and he, like Zia, exploited Islamic religious fervor to fuel the fight against the invading Soviet Union being waged by Afghan mujahedeen or Islamic warriors, also dubbed freedom fighters by Reagan.
To exemplify just how deep the United States’ contribution has been to exploiting religion and abetting extremism in the region, in the early 1980s at the height of the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan, the University of Nebraska devised an English-language program to teach English to millions of Afghan refugees in Pakistan that went like this: “I” is for infidel, who are the godless communists, “J” is for jihad against the godless communists and “K” is for Kalashnikov to use in your fight. against the godless communists.
There was even a math component that went something like this: If you have 10 godless communists and you kill 5, how many do you have left?
That 1980s war was also the start of Pakistan’s use of Islamic militants as proxies, in Afghanistan first and later in Indian controlled Kashmir. But today proxies are used by the three neighbors and the battles they are fighting are the ones where “lines- instead- of- borders” have gone unresolved. Until the international community, together with the countries of this region, create internationally recognized borders to replace the disputed “lines” lasting peace will remain elusive.