Pakistan pins its Afghan border war on India
Pakistan's army has accused Afghanistan's Taliban of sheltering militants and warned it of serious consequences, while alleging that India is behind the violence.
Lieutenant General Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry, who heads Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), the military's media wing, made the threat in an interview with an unnamed foreign outlet, Dunya News reported on November 1. He called India the biggest sponsor of terrorism inside Pakistan, cast the Taliban administration as New Delhi's proxy and described both Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) as Indian instruments.
Islamabad had a single demand, he said: that Kabul stop backing the militants who operate on Pakistani soil. If it did not, serious consequences would follow. His warning to the Taliban accused Kabul of sheltering TTP leader Noor Wali Mehsud along with Bashir Zeb and Gul Bahadur, and of letting fighters and weapons flow across the border. Pakistan's forces could handle any threat from Afghanistan, drones included, he added.
By merging the western frontier with the eastern rivalry, the generals are telling audiences at home and abroad that the Afghan conflict is India's war fought by other means. That account turns every bombing in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan into proof of a foreign hand rather than a failure of Pakistani policy. For now, New Delhi has rejected earlier accusations that it arms anti-Pakistan groups, and Islamabad has put no public evidence on the table.
The two armies traded fire along the Durand Line in October 2025, in the same week that the Taliban's foreign minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi, was in New Delhi, where India said it would turn its Kabul mission into a full embassy. A ceasefire was followed by talks in Istanbul that broke up without a deal.
"Regrettably, the Afghan side gave no assurances, kept deviating from the core issue and resorted to blame game, deflection and ruses," said Information Minister Attaullah Tarar after the first round.
Pakistan then shut the crossings, cutting bilateral trade to below $1bn a year, and business groups put the cost to Pakistan at more than $4.5bn by December. Open war came on February 26, when Afghan forces attacked border posts along the 2,600 km frontier and Islamabad launched Operation Ghazab lil-Haq. In March Kabul said a Pakistani strike on a drug rehabilitation centre in the capital had killed about 400 people, which Islamabad denied. Mediation by Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar bought only a pause for Eid.
Rounds of talks in Doha, Istanbul, Riyadh and Urumqi never produced the written guarantees Islamabad wanted, and in June Defence Minister Khawaja Asif said the security talks had collapsed. He put the number of Pakistani soldiers and civilians killed in militant attacks since 2022 at more than 4,300. Pakistani aircraft struck eastern Afghanistan twice that month, and the UN mission in the country counted at least 28 civilians dead in the second raid. Washington backed Pakistan's right to self-defence all the same.
After further strikes on Kunar and Paktika in September, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid promised that Afghans would deliver "an appropriate response".
Inside Pakistan, the armed forces recorded 3,145 militant incidents and 819 deaths among soldiers, police and civilians between January and early August, along with 28 suicide bombings they blamed on fighters based across the border. One of those, at an anti-militant rally in Kabal in the Swat Valley on August 2, killed at least 14 people. In Balochistan, ISPR now routinely brands the separatists it fights as Fitna al-Hindustan, a label that writes India into every casualty report.
India handed the generals material when it struck targets across Pakistan during Operation Sindoor in May 2025 after a militant attack at Pahalgam in Kashmir killed 26 civilians, and the two governments were still arguing over who won that war at the UN General Assembly in September. There, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar, without naming Pakistan, accused a "serial practitioner of terrorism" of distorting the record.
New Delhi has also kept its channel to Kabul open, and on October 14 it held consultations with Russia on Afghanistan and Pakistan. Moscow in July 2025 became the first country to recognise the Taliban government.
Washington sounds sympathetic. Speaking in Atlanta, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said:
"Pakistan is concerned about terrorist attacks that are being sponsored from the territory of Afghanistan. They feel that the Taliban is not doing enough to constrain those attacks, and they've taken action against it."
Pakistan's Foreign Office welcomed the remarks on November 1 and said it would back sincere efforts by the US and other friendly states to broker dialogue with Kabul. It then attached a price: verifiable action against the TTP, the BLA and the other groups it says operate from Afghan soil.
The information ministry had gone further the day before, calling terrorism launched from Afghan territory a red line and reserving Pakistan's right to take whatever steps it judges necessary, within international law, to remove threats to its security.
That is the condition Kabul has refused for a year, and Chaudhry's interview makes it harder still to meet. A Taliban government that denies sheltering the TTP is unlikely to move against fighters it is now told are Indian agents, since doing so would concede Islamabad's whole case. By binding the western and eastern border flare-ups, Pakistan's generals have made any settlement with the Taliban hostage to a rivalry with New Delhi that still shows no sign of cooling.
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