Pakistan-Afghanistan Ties Come Under Strain After Taliban Opposes Border Fencing

Putative bilateral goodwill between Pakistan and Afghanistan’s Taliban administration appears to be faltering over the issue of protecting their common frontier, raising formerly again the ultimate’s enduring demand for Pashtunistan or a Pashtun motherland.

Pashtunistan, as claimed largely by Pashtun Taliban, covers vast swathes of Pakistani home, south of Kabul, including Pakhtunkhwa ( formerly the North West Frontier Province or NWFP) inhabited by their ethnical clansmen, thereby taking their long- standing motherland claims to the external limits of Islamabad. The Pashtun motherland also notionally includes Pakistan’s seven federally administered ethnical areas and six lower pockets known as Frontier Regions, adjoining Afghanistan, which are also inhabited largely by Pashtuns.

According to recent news reports from Islamabad, Pakistan’s public security counsel Moeed Yusuf is listed to visit Kabul latterly this month to ease pressures preceding from the issue of protecting a portion of the-km-long border in order to firm up the boundary between the Islamic neighbours, also known as the Durand Line. This move has been steadfastly opposed by generations of Pashtuns. The issue has formerly again come to the fore, important to the chagrin of Pakistan at a time when it’s witnessing great internal political, social and fiscal turbulence.

Yusuf’s prospective Kabul visit, slated around January 16, follows Taliban commander Mawillawi Sanaullah Sangin’s warning to Islamabad against advancing its Afghan border fencing.

We (the Taliban) won’t allow the fencing anytime, in any form,” Sangin categorically told Afghanistan’s Tolo News last week. “ Whatever they did ahead, they did, but we won’t allow it presently,” he combatively added in what appears to develop into a major wrangle between Kabul and Islamabad. It also imperils the putative collective cordiality that Pakistan had projected after the Taliban assumed power last August, following the US service’s ignominious pullout.

Sangin was replying to Pakistani foreign minister Mehmood Sah Qureshi’s before allegation that “ certain culprits” had  unnecessarily” raised the border fencing question and his insouciant protestation that this matter would be resolved through politic addresses. Qureshi was pertaining to two clashes last month between the Afghan and Pakistani forces along the fencing underway by the side of Afghanistan’s southwestern Nimroz fiefdom and its eastern Nangarhar fiefdom.