From Strategic Depth to Strategic Liability: The Collapse of Islamabad–Kabul Ties

 



When Kabul fell in August 2021, Western capitals watched with dread. Islamabad barely hid its satisfaction. American transport planes lifted off from Hamid Karzai International Airport, closing twenty grinding years of occupation, and inside Pakistan’s deep state the mood was one of historic vindication. For decades the country’s security thinking had rested on “strategic depth”: a friendly, pliant government in Kabul that would shut India out of the western flank and quiet a porous border. Then came the photograph, of senior Pakistani intelligence officials sipping tea in the lobby of Kabul’s Serena Hotel days after the takeover. It said what everyone assumed: the new rulers would remember their benefactors.

They did not. History is hard on short-sighted victories, and the euphoria soured fast. Pakistan’s original error was misreading the Taliban’s motives. Islamabad had treated them as one obedient proxy, brushing aside Pashtun nationalism and the binding force of global jihad. Once settled in the presidential palace, the Taliban stopped behaving like an asset and started behaving like a state, with survival instincts and ideological commitments of its own. The honeymoon barely lasted; an idealized alliance became an existential security problem.

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