Last month, the U.S. State Department issued a joint statement on the Pakistan-U.S. Counterterrorism Dialogue, held on May 10. The statement highlighted the cooperation between the two sides “in addressing the most pressing challenges to regional and global security, including Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and ISIS-Khorasan,” also known as the Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP). The dialogue was co-chaired by Ambassador Elizabeth Richard, representing the U.S. side as the State Department’s Coordinator for Counterterrorism, and Ambassador Syed Haider Shah, who serves as Pakistan’s Additional Foreign Secretary at the United Nations.
In 2023, the dialogue was held from March 6-7 in Islamabad, where both sides reaffirmed their commitment to enhancing Pakistan’s counterterrorism capacity. The latest iteration commenced amid many vicissitudes in Pakistan’s terrorism landscape, meriting closer study.
Preceding the 2024 Counteterrorism Dialogue, the U.S. Central Command chief, General Michael Erik Kurilla, visited Pakistan from May 7 to 9, during which he traveled to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province bordering Afghanistan to discuss the counterterrorism operations along the frontier areas.
For Pakistan, these are unarguably welcome developments, indicating a renewed focus by Washington on countering the militancy springing from the Af-Pak region. U.S. interest in the region, and its many security challenges, had declined following the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021. Since then, Pakistan has been striving to have the scourge of TTP recognized as a global threat, given the group reared its ugly head again following the Taliban’s rise to power in Kabul.
To that end, Pakistan’s chief of army staff (COAS), General Syed Asim Munir, on his maiden trip to Washington in December 2023, sought to project the TTP as a group capable of jeopardizing U.S interests, citing its history of past attacks.
Once Allies, Now Detractors
Some reports indicated that on May 9, Pakistan had conducted fresh drone strikes in Afghanistan’s Paktika province, targeting certain TTP terrorists; interestingly, this coincided with the CENTCOM chief’s visit to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. However, the supposed strike was not officially claimed by the government of Pakistan (or the Afghan Taliban), as was the case during its March 18 cross-border airstrikes in Khost and Paktika provinces of Afghanistan.
Afghanistan International, an Afghan media outlet, claimed to have heard from “multiple sources” in Islamabad about the strike. The same outlet later reported that a Pakistani military delegation’s scheduled trip to Kandahar on May 12, to deliberate on issues concerning the TTP and border management, was canceled in the wake of these airstrikes.
If Pakistan did, indeed, conduct fresh strikes, why, then, did they go unclaimed? And more importantly, why did the Afghan Taliban not publicly remonstrate? There are a few plausible explanations for this.
First, it could mean that Pakistan did not want to stir anti-Pakistan sentiments in Afghanistan, which is already on the rise due to its decision to expel millions of Afghan refugees from its soil. In April 2022, when Pakistan had conducted airstrikes in Afghanistan’s Khost and Kunar provinces, the collateral damage was numerous civilians getting killed, resulting in hundreds of Afghans thronging the streets, protesting and chanting anti-Pakistan slogans.
For their part, the Afghan Taliban may have been deterred from protesting because such airstrikes only underscore their complicity in providing succor to groups like the TTP. Drawing attention to the issue risks inviting international ire for allowing Afghanistan to be used by terrorist groups, which contravenes the 2020 Doha Agreement between the Taliban and the United States.
Notwithstanding the ambivalence surrounding this fresh airstrike, the crux of the matter is that Pakistan’s patience with the Afghan Taliban is wearing thin, and both have increasingly resorted to a game of recrimination. For instance, during a lengthy press conference in early May, the Pakistani military spokesman, Major General Ahmed Sharif, claimed that the March 26 attack in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, which killed five Chinese engineers and one Pakistani driver, was planned in Afghanistan and carried out by an Afghan national.
In response, the spokesperson for the Afghan Defense Ministry rejected these claims, retorting that the Taliban have evidence of Islamic State fighters coming to Afghanistan from Pakistan’s territory, for which Pakistan should be accountable.
Both Afghanistan and Pakistan have conspicuous and conflicting set of red lines, which remain in a constant state of violation. For Pakistan, it is the Afghan Taliban aiding the TTP and failing to take decisive actions against the group; for the Afghan Taliban, it is Pakistan conducting cross-border airstrikes in Afghanistan’s territory and fencing the disputed Durand Line. Now the newly formed government in Pakistan, led by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, along with the military leadership, has evidently upped the ante against the TTP with the launch of a new nation-wide counterterrorism operation named “Azm-e-Istehkam” (Resolve for Stability).
The U.S. Role
Now, at this critical juncture – amid a resurgent TTP, which ended a tenuous ceasefire with the Pakistani government in November 2022 – comes the offer of U.S. support. The U.S. overtures are in line with a study conducted by the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), which emphasized counterterrorism-specific security cooperation with Pakistan and Afghanistan, as the region continues to remain ripe for terrorist activities.
By turning a blind eye to the region due to preoccupation with more pressing geopolitical concerns, such as the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Hamas wars, and curtailing the rise of China by focusing on the Indo-Pacific theater, Washington risks backtracking on the counterterrorism enclave it had so scrupulously built post 9/11. The threat of global terrorism has not waned, and the terrorist attack by ISKP on the Crocus City Hall outside Moscow is a case in point. The looming threat of an attack aimed at the 2024 Summer Olympic Games in Paris only seems to reinforce this argument.
For the longest time, ISKP and al-Qaeda, rather than the TTP, were bigger concerns for the U.S., and although Washington is providing limited security assistance to Pakistan to fight the TTP, it still more or less holds the same view. This can be gauged from the U.S. Defense Department deputy press secretary’s response regarding U.S. involvement in the recent Pakistani military attacks against “TTP” positions; she stated that Washington continues to pursue “ISIS” leaders in the region.
While there is reason for the United States to consider the TTP as more of Pakistan’s internal problem – especially since the TTP’s 2018 manifesto rescinded its global jihad stance to focus exclusively on Pakistan – one cannot not lose sight of its ties to transregional and global terrorist groups, or the fluid nature of the militant ecosystem in the region. After all, ISKP was formed by disgruntled TTP members, with Hafiz Saeed Khan, a TTP commander, as the group’s first emir, and even today, some sources suggest a possible nexus between the TTP and ISKP, despite the purported divergence in their objectives.
Moreover, multiple anecdotes indicate that al-Qaeda is providing weapons and equipment, including fighters, to the TTP. If the TTP expands, so do al-Qaeda’s ambitions, which currently remain limited to an advisory role to the TTP and the Taliban.
A recalibration by U.S. policymakers regarding the extent of counterterrorism collaboration in the region may be on the horizon. Contrary to popular credo, such a focus would not detract attention from the recent trends in bilateral relations between the United States and Pakistan, which have refreshingly pivoted toward the nontraditional security domain, but will ultimately serve this purpose by making the region’s climate conducive for such cooperation.
Neither will this endeavor take Washington’s onus away from broader strategic concerns, as highlighted by the USIP report. In fact, any attack on U.S. interests or its allies by Afghanistan and Pakistan-based terrorist groups would require policymakers to redirect resources from the current strategic competition toward exigency-based counterterrorism efforts, which would in actuality incur higher costs (both political and logistical) compared to preventive investments. On top of that, if Pakistan’s relations with the Afghan Taliban plummet beyond the current war of words (or sporadic air strikes), it would destabilize the region further, which is already plagued by enormous challenges.
However, ratcheting up assistance to Pakistan, even if it is limited to countering terrorism, comes with its own set of pitfalls. For one, Pakistan has historically used U.S. aid to improve its deterrence capabilities vis à vis India, and with India-U.S. ties stronger than ever before, largely driven by a shared enmity with China, Washington would have to account for the India factor before giving a green light to any substantial aid. In 2022, for instance, when the U.S. approved a $450 million F-16 sustainment package to Pakistan to buttress its counterterrorism capabilities, India’s foreign and defense ministers expressed their objections to the decision.
Additionally, monitoring terrorist groups or undertaking over-the-horizon operations in the region would involve accessing Afghanistan’s skies through Pakistan’s air space, compromising both countries’ sovereignty and fueling further anti-American sentiments in the region. Recently, reports and videos of U.S. drones flying over Afghan provinces had surfaced, garnering reactions from not just the Taliban, but also other political groups in Afghanistan, such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar of the Hezb-e-Islami.
Later, a Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) leader alleged that Pakistan had handed over two air bases in Balochistan to the United States. When the U.S. State Department was asked for clarification regarding this matter, its spokesperson instead suggested seeking an explanation from the U.S. Department of Defense.
Further, similar assistance in the past had often arrived with high expectations heaped on Pakistan, which it could not live up to, making the nature and degree of aid a perennial issue in the U.S. Congress. This calls for expectations to be tempered on both sides. If the United States curtails aid or pushes Pakistan to “do more” because the latter foundered on its deliverables, Pakistan should, for once, look within and get its own house in order rather than correlate it with U.S. perfidy.
For counterterrorism cooperation with Pakistan to pick up greater momentum, one question remains to be answered: Can Washington overcome the past mistrust and present weariness toward the region, along with other operational complexities, in order to effectively address future threats?