As if to add insult to injury, Afghanistan’s deputy prime minister, Abdul Ghani Baradar, publicly urged Afghan traders to seek “alternative trade routes” that bypass Pakistan. His words, coming days after border clashes that left soldiers dead on both sides, declared what Islamabad has long feared: the old equation is broken, and trust has been replaced by quiet hostility.
That political frost now overlays a climate of terror. On Tuesday, a suicide bomber struck an Islamabad district court, killing twelve people and wounding dozens. The blast shattered the illusion that militancy was confined to Pakistan’s peripheries. It arrived in the heart of the capital; an assault not only on lives but on the state’s confidence. Together with the earlier attack on a cadet college in Wana, it followed a pattern grimly familiar since the Taliban’s takeover of Kabul in 2021.
The irony is bitter. Pakistan once believed a friendly Taliban government would stabilise its western border. Instead, the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan has regrouped under that very umbrella, carrying out some of the deadliest assaults in a decade. The threat is both local and imported–a domestic insurgency emboldened and equipped from sanctuaries across the Afghan border. Every major investigation into recent attacks has traced weapons, training, or funding to Afghan soil, often facilitated by regional intelligence networks hostile to Pakistan.
Afghanistan, meanwhile, is gambling with an economy that can least afford isolation. After an estimated 27% GDP collapse following 2021, the World Bank says growth has only inched back, leaving output far below pre-takeover levels. Deprivation is severe as UNDP finds around 69% of Afghans lack the basics for subsistence, and the latest IPC projects about one in five people in acute food insecurity. In this context, Mr Baradar’s call to abandon Pakistan routes reads less like defiance than self-harm. Afghanistan is landlocked and, although it has diversified via Iran’s Chabahar, border closures and a steep drop in transit through Pakistan since 2023 have already tightened supplies. To pretend Kabul can painlessly sever a corridor that historically carried the bulk of its transit imports is to misread both geography and arithmetic.
Both countries now stand at the edge of escalation. Islamabad is right to prioritise its security. Still, it also understands that the region cannot bear another war. Durable defence lies not in retaliation alone but in joint border management, intelligence cooperation, and credible guarantees from Kabul. Stability will come only when both sides accept that denial is no strategy and delay is no defence. *