Pakistan Can Ensure Its National Security Without Invading Afghanistan

Fortifying the Durand Line, eliminating sleeper cell threats on Pakistan’s side, and dividing-and-ruling Afghanistan through hybrid means can ensure Pakistan’s national security in lieu of the invasion that the US might be putting Pakistan up to in advance of America’s geopolitical and mineral-related goals.

The most intense Pakistani-Afghan clashes in years have drawn wider attention to each side’s grievances. Pakistan accuses the Taliban of hosting fundamentalist TTP terrorists, separatist BLA ones, and dislikes its refusal to recognize the Durand Line, while the Taliban accuses Pakistan of hosting ISIS-K and dislikes its newly restored closeness with the US. Pakistan’s conventional military superiority empowers it to shape the course of this conflict, but it doesn’t have to invade Afghanistan to ensure its national security.

That would put its troops at enormous risk, spike the likelihood of sleeper cell terrorist attacks all across Pakistan, and amount to doing the US’ bidding by at least displacing the Taliban from Kabul’s vicinity so American troops can return to Bagram Airbase like Trump wants. If ensuring national security is the de facto military junta’s goal, not advancing ulterior motives like remaining in power with US support or profiting from facilitating the export of Afghan minerals, however, then there’s another way to do this.

The top priority must be finishing Pakistan’s planned fencing of the entire Durand Line, which should ideally be modelled off of Egypt’s ultra-secure one with Gaza, replete with fortified outposts for rapidly responding to any attempted breaches. These outposts could also function as nodes in an EU-inspired “drone wall” all along the frontier for conducting intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) and responding to threats with first-person view (FPV) kamikaze drones before putting troops in harm’s way.

Upon more effectively defending from border infiltrations by Afghan-based terrorists, Pakistan would then have to root out as many sleeper cells as is realistically possible, albeit without doing so in such an overbearing way that the locals feel persecuted and thus start to sympathize with such groups. Therein lies one of the country’s main problems since the aforesaid overbearing methods have been responsible for turning locals in Balochistan and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa against the government for decades.

It’s not enough to root out sleeper cells in a way that prevents people from sympathizing with their fundamentalist and/or separatist causes, however, since the short-term security that this attains won’t last if local governance and people’s living standards aren’t improved. This hasn’t yet been achieved in at-risk border areas due to the central government’s incompetence and local corruption. Both are cancerous to national unity and could contribute to terrorist-related existential threats if left unchecked.

And finally, if Pakistan decides that the Taliban must be degraded and the path paved for regime change (the latter policy being of dubious wisdom), then it could exploit the group’s factionalism in parallel with providing more backing to non-fundamentalist opposition movements. Nevertheless, it would still take time to make progress, but containing Afghan-emanating terrorist threats along the Durand Line and ensuring socio-political security on Pakistan’s side thereof should keep the state safe in the meantime.

To summarize, Pakistan’s alternative to invading Afghanistan is to implement the three-phased national security policy that was proposed in this analysis: 1) fortifying the Durand Line; 2) eliminating threats on Pakistan’s side; and 3) dividing-and-ruling Afghanistan through hybrid means. This is achievable and could even be subsidized by the US, but Trump might care more about geopolitical and mineral-related goals than security ones, hence why he might keep pushing Pakistan to invade Afghanistan at his behest.