Why Afghanistan is becoming a pressure point for Pakistan’s Middle East ambitions

When Russia convenes the Moscow Format on 5 October, the worsening confrontation between Pakistan and the Taliban will be among the issues on the table. Moscow says it hopes to encourage a “reasonable compromise”, bringing Afghanistan and Pakistan together with China, India, Iran, Russia and the Central Asian states.

The immediate dispute concerns Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). But its significance is becoming larger than another Afghanistan–Pakistan crisis. Islamabad is undergoing two strategic transformations simultaneously: Taliban-controlled Afghanistan has become a growing source of insecurity on Pakistan’s western frontier, while Pakistan itself is becoming more consequential farther west through its expanding defence relationship with Saudi Arabia and Türkiye.

The two developments were not caused by one another. Increasingly, however, they act upon the same state, military capacity and strategic choices.

Pakistan is becoming a hinge between South Asian and Middle Eastern security systems, while Afghanistan is becoming a pressure point on that hinge.

The reversal in Pakistan’s Afghan position is striking. The Taliban’s return in 2021 removed a Kabul government with close relations with India and installed a movement over which Pakistan was widely assumed to possess considerable influence. Yet the TTP problem has transformed that presumed advantage into a serious vulnerability.

The Afghan Taliban and TTP are separate organisations, but years of overlapping insurgency and operational ties make separation more difficult than organisational labels imply. A UN monitoring report describes TTP as continuing to receive logistical and operational space and financial support in Afghanistan.

Islamabad may therefore be demanding more than a policy decision from Kabul. A complete rupture with TTP could force Taliban leaders to confront networks connected to the environment from which their own insurgency drew support.

Pakistan’s difficulty may concern not merely Taliban willingness to act but how far Kabul can go without incurring significant internal costs.

This exposes the limits of coercion. Pakistan can raise the price of non-compliance through border pressure and military force, as its latest strikes inside Afghanistan demonstrate. But if the obstacle is partly structural, greater pressure will not necessarily produce proportionately greater cooperation. It can also increase Kabul’s incentive to reduce its vulnerability to Islamabad.

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India benefits from that dynamic. New Delhi has progressively rebuilt engagement with Taliban-controlled Afghanistan without formally recognising the government. For Kabul, India provides diplomatic and economic space beyond Pakistan. For India, deterioration in Pakistan–Taliban relations offers an opportunity to recover strategic space. Pakistan thus confronts an uncomfortable reversal: pressure intended to make the Taliban more responsive to its security demands can encourage Kabul to deepen precisely the relationship Islamabad has historically sought to constrain.

Recent developments inside Afghanistan raise another question. Armed opposition activity has begun showing signs of change. In July, Sipahiyan-i-Mihan briefly occupied the administrative centre of Yaftal-e Payeen in Badakhshan, while the Afghanistan Freedom Front fought sustained engagements against Taliban forces in Zebak. More recently, fighting intensified in Nuristan.

Taliban authorities accuse Pakistan of facilitating fighters, including former Afghan security personnel. Pakistan rejects allegations of involvement, and independent evidence remains insufficient to conclude that Islamabad is sponsoring a coordinated Afghan opposition campaign.

But Pakistan would not necessarily need regime change to increase its leverage. Opposition forces capable of contesting parts of Afghanistan could erode the Taliban’s monopoly of force, compel it to divert military resources internally and create pressure that cross-border coercion has failed to generate. The important indicator is whether opposition forces begin obtaining sustained sanctuary, logistics, weapons, operational freedom or territorial presence. Even a Pakistani shift from denying such forces strategic space to tolerating it could change the Afghan equation without overt sponsorship.

Why should any of this matter to the Middle East? Because Pakistan’s strategic role there is simultaneously expanding.

The Makkah Joint Defence Agreement with Saudi Arabia and Türkiye has moved toward institutionalisation. The three governments have established a Strategic Political and Defence Committee, agreed to create a permanent secretariat in Saudi Arabia initially headed by a Pakistani secretary-general, and committed themselves to strengthening collective deterrence, defence-industrial cooperation and joint technology development.

The agreement should not be exaggerated into an alliance that will act uniformly in every crisis. Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Türkiye retain different threat perceptions and relationships. But it is no longer merely symbolic. Its first serious tests are already appearing. Pakistan says the three pact members will hold emergency consultations over Iran’s suggestion of political engagement with Yemen’s Houthis after escalating attacks on Saudi Arabia.

This produces a paradox with implications beyond Afghanistan: Pakistan is becoming a more significant security provider to its west while becoming a greater security consumer on its western frontier.

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Afghanistan did not cause the new Gulf security architecture. Nor did Middle Eastern rivalry cause the Taliban–Pakistan rupture. But military capacity, intelligence attention, diplomatic capital and strategic bandwidth are finite. Pressure originating in Afghanistan increasingly acts upon a state whose security capacity is acquiring greater significance farther west.

That is why Afghanistan’s instability can no longer be understood exclusively through a South Asian lens. The 5th October Moscow meeting itself illustrates the emerging order. India and Pakistan remain rivals. China and India compete. Iran pursues its own regional strategy. Russia has recognised Taliban rule. Yet all have reasons to prevent the Pakistan–Taliban confrontation from widening.

This is a networked regional order in which states compete in one theatre, cooperate in another and hedge in a third. Security consequences can therefore travel between regions without requiring a common alliance or coordinated strategy.

Moscow may produce temporary de-escalation. But Pakistan’s deeper problem will remain. If Islamabad believes coercion can still induce verifiable Taliban action against TTP, it can continue concentrating on changing Taliban behaviour. If repeated coercion fails while Afghan opposition forces acquire greater capacity, however, Pakistan may increasingly look for leverage in Afghanistan’s internal balance of power.

That does not necessarily mean overthrowing the Taliban. A less monopolised balance could constrain Taliban strategic autonomy and potentially create space for broader political accommodation among Afghan forces. For Afghans, the distinction matters: changing the internal balance should not mean substituting one neighbour’s domination for another form of external dependency. A more plural political order would have to derive its legitimacy from Afghan participation while also addressing legitimate regional security concerns.

The question after Moscow will therefore not simply be whether Pakistan and the Taliban can stop their latest confrontation. It will be whether Islamabad still believes the Afghan order created after 2021 can be made compatible with its security requirements through changes in Taliban behaviour alone.

As Pakistan’s security importance expands westward, the answer increasingly matters beyond South Asia. Pakistan is becoming the hinge. Afghanistan is becoming the pressure point.

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The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.