Afghanistan's cycle of conflict: history, power vacuums, and Pakistan's strategic dilemma

A deteriorating security situation opens the conversation

The episode opens with Muzamil noting that Afghanistan has long been an underexamined subject in Pakistani public discourse - overshadowed by the daily preoccupation with India - despite being, as he puts it, “a very major component for Pakistan.” That framing sets the tone for what follows: a detailed, historically grounded conversation about why Afghanistan matters, and why the signs visible in early 2021 are familiar and troubling.

Salman Javed begins by cataloguing the most recent indicators of deterioration. Over the preceding two to three months, he explains, terrorist activity on Pakistan’s western border had visibly increased. More significantly, Afghan Taliban commanders were being targeted. One killing in particular stood out: Mohammad Rahbar, described by Salman as the right hand of Haji Usman - the governor of Nangarhar - a figure who had played a central role in fighting ISIS-K and pushing the group back from key areas. The targeting of someone at that level, Salman argues, is not incidental. “ISIS means business,” he says. It signals that ISIS-K retains strong footholds and the cell infrastructure needed to carry out high-profile assassinations.

The Quetta blast and the broader uptick in violence, Salman suggests, are not isolated events. They are indicators - what he calls a sign that “Afghanistan is heading toward another civil war.”

The Soviet withdrawal and the Najibullah years

To explain why the current moment feels familiar, Salman walks through the history of Afghanistan from the late 1970s onward. He describes the communist-era governments, the internal party rivalries, and the eventual installation of figures backed by Soviet advisers. The period that receives the most attention is the presidency of Najibullah, who came to power in the mid-1980s and remained in office until 1992.

Salman describes Najibullah as a figure who inherited a functioning, if deeply compromised, state apparatus - one that included the notorious Pul-e-Charkhi prison, infamous, he notes, for torture, abduction, rape, and killing. Yet Najibullah also attempted reconciliation. He reached out to Pakistan, to the Soviets, and eventually to the Americans, trying to negotiate a political settlement that would keep his government intact even as Soviet forces withdrew.

What is striking in Salman’s account is how long Najibullah held on. Even after the Soviet withdrawal was formalised, his government survived - economically and militarily supported at a distance by Moscow, while the resistance factions were backed by the United States and Pakistan. The Battle of Jalalabad, in which the mujahideen attempted to take the city and were repelled by the Afghan army, is cited as a moment that demonstrated the government still had real military capacity. “The resistance was defeated,” Salman notes, and Najibullah’s forces held.

But the structural problem was already in motion. As Soviet support diminished and internal factions began to fracture, the government’s position became untenable. By 1992, Najibullah was forced to resign. He sought refuge in the UN compound in Kabul - India, Salman notes, declined to take him in, reasoning that recognising any incoming government required not antagonising whoever controlled Kabul - and he remained there until the Taliban arrived in 1996.

The mujahideen’s civil war and the conditions that produced the Taliban

The period between Najibullah’s fall in 1992 and the Taliban’s consolidation of power is where Salman’s account becomes most detailed - and most relevant to the present. The Peshawar Accords brought the mujahideen factions together in theory, with figures like Ahmad Shah Massoud taking the defence ministry and Burhanuddin Rabbani eventually assuming the presidency. But the arrangement collapsed almost immediately into infighting.

Massoud and his forces seized Kabul. Other commanders - Gulbuddin Hekmatyar among them - fought against the government from outside. The city became a battlefield. Salman describes war crimes committed by multiple factions during this period, citing research and surveys conducted years later that documented what happened. He is careful not to assign blame exclusively to any one group, noting that “all of them, in one way or another, were part of the looting.”

Pakistan, he explains, found itself in an increasingly difficult position. It had invested heavily in the mujahideen as a strategic asset during the Soviet-Afghan war, but those same factions were now ungovernable. “Pakistan’s control had diminished,” Salman says. The factions were fighting each other, the refugee crisis was worsening, and the internal security situation inside Pakistan was deteriorating as a direct consequence of the conflict next door.

It is in this context that the Taliban emerged. Salman describes how the movement drew on madrassa networks and Pashtun tribal structures, and how Pakistan - through figures like Interior Minister Naseerullah Babar - began supporting them, seeing in the Taliban a potential instrument for restoring order and securing the corridor to Central Asia that had long been a Pakistani strategic objective. Benazir Bhutto’s government, he notes, was involved in this calculation. “These are our misguided children,” he quotes as the framing used at the time - an acknowledgment that the relationship was complicated from the start.

Massoud’s resistance and the Taliban’s consolidation

Salman gives considerable attention to Ahmad Shah Massoud - the Tajik commander who led the Northern Alliance’s resistance against the Taliban through the late 1990s. He describes Massoud as someone who was genuinely defending his people, holding a defensive line against a movement that had the momentum, the territory, and eventually the support of al-Qaeda. India, Iran, and Russia all provided support to Massoud’s forces during this period, Salman notes, which created a direct counter to Pakistan’s alignment with the Taliban.

The Taliban’s regime, once established, is described in terms of its social restrictions - schools closed, public executions, the suppression of women’s movement - but Salman’s focus is less on cataloguing those policies and more on the political dynamics that sustained and eventually undermined the regime. The presence of al-Qaeda, and Osama bin Laden’s financial and organisational role, is acknowledged, though Salman is careful to distinguish between the Taliban as a political-military movement and al-Qaeda as a transnational network operating within Taliban-controlled territory.

Massoud’s assassination - carried out by al-Qaeda operatives posing as journalists, with a bomb concealed in a camera - came on September 9, 2001, two days before the attacks in New York and Washington. Salman frames this as a deliberate sequencing: removing the one commander capable of leading effective resistance before the event that would bring American forces into the country.

The current moment and the risk of repetition

Muzamil brings the conversation back to the present, asking Salman directly: given everything that has been described, what does Pakistan want, and what is actually likely to happen?

Salman’s answer is structured around what he sees as Pakistan’s genuine strategic interest. Pakistan, he argues, has never wanted permanent instability in Afghanistan. What it has consistently wanted is a friendly government in Kabul, access to Central Asian markets and energy corridors, and the absence of an Indian strategic foothold on its western border. The problem, he suggests, is that the instruments Pakistan has used to pursue those interests - support for particular factions, leverage over the Taliban - have repeatedly produced outcomes that undermined those same interests.

“Pakistan is very, very serious for a peaceful transition of government,” Salman says, describing the diplomatic activity underway in early 2021, including high-profile delegations and engagement with multiple Afghan political actors. He had personally met with figures including Ahmad Wali Massoud - the brother of the slain commander - and Karim Khalili, a prominent Hazara leader and former vice president, describing those conversations as substantive and ongoing.

But the structural problem remains. The factions that are anti-Taliban are politically fragmented. The Taliban itself is the most organised military force in the country. And the American withdrawal - announced by the Biden administration - is removing the one external actor whose presence had, however imperfectly, prevented a full return to 1990s-style civil war.

Salman draws the parallel explicitly. Najibullah, he notes, was doing exactly what Ashraf Ghani was doing in 2021: attempting reconciliation, reaching out to opponents, trying to hold a government together while external support diminished. “The same cycle is about to repeat,” he says. The factions that are nominally anti-Taliban are not unified. The moment external pressure is removed, the incentive to fight each other reasserts itself.

What an alternative approach would require

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil presses Salman on what a different path would look like - both for Afghanistan and for Pakistan’s role in it.

Salman’s answer centres on what he calls an “all-inclusive approach.” Afghanistan, he argues, cannot be governed by any single faction imposing its will. The country’s ethnic and political diversity - Pashtun, Tajik, Hazara, Uzbek - means that any durable settlement has to reflect genuine power-sharing. The Taliban’s own stated position, that no non-Pashtun can lead the country, is, in his view, a fundamental obstacle to stability.

For Pakistan, the implication is that supporting the Taliban as a proxy is not a sustainable strategy. The corridor access and regional connectivity that Pakistan wants - rail links, energy projects, trade routes - require a stable Afghan state, not a faction-controlled territory in permanent conflict with half its own population. “Pakistan will have to understand,” Salman says, “that peace in Afghanistan means peace in Pakistan.”

He also addresses the broader stereotyping that shapes how Pakistanis and Afghans perceive each other. Thirty to forty thousand people cross between the two countries every day through the Chaman and Torkham crossings alone, he notes. The cultural, linguistic, and familial ties are deep. The political hostility is real but, in his framing, not inevitable. Breaking out of the stereotypes - on both sides - is a precondition for the kind of diplomatic engagement that could actually produce a different outcome.

Muzamil closes by noting that the episode has covered the period from the Soviet withdrawal through to the present, and that a follow-up conversation covering the post-2001 period in more detail would be warranted. The invitation is left open.