‘Everything will be okay’ with Afghanistan. It still isn’t.

I remember sitting across from the commander of the Kabul front of the Afghan Taliban for an interview in September 2009. His nom de guerre was Saifullah Jalali, and he spoke with the calm assurance of someone who believed time was on his side.

“We are ready,” he told me. “We have a shadow government in all provinces. When the time comes, we will take over.” Kabul was still under the internationally backed Afghan government. The Taliban were insurgent fighters.

After the interview, we had a conversation, part of which was about their relations with Pakistan. “No more trust,” he said, and spoke of the arrests of Taliban leaders after 2001 and of Pakistan not being a trusted ally after it “shifted course and joined the US-led war in Afghanistan.”

“When we return,” he said, “relations will be based on interests, not trust.”

Nearly two decades later, those words feel uncannily accurate.

The Taliban did return. They did take Kabul in 2021. And today, relations between Islamabad and Kabul are once again tense: Pakistan accuses the Taliban government in Kabul of allowing the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) to operate from Afghan soil. Border incidents follow. Diplomatic channels strain. Mediation efforts in Doha, Istanbul and Urumqi do not produce durable outcomes.

But the current tension cannot be understood in isolation from the history that shaped it. The trust deficit dates to Pakistan’s birth in 1947, when Afghanistan cast the only vote against its admission to the United Nations over disputes tied to the Durand Line. Since then the two capitals have swung between pragmatic cooperation and suspicion, with the Taliban’s first rule from 1996 to 2001 marking the warmest period in relations.

Yesterday’s fighters, who once depended on Pakistan, are today’s rulers in Kabul, and they resist being seen as a non-state actor. 

-Baker Atyani

Pakistan’s Afghanistan policy has historically been driven by strategic interest. When I interviewed former ISI chief Gen. Hamid Gul in 1999, he told me about Pakistan’s role in supporting the United States during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Pakistan, he said, had reached an understanding with the Americans that gave it a certain degree of freedom to continue with its nuclear program unhindered. In return, it was facilitating the Afghan mujahideen who fought against the Soviets.

It all had to be done secretly, while being openly denied, because “the Americans were saying that they needed to convince their Congress for military support,” he said.

Afghanistan was not just a battlefield. It was a strategic space. Pakistan’s decision to help the US against the Soviets was driven by its national interests: the nuclear program and securing strategic depth in Afghanistan — a friendly western neighbor that could reduce Islamabad’s security challenges, especially in relation to its eastern neighbor, India.

When the Taliban returned to power in August 2021, Pakistan was visibly cautious over whether it could restore the strategic comfort it had previously enjoyed in Afghanistan.

Days after the fall of Kabul, then-ISI chief Gen. Faiz Hameed appeared in the Afghan capital and told reporters, “Do not worry, everything will be okay.”

But his brief comment revealed something else — an awareness that things might not be okay, that the return of the Taliban would not automatically reset the relationship to two decades earlier.

Nearly five years on, those words still define the moment: The Taliban govern as de facto rulers, asserting sovereignty and pursuing their own diplomatic choices. Pakistan faces a persistent TTP threat and demands security guarantees. Trust remains thin.

There is a deeper clash between Pakistan’s idea of strategic depth and the Taliban’s insistence on sovereign authority. Islamabad has long assumed that a friendly Taliban order in Kabul would give it influence and security space. But yesterday’s fighters, who once depended on Pakistan, are today’s rulers in Kabul, and they resist being seen as a non-state actor.

Neither side wants a collapse. Neither side benefits from chaos. Neither appears fully satisfied with the uneasy arrangement that has taken shape since 2021.

The relationship is not an open confrontation. It is a tense balance — sustained less by confidence than by caution.

“Do not worry, everything will be okay” may be the clearest reflection of where it stands today — everything is still not okay.

Baker Atyani is a veteran journalist with two decades of experience covering militant groups in Asia. He was held captive for 18 months by the Abu Sayyaf Group in the southern Philippines. He was the last journalist to interview Osama bin Laden before 9/11. He can be reached on Twitter at @atyanibaker