In September 2024, I met Yasin Zia, founder of the Afghan Freedom Front, and Daoud Naji, the party’s political committee leader, in a plush restaurant in London. Time had been gentle on the silver-haired general, but Naji, a former BBC journalist, looked tired and time-worn. The two men had once been enemies, fighting on opposing sides of Afghanistan’s brutal civil war that followed the mujahedeen victory over the Soviets in 1992. Both later served in the administration of President Ashraf Ghani and, in middle age, were brought together by the Taliban takeover of August 2021.
Over a meal, the elusive general, who rarely spoke to the media, tried to appear positive. But there was an air of fatalism about him, as if his efforts rested in God’s hands. The truth is that there was little to be positive about. He was politically homeless, living an itinerant existence, traveling between London, Dubai, Uzbekistan and Germany in an effort to drum up support among former colleagues and foreign backers. It was a thankless task; no one was interested in Afghanistan. He tried to put a brave spin on it, saying that the Afghan national interest did not depend on foreign agendas. The bespectacled Naji, for his part, cited the familiar argument one might make to a liberal or a neocon politician. “What happens,” he asked, “when you forget Afghanistan? 9/11 happens.” It was a line that anti-colonialists would bristle at. In any case, the age of counterterrorism is over. Such arguments no longer galvanized the West into action.
Under the circumstances, I thought the two men didn’t have much chance of succeeding. But now that Pakistan’s relationship with its former proteges, the Taliban, has soured, perhaps Zia does have a chance. It seems Islamabad is quietly shopping around for a new Afghan partner and sounding out opposition figures, even hosting them at the beginning of October. This shift could prove significant for Zia’s Freedom Front, which, rumors have it, has opened up an office in Pakistan.
Although Zia has been conducting insurgency operations against the Taliban since the 1990s, recent attacks have been little more than mosquito bites on the Taliban ox. The Taliban, with political backing from Pakistan, have exerted control across Afghanistan. According to many Afghans I have spoken to, the country appears to be more stable and safer than ever before.
It has also made some headway on the political front. In a diplomatic coup, Russia recognized the Taliban emirate in July 2025, and many former embassies — such as those in China and the United Arab Emirates, previously affiliated with the former government — have since been taken over. More importantly, the group is reshaping perceptions. It has won over certain Western influencers like Keith Sinclair, who drove his American-made Dodge across the country, and even my local chicken shop, which I jokingly renamed TFC — Taliban Fried Chicken — because of the owner’s open admiration for the group.
Pakistan’s political maneuvering and attempts to manufacture a credible opposition will take time. The Afghan opposition still has a long way to go; it remains fractured. In 2024, I attended the fourth Vienna conference of the Afghan opposition. There, I interviewed Ahmad Massoud, leader of the National Resistance Front (NRF), who had managed to persuade more opposition figures to join these gatherings, backed by the Austrian diplomat Wolfgang Petritsch.
Although Massoud and the opposition seemed to be striking the right political notes, calling for an inclusive, democratic settlement with the Taliban, Paris and London appeared to be keeping him at arm’s length. Some believed this was due to Massoud’s closeness to Iran’s inner circle; others thought the opposition simply lacked operational effectiveness. Like Zia, Massoud, too, found himself traveling widely to secure the diplomatic and financial isolation of the Taliban and, more importantly, financial support for his insurgency. But support in the form of a state backer never materialized. Simply put, there was no Afghan opposition capable of challenging Taliban hegemony.
It wasn’t Massoud himself; he struck me as more self-assured politically than at our previous meeting in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, in 2023. But to my mind, the Vienna conference reflected all the afflictions that had plagued the fallen Afghan republic over the past 20 years. Everyone wanted prominence. I watched the Austrian organizers wrestle with the seating protocol because, as everyone knows, proximity is power, and where each person sat in relation to the convener and its star, Massoud, mattered greatly. In the end, they cobbled together a few extra seats, mixed up the name badges, messed up the audio system and started the press conference. Yet long before it even started, someone had edited one of the leaders’ Wikipedia pages, lampooning Khalid Pashtoon’s toupee and his links to notorious warlords. For me, it was over. I wrote off the opposition. I could not see how or why anyone would want to back them, given that they seemed destined to repeat the mistakes of the past. Engaging the Taliban, though politically unpalatable, appeared the only pragmatic way forward.
In any case, the Taliban had Pakistan; the disorganized opposition had no equivalent ally. That alone meant the Taliban were likely to remain in power for a long time. As history has shown with every armed Afghan opposition movement, power always depends on an external backer. Afghanistan has, in many ways, served as a bloody chessboard on which empires have played out their proxy wars. In the 1980s, the mujahedeen relied on the Americans, Saudis and Pakistanis to fight the Soviets; in the 1990s, Pakistan installed the Taliban, and the United States later toppled them with the help of the Northern Alliance; and in 2021, Pakistan helped to bring down Ghani’s U.S.-backed government through the Taliban. And so the cycle went. Afghanistan may be the graveyard of empires, but its victims were always the Afghans.
After 9/11, the Taliban enjoyed such close support that their leaders lived in Quetta, in northern Pakistan, beyond the reach of the U.S. As I discovered while visiting, every taxi driver knew where the Taliban high command held court. They even traveled on Pakistani passports. Rafi Fazil, former deputy national security adviser, told me that, even during the fall of Kabul in August 2021, the Taliban offensive appeared so coordinated that he had no doubt Pakistan was providing support.
As I saw it, after NATO’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, the only country capable of moving the chess pieces there was Pakistan. When I visited the country at the end of 2023, researching a book and delivering a letter to the Taliban ambassador, I sensed that the political calculation was slowly shifting. Over dinner with a Lahori businessperson, I was surprised to learn that this devout man supported the expulsion of Afghan nationals and refugees, his fellow Muslims, living in Pakistan.
Tensions between the two countries had been brewing since the fall of Kabul. Part of this stemmed from the Taliban’s decision to shelter the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), also known as the Pakistani Taliban, who continued to launch cross-border attacks into Pakistan. Pakistan demanded that the Taliban hand them over and, without irony, stop sheltering terrorists. The businessperson referred to an Urdu proverb: “Don’t be unfaithful to the one whose salt you’ve eaten.” His words were echoed by an old friend close to the Pakistani military, who told me recently that Pakistan had helped Afghanistan with money and extensive resources for decades — albeit in pursuit of its own national interests — but all Pakistan had received in return was ingratitude.
Yet the growing animosity had not led to any overtures toward the Afghan opposition. At the time, Hassan Abbas, author of “The Return of the Taliban,” told me that the Pakistani authorities still believed they had enough influence over the Taliban through the Haqqani network — an old faction they had patronized since the Afghan jihad against the Soviet Union. But according to insiders, the Haqqanis had since been marginalized. Pakistan no longer had an “in” with the Taliban. The movement was now pursuing an independent foreign policy, courting the likes of Iran and, alarmingly, India.
Meanwhile, the TTP had grown bolder. Alarming videos emerged of the group patrolling and setting up checkpoints on the outskirts of Peshawar, a major Pakistani city. More worrying still, the Afghan Taliban adopted a neutral stance during the brief war between Pakistan and India that followed the Pahalgam attack in May. That neutrality was a red line. Pakistan had been attacked by ultranationalist India, and Baloch insurgents were causing havoc in the west, and yet Taliban leaders — Pakistan’s proteges and coreligionists — had refused to voice support for their longtime backers.
A contact within the Pakistani military told me that the Rubicon was crossed when the Taliban’s foreign minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi, visited Delhi and was photographed alongside his Indian counterpart, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, on Oct. 10. Muttaqi even went so far as to describe India as a “close friend.” India, in turn, upgraded its technical mission in Kabul to a full embassy, with a view to “further augmenting India’s contribution to Afghanistan’s comprehensive development.” That same week, Pakistani and Afghan forces had exchanged heavy fire along the border, resulting in civilian casualties on both sides. Only Turkish intervention was able to broker a ceasefire.
Muttaqi sharing a stage with his Indian counterpart was seen as going against Pakistan’s security doctrines. To Islamabad, if Muttaqi forges close relations with its nemesis, India, that would amount to military encirclement. Geographically, Pakistan is a narrow strip of land that India could overrun with sheer force of numbers. It lacks strategic depth. In such a scenario, Pakistani military planners have long assumed that they would fall back into Afghanistan to regroup and retake the country. This consideration, so central to Pakistan’s security doctrine, means that it requires a friendly government in Kabul aligned with its strategic interests. Any deviation in Kabul risks making Pakistan reconsider its options. With the Taliban cultivating closer ties with India, sources tell me that Islamabad is already planning regime change.
In some ways, the Taliban’s behavior was predictable. Zia Saraj, the former head of Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security, told me in 2023 that he had some “frank conversations” with his Pakistani counterpart, Faiz Hameed, before the Taliban takeover, telling him that Pakistan would pay the price for Kabul’s fall. He said that it was in Pakistan’s best interests to support the tottering Ghani government because today the “terrorists are fighting us, tomorrow they will be fighting against you. And if you see the TTP today, the ISI [Pakistan’s intelligence agency] is seeing that problem we had in those days.”
In the eyes of the Taliban, Pakistan would always be the “na-Pak army” — a play on the word “pak,” which in common parlance means ritually pure for prayer, with “na-Pak” being its opposite. The implication is that Pakistan’s leaders and military were bad Muslims, if not godless. Saraj had outlined several reasons for this deep mistrust. First, the Taliban would never accept the Durand Line, the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, as legitimate. To them, these are Pashtun tribal heartlands that cannot be divided. They also could not forget the repeated incursions of the Pakistani army into North Waziristan, which began with the devastating 2014 Zarb-e-Azb campaign. While Pakistan viewed the campaign as an effort to flush out foreign and local jihadi militants from the semiautonomous region, the Taliban, whose members had family ties there, saw it as Pakistan carrying out then-President Barack Obama’s orders, further souring the relationship. Those incursions by the Pakistani army into the tribal Pashtun heartlands continue to this day.
Second, the Taliban would never forgive the fact that many of its members, including its founding figure Mullah Zaeef, had been captured, tortured and rendered to Guantanamo Bay, where they suffered humiliation at the hands of the Americans. They regarded Pakistan as complicit in these betrayals, even if Islamabad had been in an impossible position. Pakistan had broken a fundamental rule that, from the Taliban’s perspective, violated both Sharia and the Pashtunwali code: One does not hand over a guest to the enemy. In line with this code, it should be remembered that Mullah Omar, revered by the Taliban, was willing to endure U.S. bombing rather than hand over Osama bin Laden.
Third, unlike the former republic, the Taliban emirate would shelter the TTP, while the TTP, emboldened by the Taliban’s success, would increase their border incursions and demand that Pakistan become an Islamic state implementing its version of Sharia.
And so, while the Taliban may have eaten the Pakistani salt, it harbored a lasting grudge against its patron. The Taliban were never mere clients or “younger brothers,” as Pakistan had imagined them; they had their own agency and ideas about the direction Afghanistan was going to take. And they kept the TTP as their ace card, a weapon to be deployed against Pakistan should relations deteriorate.
But Pakistan also kept its options open. A source close to the ISI told me that even as Ghani’s government collapsed under the Taliban onslaught, Hameed, the former Pakistani spy chief, secretly met Massoud in a Gulf country to discuss the possibility of an inclusive government in Afghanistan.
Today, the Taliban can send thousands of TTP suicide bombers into Pakistan or cooperate with India-backed Baloch insurgents to cause havoc within its borders. Pakistan, in turn, possesses both the military capacity and the intelligence network to target Taliban leaders and shift the political balance in Afghanistan. It could eliminate the Taliban leadership one by one; after all, it has studied them for decades.
But removing the Taliban would create a power vacuum and trigger a new wave of refugees returning to Pakistan amid the civil war that would likely follow. This means that opposition figures must be ready to step in — and that is precisely where the current maneuvering begins. It is no surprise, then, that Pakistan hosted several Afghan opposition members this October. Figures such as Zia and Massoud have suddenly become politically relevant again. Sources tell me that Islamabad has opened channels of dialogue with opposition representatives. Yet while discussions may be underway, NRF spokesperson Abdullah Khanjani told me that they remain “cautious” because the “Pakistani establishment consistently seeks to manage and contain the opposition.” Though, of course, “the enemy of our enemy can be our friend.” Any engagement with Pakistan, he said, must align with Afghanistan’s national interests, and there has to be a shift in Pakistan’s mentality. It needs to become a partner “for peace and stability,” he added. Association with Islamabad is a double-edged sword: Many of these same opposition leaders have long accused the Taliban of being a Pakistani tool, and they are acutely aware of how damaging an agreement could be. They don’t want to be seen as “another project for the ISI.” But Nasir Andisha, permanent representative of Afghanistan to the United Nations, and a figure said to be close to the NRF, told me that “the risk for the NRF is worth taking.”
By all accounts, recent Taliban-Pakistan peace talks in Istanbul ended in failure. For there to be a rapprochement between the two, the Taliban would have to realign their foreign policy to Pakistan and abandon the TTP. That seems like a big ask from the Taliban and highly unlikely to happen.
This means that if Pakistan decides to throw its weight and experience behind the opposition, it could transform the fortunes of both Massoud’s NRF and Zia’s Afghan Freedom Front overnight. Their attacks would no doubt become more sophisticated and sustained. And with the right backing — not just a plush office in Islamabad but years of financial, political and military support akin to what the Taliban and the mujahedeen once received — both men could become serious contenders for power in Kabul. Yet even if that were to happen, a deeper question remains: Can Pakistan be certain that a new regime would not eventually assert its own independent foreign policy, as every Afghan government before it has done? And if not, would regime change simply restart the same destructive cycle of violence that has blighted Afghanistan for decades?
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