fahmi-reza
Al Jazeera's Inside Story on Monday, 26 September 2026, turned its lens on a relationship that has repeatedly slipped from cooperation into confrontation: the one between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Presenter Adrian Finighan hosts a 27-minute discussion with a panel asked to explain a simple-sounding but persistently unresolved question — why does violence between the two neighbours keep coming back? The episode goes to air with Pakistan having carried out new strikes inside Afghan territory, and with no credible mechanism in place to stop the next round.
The core irony running through the episode is that Pakistan and Afghanistan were once allies before they became enemies. That reversal is recent in historical terms. In 2021, when the Taliban returned to power in Kabul after two decades of war, Islamabad publicly welcomed the outcome and framed it as a victory — a moment when the government in Pakistan appeared to have won a long-fought strategic prize. According to the episode's premise, however, relations have deteriorated markedly since then, transforming that early optimism into a security confrontation that now runs along the border and into Afghan airspace.
The immediate context for the discussion is a fresh escalation. Pakistan has carried out new strikes inside Afghanistan, continuing a pattern of air attacks and cross-border pressure that has become routine rather than exceptional. Al Jazeera's own recent coverage illustrates how tightly the two crises interlock: on 21 September 2026, Afghanistan said three people were killed in Pakistani air attacks; on 25 September, Pakistani forces killed Afghan Taliban fighters in a border escalation; and on 26 September, a suicide bombing in Pakistan's Dera Ismail Khan killed at least 12 people. The publication date of the Inside Story episode — the same day as the Dera Ismail Khan report — places the debate squarely in the middle of that cycle.
At the heart of the dispute is an accusation Pakistan has repeatedly directed at the Afghan government: that Kabul is harbouring the Pakistan Taliban, known as the TTP, along with other armed groups that have claimed responsibility for attacks inside Pakistani territory. Those attacks have included mass-casualty bombings such as the one in Dera Ismail Khan. Kabul has denied sheltering or backing those fighters, a denial that has done little to soften Islamabad's response. The disagreement is therefore not only about attacks that already happened, but about whether the Afghan government has any intention — or any ability — to act against militants operating from its soil.
That gap between accusation and denial is a central reason, the episode suggests, that attempts to stop the fighting have failed. Each side holds the other responsible; each side denies responsibility; and the resulting pressure produces retaliation, which produces the next round of pressure. Without an agreed mechanism for verification, prisoner exchanges, or de-escalation, the pattern restarts almost as soon as it pauses.
The panel assembled to examine this is deliberately weighted toward the two countries concerned. Syed Akhtar Ali Shah, a former inspector general of police in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province — the Pakistani province that shares a long frontier with Afghanistan — brings the perspective of a senior security official who has dealt with the policing and intelligence pressures generated by cross-border militancy. His background is significant because much of the violence attributed to the TTP has taken place in or near that frontier region, making local law-enforcement experience central to any discussion of how the cycle might be interrupted.
From the other side of the border comes Faiz Zaland, a professor of political science at Kabul University. His presence on the panel underscores that the dispute is not solely a security-operations question, but also one of governance, political legitimacy and state capacity in Afghanistan — what the government in Kabul can control, what it cannot, and how the Afghan public experiences pressure from its own military ally. The third voice, Michael Semple, a former EU representative in Afghanistan, adds the international diplomatic dimension, the vantage point of an outside actor that has spent years attempting to facilitate exactly the kind of de-escalation that has so far proved elusive.
The episode is framed around an open question rather than a tidy conclusion: what will be the fallout of this cycle of violence? Part of the fallout is already visible in the body count, with civilians reported killed in both Pakistani air attacks on Afghanistan and in a suicide bombing inside Pakistan, and with the two governments trading accusations while ordinary people on both sides absorb the consequences. Beyond the immediate toll, repeated strikes and retaliations deepen the distrust that made 2021's moment of seeming alignment possible in the first place.
That collapse of the 2021 rapprochement is the historical thread the panel is asked to pick up. Islamabad's early embrace of the Taliban government was presented as a triumph, but it did not resolve the underlying question of cross-border armed groups operating along the frontier. Once that question resurfaced — with attacks inside Pakistan attributed to militants based in Afghanistan — the strategic goodwill of 2021 gave way to coercion, and coercion has continued to escalate.
For viewers, Inside Story offers the panel's assessment of where that escalation may go next, and whether the repeated attempts to halt the fighting can succeed this time. The programme, published on 26 September 2026 and running 27 minutes and 18 seconds, sits within a broader line-up of recent Inside Story discussions on international conflicts and diplomatic crises, including episodes on Turkiye's military presence in northern Iraq, the renewed violence in Ethiopia, Greenland's strategic importance to the United States, Europe's response to hybrid warfare, and Saudi Arabia's approach to the Houthis. Against that wider backdrop, the Pakistan-Afghanistan question stands out as one of the region's most persistent — and, on the evidence of the past fortnight, most immediate.
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