How Pakistan and Afghanistan became locked in cycles of intervention

The myth of instant hostility

Muzamil opens the episode by asking a simple question. Most Western narratives paint Afghanistan as Pakistan’s natural adversary since partition. The two countries are shown as forever locked in conflict, with Afghan governments perpetually interfering in Pakistani affairs. But Salman cuts through this stereotype. Afghanistan initially rejected Pakistan at partition, yes. But within two months it accepted Pakistan’s existence. The antagonism that followed was neither automatic nor irrational. It was rooted in concrete state interests and how two governments calculated their strategic advantage.

Salman explains that Afghanistan, like Pakistan, was navigating a post-colonial world. The country was moving toward constitutional monarchy, modernizing its institutions. The King was Zahir Shah. The Prime Minister was Shah Mahmood Khan. “They had a very famous figure in our Fata, which is very revered,” Muzamil says, referencing the Fakir of Ipi. What most histories gloss over is why Afghanistan moved against Pakistan so aggressively in 1950 and beyond.

The Durand Line and Pashtunistan

The root of tension was not personal animosity. It was the Durand Line, the border drawn by the British. Afghanistan refused to recognize it. Pakistani territory in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan, Afghan officials argued, had been traditionally Afghan lands. The claim evolved into the Pashtunistan movement, a demand to reclaim or create a separate state from Pakistani territory.

“Because the Durand Line didn’t accept it from that way,” Salman says, “because it was a tradition that after the partition, the British made a rule that the territories which they defined were inherited.” Afghanistan’s Prime Minister Shah Mahmood Khan used national radio as a propaganda weapon, pushing the Pashtunistan narrative into FATA and border regions. This was not incidental messaging. This was state strategy to destabilize Pakistan’s western frontier.

Muzamil notes that open military skirmishes followed. Border attacks, captured territory, retaliatory strikes. “They were very clear that they had to do what to do,” Salman says. “Their national radio was full propaganda.” From 1949 to 1953, the relationship deteriorated steadily.

Pakistan’s first response and the liberal left’s role

A turning point comes in 1974, years before the Soviet invasion. Pakistan, under Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, decided to respond with hard power. Muzamil, Salman, and we are talking about Pakistan’s first act of training Afghan mujahideens, sending them back to destabilize Afghanistan. “In 1974, this was the first lot,” Salman says. “Ahmed Shah Masood, Burhanuddin Rabani, and others came.” General Naseeruddin Babar and Colonel Imam ordered them trained and returned.

This detail is crucial because it reverses the standard Western narrative. Americans point to Soviet invasion as the moment Pakistan entered the Afghan game. But Pakistan had already entered. The real story involves Pakistan’s own security thinking, dating back to the Daud Khan coup and Afghanistan’s sponsorship of separatist movements.

But there is another overlooked layer. “The violence, the proxy violence was started by the liberal left,” Salman says. In 1975, the governor of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Hayat Sherpao, was assassinated by militants linked to Pakhtun Zalmey, the separatist group that Afghanistan was actively supporting. “It was Bhutto,” Salman emphasizes. “It was not Zia.” The crackdown that followed, the Hyderabad case, involved leftist and ethnic nationalist insurgents, not religious militants. “From ‘47, it was all liberal left, they were involved in target killing,” Salman argues.

When Afghanistan turned socialist

What transforms the relationship is the Saur Revolution of 1978. A Marxist coup inside Afghanistan’s military government topples Daud Khan. Within a year, three Afghan presidents are assassinated. First Daud. Then Nur Mohammad Aqawi. Finally Hafizullah Amin, overthrown when the Soviets land KGB commandos at the presidential palace and install Babrak Karmal.

“In 1978-79, three presidents were assassinated in Afghanistan,” Salman recounts. The chaos inside Kabul is now state-level violence. The new socialist government tries to impose Marxist policies on rural Afghanistan, where tradition and Islam run deep. Daud Khan, though a nationalist, had resisted this radicalization. His death means no moderate check remains.

Pakistan’s rational response to the invasion

When Muzamil asks whether Zia’s 1977 coup was driven by Afghanistan, Salman is careful. “It was more of a domestic element,” he says, but Afghanistan developments “definitely had an impact on our strategic thinking.” The geopolitical picture is wider. India is arming Afghan proxies through its KAO. The Soviets are encroaching on Central Asia, threatening the warm waters that have always been in Moscow’s sights. For Pakistan, the threat is not ideological. It is physical.

“When the Russians came in, the Russians came in the end of the war, it was so hard that refugees began to come to Pakistan,” Salman says. “Remember that. So when Pakistan started to come to Afghanistan, then Pakistan was called being a state again.” Pakistan was not trying to spread Islamic revolution. Pakistan was trying to survive. “Afghanistan’s experiment was in front of us. It was not Pakistan who experimented in Afghanistan,” Salman clarifies. The experiment belonged to the Soviets.

The warlord era and Taliban as order

After the Soviets withdraw in 1989, Afghanistan descends into civil war. The mujahideen factions that Pakistan and others had nurtured now turn on each other. Hizb-e-Islami under Gulbuddin Hekmatyar becomes dominant through sheer firepower and external support, not popular legitimacy. Kabul is shattered by rocket fire and warlord violence.

Into this chaos emerges the Taliban. Benazir’s government, with General Naseeruddin Babar’s initiative, allows and nurtures the Taliban’s rise. “When the Taliban started to nurture, then their rise began,” Salman says. But Taliban ideology is important to understand. They were not born as terrorists. They emerged as a response to chaos. “Their ideology was to bring order to the chaotic elements of Afghanistan,” Salman explains. In the 1990s, they were seen by many Afghans as a Robin Hood movement, rescuing people from warlord brutality.

The Taliban’s orthodox methods, imposed to restore order, were later read in the West as brutality. “Their ideology was rooted in the orthodox elements of religion,” Salman says. “When they were taking order, where they were finished with chaos, they imposed their orthodox mentality or ideology.”

The lesson Muzamil and listeners should carry away

By the episode’s end, Salman has walked through 74 years of bilateral history. Pakistan and Afghanistan are not enemies by accident. They are rivals by structure, caught in a cycle where each state pursues its interests, each intervention triggers a counter-intervention, and neither has found a way to break the pattern. Understanding this history is not about assigning blame. It is about seeing how statecraft, ideology, and geography combine to create the geopolitics that shape the region today.