Pakistan’s Realism on Afghanistan Needs Global Backing

Four years after the Taliban’s return to power in Kabul, the world seems fatigued. Donor aid is drying up, media coverage has moved on, and multilateral efforts have lost steam. Yet for Pakistan, Afghanistan’s most impacted neighbor, disengagement is not an option. Speaking at the UN Security Council, Pakistan once again struck a tone of regional realism, calling for strategic, conditional engagement with the Taliban-led Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IAG). The world must understand that this is not naivety. It’s necessity.

Collapse Next Door: A Crisis Pakistan Cannot Ignore

The humanitarian collapse in Afghanistan is not abstract for Pakistan, it is playing out in real time across its western border. With over 28 million Afghans in need of humanitarian assistance (UNOCHA, 2023), and 6.3 million displaced, Pakistan has absorbed the second-order effects: cross-border smuggling, currency pressure, and refugee influx.

Already hosting over 1.7 million Afghan refugees, Pakistan has acted as a humanitarian lifeline, from food corridors to trade facilitation. It remains Afghanistan’s largest export market with the exports of $691M, to Pakistan in 2023, enabling a fragile economic artery to survive amid Western isolation and Iran’s deepening instability due to Israel-linked regional tensions.

Terrorism Knows No Borders

Pakistan’s statement to the UNSC rightly flagged the resurgent threat of terrorism, particularly from groups like the TTP, IS-K, and Al-Qaeda affiliates that exploit Afghanistan’s ungoverned spaces. According to a 2023 policy analysis by the Pakistan Journal of International Affairs (PJIA), cross-border attacks on Pakistani soil surged by 60% between 2021 and 2023. This is not just Pakistan’s security concern; it’s a regional time bomb that threatens Iran, Central Asia, and even Russia.

Diplomacy, Not Denial: Keeping Channels Open

Pakistan has yet again stressed the value of structured diplomatic engagement through employing various global platforms including contact with Taliban via Doha Process, the China-Afghanistan-Pakistan Trilateral Mechanism, through active participation in the OIC-led humanitarian trust and at UN.

This isn’t appeasement. It’s architecture, a scaffolding to prevent total state collapse, even if international recognition remains off the table. Pakistan has made it clear that engagement must be results-oriented: counterterrorism guarantees, inclusive governance, and progress on human rights.

Women’s Rights: The Islamic Argument for Inclusion

Playing its role once again as the most forbearing neighbor, Pakistan also reframed the issue of Afghan women’s rights not through Western liberalism, but via Islamic principles, highlighting its own system of women’s education, legal access, and political participation within a Muslim-majority, Sharia-compliant framework.

Drawing on its own pluralistic and Sharia-compliant institutions, the statement urged Kabul to uphold education and employment for women within Islamic traditions, challenging the Taliban on their own moral turf.

The World’s Moral Fatigue Is Not a Policy

As Pakistan prepares for its June 30 deadline for repatriating undocumented Afghan nationals, the refugee crisis is again becoming a global failure framed as a national issue. Pakistan’s UNSC call has always been clear about Afghanistan, Pakistan cannot, and should not, bear this burden alone.

Global institutions and donor countries must move beyond performative concern. Security cooperation, humanitarian funding, and serious diplomatic engagement are overdue. As Dr. Fayyaz from the Centre for Clinical Social Work (2023) wrote, “abandonment of Afghanistan in the 1990s created a security vacuum that spiraled into global terror.” We are at risk of repeating that mistake.

A Final Word: Realism, Not Retreat

The statement strongly proves that Pakistan has no illusions about the Taliban. But it does not have the luxury of pretending Afghanistan doesn’t exist. It is doing now what the global community should have done years ago and that is engaging pragmatically, conditioning firmly, and acting responsibly. If the world wants to see a stable Afghanistan or even prevent another global security crisis, then it must stop viewing Pakistan as a staging ground, and start recognizing it as a stabilizer. The cost of silence will not be immediately paid in New York, London, or Brussels, it will be paid in Islamabad, Quetta, and Peshawar. And then eventually, everywhere else too.