Pakistan-Afghanistan ties need issue-by-issue approach, not grand bargain

September 1, 2026 at 07:52 AM2 min

This digest was compiled by AI from multiple sources — links to the originals are below.

Pakistan and Afghanistan should untangle their multiple disputes through separate negotiating tracks rather than seeking a single comprehensive settlement, according to an analysis by News Central Asia. The piece argues that the failed October 2025 attempt to bundle security, trust, and normalization into one process led to war. It calls for building economic and humanitarian ties to create a peace constituency.

Key Facts

Pakistani airstrikes on Kabul, Kandahar, and other Afghan provinces in February 2026 killed hundreds of civilians and displaced over 100,000 people.
Bilateral trade, which exceeded $1 billion in the first half of the previous fiscal year, has fallen by roughly half.
Ceasefires during Eid al-Fitr in March, after talks in China in April, and briefly during Eid al-Adha in May each collapsed within weeks.
The October 2025 talks attempted to merge security, trust, and normalization into a single process with one outcome, and failed.

The Failure of the Grand Bargain

The October 2025 negotiations sought to combine security, confidence-building, and normalization into one process with a single outcome. When that attempt collapsed, relations had no option but to deteriorate. The most costly mistake of both sides over the past year was treating the situation as a single problem requiring a grand settlement or military solution before any other progress could be made.

The Case for Separate Tracks

Each disputed issue should be handled on a separate negotiating track with specialists chosen for that specific matter. Progress on one track should not be held hostage to failure on another. Pakistan and Afghanistan should deliberately build economic and humanitarian ties that create a public constituency for peace. The alternative of waiting for one big deal has already been tried and led to war.

Geography as a Constant

Afghanistan is landlocked but serves as a geographic bridge between Central and South Asia and part of the Middle East. Neither Islamabad nor Kabul can escape the fact that Pakistan and Afghanistan are geographically complementary. This geographic reality cannot be altered by negotiation or destroyed by bombing.