Afghanistan’s Taliban Are Getting a Little Help From Their Pakistani Friends

As they promised, Afghanistan’s Taliban have been ramping up violent attacks in anticipation of the presidential election, taking place there in just over a week.

The latest incident, earlier today, left a young girl dead after gunmen and a suicide bomber stormed a guesthouse in Kabul — another round in a wave of violence that has escalated into almost daily attacks.

Recent weeks have also seen gun and suicide attacks at the hyper-secure Serena Hotel in Kabul, a police station in the eastern city of Jalalabad, and a market in Faryab province, which left more than 50 people dead last week alone, according to UN officials. Earlier this week, attacks rocked a bank in the eastern province of Kunar, a sporting event in Kunduz, and an election commission office in Kabul.

The Taliban — who have billed the election a “plot of the invaders” and promised to “use all force” to disrupt it — may not have the capabilities to fully derail the vote. But while some Afghans say they won’t be intimidated by the threats, the growing violence is scaring many away from the polls.

As if that weren’t enough, Pakistan’s own Taliban — a separate but sympathetic group — is next door. The Pakistani group have now said they are temporarily suspending their own attacks at home, to land an extra hand to their Afghan counterparts.

The timing of the alliance is convenient to both sides. It gives the Afghan Taliban the resources to prove they are still relevant by disrupting the vote there and comes during negotiations for a truce between the Pakistani Taliban and the Islamabad government, which had recently threatened a military operation against the Taliban in the North Waziristan region of Pakistan.

“We need to focus on Afghanistan,” a Pakistani Taliban commander told Reuters. “It is a very crucial time for us and if the North Waziristan operation goes ahead we will lose many of our fighters.”

In the video below, released last year by the Pakistani Taliban, members of the group threaten to kill former President Pervez Musharraf.

Video uploaded by the Pakistani Taliban was widely circulated on Jihadi forums.

It's win-win-win, for the Taliban, on both sides of the border, and for the Pakistani government — at least for the time being. The ones on the losing side of the deal, however, are the Afghan people and government, who will likely see even more violence in the days ahead.

The alliance is hardly the first of its kind, as the Pakistani and Afghan Taliban are ideologically aligned and closely connected. More recently, the groups have put up a united front against the US-led military surge in Afghanistan.

“It’s not the first time they have joined hands, the Afghan Taliban have very close ties with the Pakistani Taliban,” Ahmad Majidyar, a security analyst focusing on the two countries, told VICE News. “The only difference now is that the potential ceasefire between the Pakistani Taliban and Islamabad will give the Pakistani Taliban more space and more time to focus inside Afghanistan, to increase violence ahead of the election.”

Militants stormed a guesthouse in the latest fatal attacks in Kabul. Read more here.

The fragile ceasefire deal, which was reportedly encouraged by the Afghan Taliban and Haqqani network, another militant group, gives the Pakistani government a temporary breather from fighting its own Taliban insurgency.

“Pakistan right now wants to just diffuse tension on its own soil, and try to divert the Pakistani Taliban attention to Afghanistan, but this is not a lasting solution,” Majidyar said, adding that the militants have historically failed to honor those agreements. “Their primary goal is Pakistan, not Afghanistan. So even if they now focus more on Afghanistan, they will come back.”

The Pakistani army had recently launched a series of air strikes and promised a military operation to storm militant strongholds in the North Waziristan region.

The Obama administration has also carried out a drone campaign against fighters in both countries — making few friends on the ground and solidifying alliances against the West and its allies, most notably the Afghan government itself.

In a VICE documentary airing tonight on HBO, Suroosh Alvi investigates the effects of drone strikes in Pakistan, where extremism and militancy are only growing in the wake of Obama’s drone campaign.

“But now that a deal is being worked out, that military operation will be put off, and those safe havens and militant sanctuaries will continue to exist there,” Majidyar said. “The problem won’t be solved.”

A shaky ceasefire might not be the preferred option for large numbers of Pakistanis either, who have long hoped their government would be firmer with the militants there.

“In Pakistan there’s a huge anti-Taliban sentiment and anti-militant sentiment, because of everything we have gone through,” Faiysal AliKhan, a fellow at the New America foundation, told VICE News, referring to frequent attacks in his home country. “There was huge amount of support for this operation, in anticipation that it was going to be something good for Pakistan. It is the politicians who want to have these so-called talks.”

That worries some in Islamabad’s government who are looking beyond the short-term reprieve, as does the prospect of more collaboration between the two Taliban groups.

“The Pakistani Taliban will have a powerhouse behind them,” Pakistan’s Defense Minister Khawaja Asif told Reuters, referring to their Afghan allies.

There are also plenty of groups in Pakistan, including some splinter factions of the Taliban itself, who have no plans to adhere to a ceasefire they have always opposed. This was evidenced by a recent attack at an Islamabad court, which was rejected by the Pakistani Taliban but claimed by the formerly affiliated Ahrar ul Hind group.

That also holds true in Afghanistan, where a number of different groups may share affiliation and occasional alliances, but act independently of one another.

“The Taliban movement now is splintered, it’s a lose sort of faction, and becoming more and more fragmented, both in Pakistan and in Afghanistan,” AliKhan said, adding that smaller groups are increasingly led by very young commanders with little patience for central authority. “The leadership of these groups, they don’t even have that kind of sway across the whole organization.”

That’s enough to make any prospect of a real ceasefire seem unlikely.

“Dealing with one group does not mean that the other militant groups will adhere to that,” Majidyar said. “Dealing with one group does not mean that the others will stop the violence.”

The Taliban alliance, in the end, will likely just bring more violence, both in the short and the long term, on both sides of the border.

“For them to cross into Afghanistan, I think it will just destabilize [the situation] and make things worse on both ends,” AliKhan said.

Follow Alice Speri on Twitter: @alicesperi