A Breakthrough After A Breakdown: An update on the Taliban-Pakistan talks
They agree to continue the ceasefire, hold another round of talks, and establish a monitoring and verification mechanism
On 30 October 2025, the Taliban and Pakistani delegations, along with Türkiye and Qatar (as mediators), issued a joint statement following five days of talks in Istanbul from 25 to 30 October. They agreed on the following three points:
To continue the ceasefire agreed upon by the Taliban and Pakistan during the two-day talks in Doha from 18 to 19 October. The ceasefire, as I reported in my previous piece here, followed a series of intense cross-border clashes between the Taliban and the Pakistani military between 9 and 17 October. The clashes included air/drone strikes carried out by the Pakistani forces in Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, and other provinces.1
To hold “a Principal level meeting” in Istanbul on 6 November to discuss “[f]urther modalities of the implementation.” A Pakistani daily, Dawn, speculated that the principals would be the Taliban and Pakistani defense ministers who led their respective delegations in the first round of talks in Doha, Qatar.
To establish “a monitoring and verification mechanism that will ensure maintenance of peace” and impose a “penalty on the violating party.”
Both the Taliban and Pakistani officials confirmed the agreement. Pakistan’s Minister of Defense, Khawaja Muhammad Asif, reposted the statement from the Turkish foreign ministry’s X account. In a separate statement, the Taliban’s chief spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahed, said that just as the group “seeks good relations with other neighboring countries, it also desires positive ties with Pakistan and remains committed to relations based on mutual respect, non-interference in internal affairs, and not posing a threat to any side.” He described the Istanbul negotiations as “a complex process,” which concluded with an “agreement that both sides will meet again and discuss the remaining issues.”
A breakthrough after a breakdown
The breakthrough came a day after Pakistan’s Federal Minister of Information and Broadcasting reported a breakdown in the Istanbul negotiations. He blamed the “Taliban regime” for the collapse of the talks, claiming that Afghanistan was being used to threaten the integrity of Pakistan.
In a separate update on the Istanbul talks, he said that the process had pursued “a single-point agenda,” which was to seek action from the Afghan Taliban to prevent “terrorist organisations [Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan/TTP and Baluchistan Liberation Army]” from using Afghanistan’s soil as a training and logistic base and “jump-off point for terrorist activities in Pakistan.” He accused the Taliban delegation of continually “deviating from the core issue, evading the key point upon which the dialogue process was initiated.” He also claimed that the Taliban refused to give “assurances” or accept responsibility and instead “resorted to a blame game, deflection and ruses”. Resultantly, the talks failed to produce “any workable solution.”
Pakistan’s Minister of Defense, Khawaja Muhammad Asif, issued a threat to the Afghan Taliban. In a statement posted on X, he said that his country did not need to employ “its full arsenal to completely obliterate the Taliban regime and push them back to the caves for hiding.” He also said that if the Taliban wished, “the repeat of the scenes of their rout at Tora Bora with their tails between [their] legs would surely be a spectacle to watch for the people of the region.” This seems to refer to the reports that many Taliban leaders and Osama bin Laden took shelter in Tora Bora following the United States’ intervention in response to the 9/11 attacks.2
However, Suhail Shahin, the Taliban’s ambassador to Qatar and a member of their negotiation team, played down the news of a breakdown. He told the media that the talks needed another round to reach final results.
Meanwhile, on 30 October, the Pakistani military announced that they had killed a TTP leader, Amjad Mozahim — described as “a high value target” — along with three other TTP members in Bajaur District on the night of 29/30 October, while they were “trying to infiltrate through [the] Pakistan-Afghanistan border.” In a statement posted by the spokesperson for the Pakistani Armed Forces, Lieutenant General Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry, the military said that Amjad was “deputy/second to” TTP leader Noor Wali and the head of the group’s leadership council. According to the statement, Amjad was “highly wanted” by the law enforcement agencies, with the Pakistani government having set a bounty of 5 million Pakistani rupees (around $17634) on his head. The statement further claimed that Amjad “remained actively involved” in orchestrating “terrorist activities inside Pakistan while residing in Afghanistan.” The military used the incident as validation of their claim that the TTP was using Afghanistan as a safe haven, calling on the Afghan Taliban to take “concrete measures” to stop it.
A divorce between the Taliban and Pakistan remains unlikely, but the challenges in their relations are daunting. This is because Pakistan accuses India and the TTP of using Afghan soil to make Pakistan “bleed,” while the Taliban deny the presence of foreign terrorist groups in Afghanistan (see my previous piece here).
Below is a timeline of these cross-border attacks (see also my previous update here).
On 15 October (Wednesday), the Taliban and the Pakistani military engaged in heavy cross-border fighting in the Spin Boldak district of Kandahar. The Pakistani forces also carried out drone strikes in Kabul. According to the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), “at least 17 civilians were killed and 346 injured” on the Afghan side of the border in Spin Boldak. The two sides announced a temporary ceasefire, though they provided conflicting accounts of which side requested it.
On 11 October, the Taliban’s defense ministry said that their forces had carried out a “successful retaliatory operation” against “centers of Pakistani forces” along the border in response to the Pakistani military’s “repeated violation” of Afghanistan’s sovereignty and airstrikes on Afghanistan’s soil. The Taliban’s retaliation was in response to the 9 October airstrikes by the Pakistani military (see below). But Pakistan’s foreign ministry claimed that the country’s forces had repelled attacks conducted by the Afghan Taliban in conjunction with “Fitna-e-Khawarij” (a term Pakistan uses for Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan/TTP) and “Fitna-e-Hindustan” (Pakistan’s reference to Baluchistan Liberation Army (BLA).
On 9 October, Mujahed confirmed a blast in Kabul following media reports of airstrikes. The following day, on 10 October, the Taliban’s defence ministry formally accused Pakistan of breaching Afghanistan’s airspace by targeting “a civilian market” in the Margha area of Paktika province and violating the airspace over the capital, Kabul (see my previous pieces on these clashes here and here).
Pakistan’s defense minister Asif also said that “Afghanistan is definitely a graveyard, surely for its own people. Never a graveyard of empires but certainly a playground of empires you have been throughout history.” This seems to be a direct response to veiled threats by the Taliban officials and other Afghans against foreign aggression.