The ISKP operates as a branch of the terror group Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which was later rebranded as the Islamic State, and aims to contribute in the formation of a worldwide Islamic Caliphate by creating a province in regions of South and Central Asia, which it refers to as ‘Khorasan’.
It accuses the Afghan Taliban of engaging with ‘unbeliever’ states like China, Russia and India, and having abandoned the implementation of Shari’a in Afghanistan, thereby threatening the investments of foreign countries inside Afghanistan.
Several evidences have emerged in recent years, indicating at linkages between Pakistan’s Inter-services Intelligence (ISI) and the ISKP.
Apparently, by supporting ISKP in its rivalry with the Taliban and the TTP for ideological supremacy, Pakistan intends to keep these two militant organisations bogged down in a conflict and maintain the status quo of volatility inside Afghanistan to capitalise on by portraying itself as a reliable partner in the region due to the influence it holds over the various militant organisations in the region.
In March 2022, Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost, a founding member of the ISKP, surrendered to the Afghan Taliban, and gave several interviews and public speeches after that, providing an insider account of the financial and logistical aspects of the ISKP’s formation.
According to Dost’s version of events, officers in the Pakistan Army and the ISI, together with or through Lashkar-e-Taiba, provided financial support for Hafiz Saeed Khan, the first Emir of the ISKP, for the formation of Daesh’s Khorasan Province. Among the Pakistani military officials he named were Major Amir, Colonel Arif and Brigadier Ashfaq.
According to Dost, ISI’s motive behind providing the financial and material aid to the creation of ISKP was to ensure that Taliban is not able to stabilize its regime in Afghanistan.
However, it is important to mention here that Afghan Taliban uses Dost as a way to convey its propaganda against Pakistan which affects the credence of Dost’s remarks despite his high-level position in the ISKP before he defected.
That said, before the Afghan Taliban took over Afghanistan, the US-backed Afghan government had also accused Pakistan’s ISI of propping up the ISKP to foment trouble inside Afghanistan.
In April 2020, the National Directorate of Security (NDS) of the erstwhile Islamic Republic of Afghanistan had arrested Abdullah Orokzai, also popularly known as Aslam Farooqi, who was the fourth chief of ISKP, together with 19 other high-ranking members of the ISKP including its military operations chief, Qari Zahid (Maaz) and the Recruitment officer for Afghanistan’s Nangarhar provice, Saifullah (Abu Talha Pakistani).
Following this arrest, the NDS stated that during his interrogation Farooqi confessed of having “close relations” with Pakistan-based state-sponsored terror outfits like the Haqqani network and the LeT, as well as of having links with “regional intelligence agencies” which was a standard euphemism used by the US-backed Afghan government for Pakistan’s ISI.2
Taliban’s Faultlines With China, Pakistan And The Islamic State Could Provide The United States With The Potential Entry Points In Afghanistan
The United States can easily supplant China’s financial investments inside Afghanistan, and provide Taliban an opportunity to play the balancing act between Beijing and Washington, in return for a low-profile and very limited military presence inside Afghanistan which the Taliban regime could provide a plausible justification to its Afghan citizens for.
For instance, if China has been reluctant to invest in the Wakhan corridor, the US can offer to create a transit route along the corridor that connects Tajikistan to Pakistan and serve as an alternative for the Central Asian countries to reach the Arabian Sea via Pakistan’s ports without needing to cross the Chinese border.
Also, being away from the population centers where most insurgencies take place, the Wakhan route can provide a more secure transit as compared to other transit points of Afghanistan.
Furthermore, one must also take a look at the events unfolding currently in Iran, wherein under the garb of human rights concerns the US under the Trump administration has threatened a significant military action against the Iranian regime with the aim of subordinating it to the American interest in the West Asian (or the Middle East) region.
So, let us also consider a scenario wherein the US and Iran reach a tacit agreement to facilitate a Central Asia-Afghanistan-Iran link, then this would allow Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan to move goods to the global ocean without transiting through Chinese territory or using the CPEC infrastructure, thereby preventing Central Asia from being completely absorbed into the Chinese economic sphere.
It would allow the Taliban to earn toll-based revenue on all goods moving across the length of the nation and make Iran a southern gateway for the EurAsian region, also bringing in massive transit fees for the Iranian regime.
That said, it is also important to exercise caution while assessing the prospects of such an endgame because developing a viable transit route along the Wakhan corridor will take nothing short of an engineering marvel. It is like building a road on the rooftop of the world.
In terms of funding, the development of the Wakhan route may demand blank cheque investment from the US and would probably never outperform the established routes in terms of volume or cost-efficiency because of the sheer hostility of the terrain.
Wakhan can provide, though, a transit route that is immune to any political or diplomatic crises such as in the case of border crossings along the routes traversing Pakistan, access to which are often closed by Islamabad during times of political disputes. Instead, as a knock-on effect, a Wakhan transit route may put the pressure on Pakistan and China both to maintain the access to the routes via their territories throughout the year.
In addition to that the US can also threaten to freeze its financial aid or the IMF package to Pakistan, to ensure that traffic through Wakhan into Pakistan is never throttled for political reasons. The coercion from the US will be needed to ensure this because even Islamabad as discussed earlier, would like the Wakhan to remain as a buffer for security reasons as well as due to the prospect of losing its leverage over the main Torkham/Chaman border crossings.
However, for all this to work, the US must be able to maintain a permanent military presence to gatekeep the transit route along the Wakhan corridor because such a US funded high-tech transit route will amount to the infrastructure that China and Pakistan want for their CPEC initiative, and allegedly even tried to militarily acquire this corridor for developing it in early 2022, as discussed earlier.
Also, depending upon the scope of the military presence that the US is able to negotiate for itself in Afghanistan, it can even have the option to nudge the regional countries into utilising the US-backed north-south route going via Wakhan up to Iran’s Chabahar port.
Now, in quid pro quo terms, development of the Wakhan corridor as well as the commitment to make it work commercially should be enough for Taliban to acquiesce to the US’ request for a military presence in Afghanistan, however, it is important to bear in mind that even if the Taliban leadership is willing to do so, it will create legitimacy issues for its regime in the country.
So, the framing of the reasons as to why the US is being allowed a military presence inside Afghanistan must be one that is plausible in Afghan context. The only one that the Author can think of is cooperation against the threat from the ISKP.
Both the United States and Taliban have been at the receiving end of Pakistan’s longstanding strategy of using terrorist proxies to further its geo-strategic objectives.
The ISKP represents a danger to global security because of its ability to utilize safe havens and digital platforms for disseminating its extremist ideology, attract followers, and incite lone-wolf terrorist attacks, and therefore Pakistan’s strategy of instrumentalising the ISKP for its own purposes despite the latter’s global anti-state ambitions carries immense risk of transforming the ISKP into a global terrorist threat.3
The terrorist attack in New Orleans in January 2025 by a lone-wolf attacker who claimed to have been inspired by ISIS is a proof of that. Also, before that, in October 2024, the US Department of Justice (DoJ) announced charges against an Afghan national affiliated with the Islamic State who was plotting to “commit a violent attack in the name of ISIS on U.S. soil on Election Day.”
As for the Afghan Taliban, its insistence on upholding its Pashtun identity while aligning with the Afghan nationalist sentiments goes against the ISKP’s ideology that advocates for a global caliphate based on a rigid Salafi doctrine, which is evident from the ISKP’s attacks in Afghanistan, with almost 75 percent of them targeting the Afghan Taliban leadership since 2022.4
That said, the US has far greater leverage than Taliban to reign in Pakistan if not completely prevent it from fomenting trouble inside Afghanistan.
For instance, Pakistan arrested the ISKP commander Mohammad Sharifullah, who is the alleged co-conspirator in the 2021 Kabul airport attacker, and extradited him to the US in March 2025. Now, Sharifullah is indeed a prominent operative and handing him over to the US enabled Islamabad to portray itself as a reliable counter-terrorism partner while allowing hundreds of other ISKP militants to operate in Balochistan unchecked, as the Pakistani security apparatus selectively targets Baloch separatist fighters.5
And, there appears to be a genuine realisation of this reality within the US administration, based on the remarks of the former US Ambassador to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad in April 2025, only a month after Sharifullah’s handover to the US, wherein he insinuated that the ISKP could be enjoying safe haven in Pakistan with the blessings of the country’s military establishment.
To substantiate his assertion, Khalilzad cited the remarks made by Pakistan’s Defense Minister Khawaja Asif in an interview, wherein he admitted that Pakistan had supported militant outfits for decades, together with an alleged incident in March 2025 in which Baloch nationalist fighters reportedly attacked an ISIS training camp in Mastund district of Balochistan.
“According to reports, around 30 ISIS fighters, including nationals from Turkey, India, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, were killed, and the camp was destroyed,” Khalilzad said in the comments posted on the social media platform, ‘X’
He further said that if these reports were accurate, it would be difficult to believe that Pakistan’s military was unaware of the camp’s existence.
“If Pakistan is serious about stamping out terrorism on their soil, they must address these issues head-on,” Khalilzad said. “By now, everyone should have learned that playing with terrorism for tactical purposes is a disastrous ploy that inevitably backfires very, very badly.”
So, overall, the point is that the only way the Trump administration can negotiate a comprehensive military cooperation arrangement with the Taliban, such as a jointly operated large military facility like the Bagram Air Base, is by promising tangible returns to the Taliban regime for its cooperation with the United States and being mindful of the domestic challenges that the regime could face if indeed such an outcome materializes.
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