More like the Kandahari Faction are trying to show it's importance through these stunts when the Haqqanis are the One Controlling Kabul and all the important Ministeries. Pakistan knows where to place the right card at the right time.
Important to flag this in the thread again. Members are letting their emotions get ahead of themselves and not analyzing things properly. There are various factions within the Taliban, some more pro/dependent on Pakistan and its patronage, some less. The Haqqanis have always been closer to Pakistan than the Kandaharis. The Taliban, whilst not some complete rag tag federation as some here would like to make out, is still not a professional army.
Should go full force and start hitting the Afghans, we will lose the support that we have in Pakistan. A lot of that support, as indicated above, is based on dependence on our patronage - which will become kryptonite if we have hostilities with Afghanistan. We will hand more power over to the Kandaharis and Mullah Baradar Group. Within these different groupings, the issue of the border is being used as an issue by which to vie for influence - we are more Afghan, more patriotic than the Haqqanis etc. An appeal to futile jingoism to present one group as having more legitimacy to rule than the other.
A lot of this is down to members having taken a somewhat naive approach to geopolitics: the Americans leave, the Taliban win, it's milk and honey for Pakistan. That was
never gonna be the case. At least, Afghanistan is now united under one major grouping, and not in perpetual civil war as always. The situation we have is that we have a guerilla army, in a country that was one of the poorest and least developed even before the invasion, in control of a vast amount of territory, in many places where it previously was persona non grata too (other ethnic areas). The vast majority of the Taliban are illiterate, possess no qualifications, and have no proper structure or organization.
You cannot compare the actions at Chaman in the same way as a fight across the IB against India. That's not being rosetinted and soft on the Afghans, it's recognizing the real politik. The Indians have a centralised command structure, which is a reflection of their polity, and the arms of that command structure will act on the intention (express via policy, posture, or even direct orders etc) of its polity/government. There is a direct link. Where an Indian battalion is more anti-Pakistan than its government, it will know it is restrained by the chain of command and subservient to it, and will not only not be able to break that chain of command but not want to (as in it wouldn't want to actively conspire to do so as it knows the consequences - military jail, getting thrown out of the army, etc). In Afghanistan, you do not have that. The local commanders have a large degree of autonomy, and their links to the central capital are through whichever group they're part of, not some unified central state that has collective disicipline across its different actors.
Pakistan has a good proxy in Afghanistan in the form of the Haqqanis and we do have huge influence - but we do not have a complete monopoly, and neither do the Haqqanis. That said, I think we need to understand what this creates: resentment. We can all say we've helped the Afghans in XYZ ways over the years, and we have, but all that has been in the service of our own national interest. Effectively, we have controlled or attempted to control Afghanistan and greatly interfered in its own affairs, including by preventing it following a truly 'independent' foreign policy, for our national security. You are bound to have resentful factions pop up when you do that. That said, it's important to distinguish this resentment: I don't think the Kandaharis, even with all their jingoistic Pashtun bluster, are anti-Pakistan in the same way India is. They're anti-India because they want Afghanistan to be independent of its influence and be able to chart its own course.
In a nutshell, we're Iran, Afghanistan is an undeveloped Iraq, the Haqqanis are the Popular Mobilisation Units, and the Kandaharis are Muqtada al-Sadr. That's what we were inheriting post-Americans and we should have been more clear about that in our minds. The game we need to play, and are seemingly playing in Afghanistan, is the same the Iranians have played over the last decade in Iraq: increase our influence, bolster our proxys, increase dependence on the State on us so even those against our influence are constrained somewhat by that dependence.
