Neutrality Treaty Can Bring the Conflict to an End the Afghan-Pakistan Conflict By Wahab Raofi

 

Last week, Pakistan launched its deadliest strike on Afghan soil in months. Islamabad says it killed dozens of militants. Kabul says it killed civilians. Both are probably right, and both are certainly angrier.

The attack lands against a grim backdrop: Pakistan now leads the Global Terrorism Index as the country most impacted by terrorism, recording 1,139 deaths and 1,045 incidents in 2025 — its worst year since 2013. The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan drove that surge, carrying out five times as many attacks as the next most active group and increasing its operations by 24 percent over the past year, almost entirely in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa near the Afghan border. Islamabad accuses Kabul's Taliban government of sheltering the TTP; Kabul, in turn, demands that Pakistan finally recognize the Durand Line as a legitimate international border. Neither side is bluffing. Neither is budging.

But a decades-old pattern of proxy warfare does not require a new bilateral breakthrough — it requires a structural solution. A neutrality treaty for Afghanistan, modeled on Austria's 1955 State Treaty, offers one.

Why It Matters

The Pakistan-Afghanistan conflict isn't really a bilateral dispute — it's the latest expression of a structural pattern that has repeated for half a century. When Afghanistan aligns with one regional power, its rivals respond by arming its enemies. It happened when the Soviet-backed government took power after the 1978 Saur Revolution and the U.S. funded the Mujahideen in response. It happened again when President Hamid Karzai tilted Kabul toward New Delhi, and Pakistan responded by re-recruiting the Taliban leaders it had let go after 2001. Each time, the incentive is the same, and so is the outcome: proxy warfare, absorbed almost entirely by civilians.

The one period that broke this pattern is instructive. Under King Zaher Shah, Afghanistan pursued deliberate non-alignment — and its neighbors, with nothing to fear from it, had little reason to interfere. That equilibrium held until Zaher Shah's 1973 overthrow set off the chain of instability that has run, largely unbroken, to the present day.

Austria offers a template for restoring that kind of equilibrium deliberately rather than by accident. In 1955, the four postwar occupying powers — the U.S., Britain, France, and the Soviet Union — withdrew in exchange for one guarantee: permanent neutrality, written into Austria's constitution. It worked because it eliminated the one outcome every rival power feared most — Austria becoming someone else's asset. Afghanistan's neighbors today share that exact fear. India, Pakistan, Iran, China, and Russia all dread a rival-aligned Afghanistan. That shared fear isn't an obstacle to a settlement; it's the foundation for one.

Switzerland shows what such an arrangement can become with time. Swiss neutrality has held without a single violation through two World Wars — because it backed its pledge with universal conscription and fortified defenses, making invasion costly rather than merely undesirable. That is the second stage Afghanistan should build toward: a state that enforces its own neutrality rather than relying on paper guarantees alone.

Applied to the current conflict, this framework directly addresses Pakistan's core fear — that Afghan territory becomes a staging ground for India or other rivals — while giving Afghanistan security guarantees from multiple outside powers with a shared interest in upholding them. Crucially, it doesn't require trust between Kabul and Islamabad, which neither side currently has. It substitutes mutual self-interest for trust, which is a far more durable foundation for a treaty between adversaries.

The obvious objection: the Taliban is not Zaher Shah's monarchy, let alone postwar Austria's new republic, and it has given little reason for confidence that it could uphold a neutrality commitment. That objection is serious but not disqualifying. Austria's own neutrality was enforced collectively by its occupying powers in its early years, before Vienna could fully stand on its own.

The same collective-enforcement model could apply here — with co-guarantors bearing responsibility for the treaty's terms while Afghanistan builds, over years, toward Swiss-style self-sufficiency. China, Russia, and the United States all share an interest in preventing Afghan territory from becoming a proxy battlefield — and all have leverage over Kabul and Islamabad, from economic investment to security cooperation. India, too, would have an interest in upholding it — a neutral Afghanistan is preferable to a Pakistan-aligned one.

Most importantly, neutrality would give the Taliban something it currently lacks: a formal, internationally-backed identity that hinges on policing all militant groups equally, not selectively. If the Taliban wants legitimacy, border recognition, and relief from external interference, it must demonstrate that Afghan soil is not used to threaten any neighbor — including Pakistan. That transforms a weakness into an incentive. And incentives — not trust — are what change behavior.

The alternative is what's already failing: continued proxy warfare with no diplomatic off-ramp at all. A flawed treaty with real enforcement mechanisms is more durable than no treaty and no mechanism — and the cost of choosing neither is being paid in civilian lives right now.

Austria today lives in full sovereignty alongside the powers that once occupied it. Switzerland has lived in security for two centuries. Neither outcome was preordained; both required courage from parties with every reason to distrust one another. Afghanistan and Pakistan aren't there yet. But the framework exists, the precedent is documented, and the only open question is whether anyone with the power to act on it is willing to try.