The employment of military force as a bargaining tool, or the threat to use it, is an essential component of diplomacy and is now widely accepted as standard practice in statecraft. Coercive diplomacy, in particular, is a defensive strategy used to counter an opponent’s attempts to alter the status quo to their advantage. Pakistan has been trying to use coercive diplomacy to compel the Taliban regime to guarantee that the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which has been listed as a terrorist organization by both the United States and the United Nations for over a decade, does not use Afghan soil against it. So far, however, Pakistan’s coercive and diplomatic efforts have failed to yield a positive outcome, the current ceasefire mediated by Türkiye and Qatar notwithstanding.
While Pakistan has historically used coercive diplomacy against various regimes in Kabul, this latest episode began after the country experienced a sharp rise in militant attacks in recent months, largely claimed by the TTP. First were the strikes in Kabul in October, which were followed by skirmishes over the Durand Line and several more aerial attacks in Paktika, Khost, and Kunar provinces. While the Taliban blamed Pakistan for these attacks, Pakistan has denied responsibility. As a second coercive tool, Pakistan closed its transit routes with Afghanistan, on which Afghanistan relies heavily for its trade with India and the rest of the world. Pakistan further turned the screw by expelling around 241,000 Afghan refugees in November alone, including those who possess valid refugee documents, putting the total number of Afghan refugees expelled in 2025 by Pakistan at over one million.
Pakistan’s coercive diplomacy is shaped by its internal political and strategic considerations. However, the Taliban government’s continued refusal to strike a deal regarding the TTP’s activities and its persistence in labeling the TTP as Pakistan’s internal problem highlight the significant limitations of Pakistan’s coercive strategies. This article will therefore examine and assess Pakistan’s coercive diplomacy against the Taliban from a theoretical perspective.
Assessing Coercive Diplomacy
Scholars are torn on the effectiveness of coercive diplomacy. Many link the effectiveness of coercive threats to the coercer’s power, as does Todd Sechser. However, Peter Jakobsen counters this by noting that out of thirty-six coercive diplomacy cases from 1990 to 2008, only five resulted in lasting success. Other researchers believe that the success of coercive diplomacy hinges on the rationality of the demand. Understanding when and how coercive diplomacy succeeds remains a key issue in international relations.
In general terms, coercion succeeds when the expected pain of complying with a threat outweighs the anticipated benefits of resistance. However, there is little agreement on what counts as a successful outcome of coercive diplomacy in the first place. Bruce Jentleson and Christopher Whytock offer a methodology that classifies the variables necessary for successful coercive diplomacy into two categories: (1) the strategy of the coercer, i.e. whether the coercer effectively combines credible threats with skilled diplomacy and employs principles of proportionality with reciprocity and coercive credibility; and (2) the target state’s vulnerability, which is measured by the internal political and economic status of the target state. This includes, but is not limited to, the nature of the role of its elites and other pivotal actors. Jentleson and Whytock’s model can be used to examine the tactics employed by Pakistan, the coercive state, as well as the internal dynamics of the target state, Afghanistan.
“The Taliban government’s continued refusal to strike a deal regarding the TTP’s activities and its persistence in labeling the TTP as Pakistan’s internal problem highlight the significant limitations of Pakistan’s coercive strategies.”
Coercing State: Pakistan
The first variable used to evaluate the effectiveness of Pakistan’s coercive diplomacy is the proportionality between the ends and means. Based on Jentleson and Whytock’s criteria, the logic of the coercive diplomacy model posits that an adversary’s reluctance to comply intensifies with the scope of the demand. Thus, greater demands elevate the target’s compliance costs, compelling the coercer to scale up noncompliance penalties and compliance rewards proportionally, ensuring means align with objectives. In other words, the fewer the demands, the greater the chance of success.
Although Pakistan’s demands have been changing in intensity over time, two of its demands are that the Taliban expel the TTP from Afghanistan and that Taliban authorities address Pakistan’s security concerns by acting against the TTP militants, which Pakistan claims are based in Afghanistan, in Afghan territory. Pakistan also challenged the legitimacy of the Taliban government in the fall and winter of 2025, demanding a representative government, though this narrative was short-lived. In this situation, Pakistan’s demands impinge on the key affective and ideological ties between the Taliban and TTP, heavily upsetting the proportionality between demands and the likelihood of success. Therefore, the likelihood that the Taliban will meet these demands is low.
The second factor in this model is reciprocity, in which the target state compares the benefit of compliance with the cost of noncompliance. Reciprocity entails a clear, or at least implicitly shared, understanding that links the coercer’s incentives to the target’s concessions. But Pakistan’s demands are neither easy for the Taliban to meet, nor in their interest, because of the TTP’s shadow structures in many parts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and other parts of Pakistan; even if the Taliban wanted to rein in them, they might not have the bandwidth or capacity to do so. Therefore, the cost of Pakistan’s demands is higher than that which the Taliban can pay. More importantly, Pakistan’s regime change demand would mean the replacement of the Taliban regime. In other words, the target country must calculate whether the cost of compliance is worth the return—and no rational actor would strike such a bargain if the cost was their existence.
Coercive credibility is the third factor in the coercer’s strategy, involving how the coercer signals the genuine costs of defiance to build trust and convince the target that resistance is futile. In this case, Pakistan’s cross-border strikes on alleged TTP sanctuaries in Afghanistan, carried out during severe domestic turmoil, sparked controversy over civilian harm and fears of backlash, which has limited Islamabad’s appetite for further escalation. Similarly, Pakistan has backed away from its announcement of repatriating the Afghan refugees multiple times in the past, repeatedly delaying it in waves between 2023 and 2025 due to legal and humanitarian pressures. Pakistan has also repeatedly sealed its borders to Afghan goods in the last decade, inflicting severe economic losses on Afghan traders each time—only for trade to be reopened again. Taken all together, these irregularities have eroded Pakistan’s coercive credibility in Afghanistan’s perception; that TTP attacks in Pakistan intensified in November 2025, following the air strikes in Afghanistan, indicates that the Taliban perceive Islamabad’s threats more as inconsistent bluffs than as credible threats.
Target State: Afghanistan
The second set of Jentleson’s and Whytock’s variables applies to the target country. One of those variables is the target’s capacity, specifically the Taliban’s political and economic capacity to withstand the economic toll of military action, sanctions, and other pressures relative to the gains from trade and incentives. These costs are shaped by the economy’s resilience and adaptability.
Based on their recent moves internally and in the region, it seems that the Taliban are ready to take the risk. In November 2025, Taliban Deputy Prime Minister Mullah Biradar asked Afghan traders to not import any goods from Pakistan and wrap up their business deals within three months. While the closure of the transit routes does pose serious political and economic costs on the Taliban, with many believing that border closure is not beneficial to traders on either side, the Taliban are seeking to mitigate those losses through alternative trade routes, including the Chabahar International Transport and Transit Corridor, in which India has invested heavily, and rapidly expanding northern routes to Central Asia, including Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and the Caspian region. The Taliban believe that these routes will end Afghanistan’s dependency on Pakistan for transit in the long term. That Pakistan appears to have reversed course on the transit routes, publicly gesturing that it is ready to facilitate the delivery of United Nations food supplies to Afghanistan and allowing the re-export of Afghan transit cargo that had been stuck at its ports, has perhaps borne out that risk acceptance.
The Taliban government have also been able to absorb the repatriation of the millions of refugees from Pakistan as well as other countries in the region. Despite their own limited resources, the Taliban have established a specialized commission for refugees, helping them with transportation to their home provinces and providing them with basic commodities. While conditions within the country remain extraordinarily difficult, the Taliban have demonstrated a deep resilience to the costs of noncompliance, and do not appear to be making any concessions to Pakistan.
“Pakistan’s coercive diplomacy is doomed to fail due to the imbalance between the cost and return of the demands, Pakistan’s diminished credibility as a coercing actor, and the Taliban’s capacity to accept the risks of noncompliance.”
Looking Ahead
Based on Jentleson’s and Whytock’s model of coercive diplomacy, we can conclude that Pakistan’s coercive diplomacy is doomed to fail due to the imbalance between the cost and return of the demands, Pakistan’s diminished credibility as a coercing actor, and the Taliban’s capacity to accept the risks of noncompliance.
Perhaps as a result of the failure of Pakistan’s latest coercive diplomatic episode, Pakistani officials’ demands of Afghanistan have in fact changed: they no longer talk about “regime change” in Kabul. In a momentous turn of events, Tahir Andrabi, spokesperson for Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, proclaimed that the Afghan people possess the sovereign prerogative to select whatsoever government they deem fit, and that Pakistan remains poised to collaborate with the prevailing administration in Kabul. Pakistan and Afghanistan have also agreed to establish a 13-member joint committee comprising business leaders from both sides to conduct formal discussions on reopening the border, further undercutting one of Pakistan’s key coercive tactics.
Pakistan’s about-face might be informed by the negative domestic reverberations of its coercive tactics, including economic losses due to the border closure and international condemnation for the alleged civilian casualties of the strikes in Afghanistan. Nonetheless, its failure to compel the Taliban to comply with its security demands leaves Islamabad in a precarious position. Short-term declines in TTP attacks remain possible but likely fleeting, with violence poised to accelerate over the medium and long term. Moreover, this failure constrains Pakistan’s options in the case of future spikes in violence.
In the meantime, the Taliban’s original contention that the TTP constitutes an internal quandary for Pakistan alone remains unchanged. So, as Zabihullah Mujahid once averred, Pakistan may have no choice but to “safeguard its own security.”
Views expressed are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the positions of South Asian Voices, the Stimson Center, or our supporters.
Also Read: Pakistan’s Future with the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan
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Image 1: MoFA Qatar via X
Image 2: Asmatafridi787 via Wikimedia Commons
