Inter-Services Intelligence activities in Afghanistan

Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan's principal intelligence and covert action agency, has historically conducted a number of clandestine operations in its western neighbor, Afghanistan. ISI's covert support to militant jihadist insurgent groups in Afghanistan, the Pashtun-dominated former Federally Administered Tribal Areas, and Kashmir has earned it a reputation as the primary progenitor of many South Asian jihadist groups.

The first publicly-known ISI operation in Afghanistan occurred in 1975, in response to a limited border conflict between the two nations. ISI's operations in Afghanistan grew exponentially in response to the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, with backing from Saudi Arabia and the United States' Operation Cyclone. Islamist militant mujahideen groups fighting the communist Afghan government and its later defenders, the Soviet Union, were funded, trained, and equipped by ISI and successfully forced the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan and the overthrow of the Soviet-backed communist government of Afghanistan. The previously allied, ISI-supported mujahideen groups began to compete for power, initiating three successive civil wars (1989–1992, 1992–1996, and 1996–2001). When Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hezb-e Islami, ISI's preferred mujahideen group, showed little promise of seizing Kabul and lost popular support through a bloody shelling of the city, ISI sought a new group to establish an Afghan government friendly to Pakistan's interests.

After the Taliban demonstrated it could clear routes for Pakistani land trade in the 1994 capture of Spin Boldak through Kandahar City, the ISI dropped support for Hekmatyar's Hezb-e Islami and shifted its focus to the Taliban. Through ISI, Pakistan armed, equipped, and supplied young fighters to the movement from jihadist Deobandi religious schools (madrassas) in the relatively ungoverned Pashtun tribal areas of Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province. ISI continued to support the Taliban through its 1996 capture of Kabul and declaration of the Taliban's Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. From 1996 to late 2001, Pakistan backed the Taliban in its war against the remaining allied mujahideen groups in the country's north, united under the banner of the Northern Alliance (United Front), led by Burhanuddin Rabbani and Ahmad Shah Massoud.

After the September 11th attacks against the United States by Osama bin Laden's Taliban-hosted and Afghanistan-based al-Qaeda, Pakistan publicly declared its support to the United States in their war against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and their Taliban hosts. Despite the public pledge of support, Pakistan was believed by international observers and the subsequent Afghan government to maintain its backing of the Taliban and, in the view of some, al-Qaeda.

Pakistan's motivation for covert activities in Afghanistan, since the cessation of hostilities between the two nations in the mid-1970s, has largely focused on supporting (Hezb-i Islami, Taliban) or opposing (PDPA, Soviet, Northern Alliance) various groups in an attempt to influence the Afghan government. This campaign to seat and preserve an Afghan government friendly to Pakistani interests (and opposed to Indian interests) has largely centered on support to groups ideologically aligned with Islamabad, typically Pashtun, socially conservative, political Islamist, and Deobandi (Sunni).