Ashraf Ghani Went to GHQ, The Taliban Made GHQ Come to the Table

When history looks back at Afghanistan’s recent decades of leadership, one image will forever symbolize Ashraf Ghani’s legacy: a sitting Afghan president walking into the military headquarters of Pakistan,  not as an equal, but as a supplicant. In 2014, Ghani did the unthinkable for any head of state. He traveled to the heart of Pakistan’s military establishment, the GHQ in Rawalpindi, to plead with generals,  not diplomats, not elected officials, but the same men who had long treated Afghanistan as a pawn in their strategic games. It was a moment of national disgrace disguised as diplomacy.

Ghani’s desperate outreach to the Pakistani army epitomized his government’s dependence and weakness. Instead of asserting Afghanistan’s sovereignty, he knelt before the very institution that armed and financed the Taliban insurgency, believing naive gestures could change Pakistan’s long-entrenched policies. That visit did not yield peace, respect, or stability, only deeper humiliation and further loss of Afghan lives as cross-border violence escalated.

Fast forward to the present day, and the contrast could not be starker. Whatever one thinks of the Taliban, they have demonstrated a spine where Ghani bent and broke. Following recent skirmishes on the Afghan-Pakistan border, the Taliban government achieved three significant diplomatic victories that Ghani never could.

First, they forced Pakistan,  a nation long accustomed to dictating terms to Kabul,  to engage in dialogue on neutral ground in Qatar, not in Islamabad or Rawalpindi. This was not a token meeting; it was a symbolic reversal of roles, compelling Pakistan to recognize Afghanistan’s new political reality.

Second, the Taliban compelled Qatar to amend its official declaration, removing references to the border,  a term that has never been recognized by the Afghan people or by the Pashtuns living on both sides of the Durand Line. This was a subtle but powerful diplomatic win, reaffirming Afghanistan’s historical position that its territorial identity cannot be reduced to colonial demarcations.

Third, both sides agreed to continue diplomatic talks in a third country, Türkiye,  further cementing Afghanistan’s ability to negotiate on equal footing and outside Pakistan’s shadow.

These achievements, while still in their early stages, underscore a fundamental truth: Afghanistan commands respect only when it acts like a sovereign nation, not a client state. Under Ghani, the Afghan presidency was a puppet theater run by foreign donors and manipulated by Pakistani generals. Under the Taliban, for the first time in decades, Pakistan has found itself compelled to answer, not dictate.

Ashraf Ghani’s government spent years begging for legitimacy abroad while losing it at home. The Taliban, by contrast, have leveraged national pride and strategic pressure to secure diplomatic recognition abroad while maintaining internal authority. One can debate their ideology and governance, but their approach to Pakistan reflects a long-missing Afghan confidence — a readiness to meet adversaries as equals rather than inferiors.

In the end, history will judge Ashraf Ghani not as a reformer or intellectual, but as the man who carried Afghanistan’s dignity to Rawalpindi and left it there. The Taliban, for all their flaws, have at least picked it up again.

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