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After the Taliban takeover in Kabul, Pakistan’s failed proxy strategy has turned inward, fuelling repression, displacement and war against Pashtuns.
By PROFESSOR JUNAID S. AHMAD
Pakistan’s military has always preferred its wars orderly: enemies legible, proxies pliable, violence narratively obedient. For decades, the western frontier complied. Militants were assets, Pashtuns were terrain, and Afghanistan was treated not as a polity but as strategic negative space — a hinterland to be shaped, managed, and periodically disciplined. What the generals never planned for — because they never do — is autonomy. Not from civilians, not from provinces, and certainly not from former clients expected to remain grateful, dependent, and silent.
What Rawalpindi now brands a security crisis is something far less dignified. It is the shock of lost control, disguised as resolve. A tantrum, armoured and aerial.
Pakistan’s long dependence on proxy power
The Taliban in Kabul were supposed to vindicate Pakistan’s long romance with proxy power: deferential, aligned, permanently conscious of who midwifed their rise. They were expected to outsource strategic imagination to Islamabad. Instead, they committed the unforgivable sin of client regimes everywhere. They behaved like a sovereign authority. Brutal, reactionary, and incompetent — yes — but independent. They refused instruction, rejected hierarchy, and declined the role scripted for them in Pakistan’s strategic theatre.
Nothing enrages a patron more than a proxy that stops asking permission.
When proxies refuse obedience
Pakistan’s hostility toward Kabul is therefore not about terrorism in the abstract. Terrorism has always been negotiable. Militancy, when useful, has always been tolerable. What is intolerable is insubordination. The Afghan Taliban’s real offence is not harbouring the Pakistani Taliban; it is refusing to accept that their political horizon should terminate in Rawalpindi. That refusal punctures the mythology of omnipotence on which Pakistan’s security state depends.
And so the gaze turns inward. Enter the Pashtuns — again.
From external failure to internal scapegoats
Every authoritarian system eventually exhausts explanation and reaches for scapegoats. Pakistan’s establishment has chosen the population it has always known how to manage with force. Pashtuns, long racialised as suspect and governed as exception, are recast as the connective tissue between Kabul’s defiance and domestic instability. A strategic failure is collapsed into an ethnic security problem, and the remedy remains reassuringly familiar: bombard, displace, sanitise the language, repeat.
The militarisation of Pashtun life
Military operations in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the former tribal districts are not counterterrorism in any meaningful sense. They are disciplinary performances. Villages are destroyed to restore hierarchy. Displacement is normalised as method. Civilian suffering is rendered administratively invisible through the antiseptic dialect of ‘kinetic actions’ and ‘area clearance’. Violence is not merely inflicted; it is processed.
Pashtuns understand this grammar fluently. They have lived under it for generations.
What has changed is not their exposure to repression, but their tolerance for its alibis.
Security language as a tool of domination
The Pakistani state prefers to pathologise Pashtun resistance as cultural reflex — atavistic militancy rather than political response. This fiction is convenient, because it absolves the centre of responsibility. The reality is more corrosive. Pashtun regions have been subjected to a rolling experiment in securitised governance: collective punishment, economic abandonment, enforced disappearances, and episodic devastation marketed as stability. Loyalty is demanded as tribute, never cultivated as consent.
Why Pashtun political consciousness threatens power
Yet political consciousness has evolved in ways the generals failed to anticipate. The appeal of Imran Khan in these regions is not sentimental; it is diagnostic. He opposed drone strikes when applauding them was elite consensus. He condemned military operations when silence was safer. He stated — without euphemism — that mass displacement is not counterterrorism, that bombing civilians manufactures militancy, and that dignity does not arrive by helicopter gunship.
This made him dangerous. Popularity among the governed is intolerable when it bypasses the governors.
The military’s resentment toward Pashtuns is therefore cumulative. It is anger at communities that refuse pacification through slogans. Anger at people who remember too much. Anger at a population that understands — perhaps more clearly than any other in Pakistan — that the language of security is often the vocabulary of domination. Pashtuns expose the limits of coercion. That exposure is intolerable.
Cross-border strikes and the politics of diversion
The standoff with Afghanistan intensifies this fury. Cross-border strikes are framed as self-defence, but function politically as diversion. They convert internal legitimacy deficits into external threat narratives. Each missile becomes a press release; each funeral, a footnote.
The Durand Line and Pakistan’s loss of leverage
Borders, however, are not abstractions in Pashtun life. They are colonial incisions cutting through kinship, commerce, and memory. The Durand Line has never been emotionally internalised by those who live across it, and successive Afghan regimes — monarchical, republican, Islamist — have treated it with studied ambiguity. The Taliban have not formally rejected the border, but they have refused to consecrate it. That ambiguity is deliberate, historical, and strategic.
Pakistan’s failure is not that Kabul questions the line. It is that Rawalpindi no longer has the leverage to enforce silence about it.
The Afghan Taliban no longer depend on Pakistani sanctuaries or sponsorship. They have alternatives: regional engagement, transactional diplomacy, calibrated flirtations with Pakistan’s rivals. This is not Taliban brilliance. It is Pakistani strategic exhaustion.
And exhaustion, when denied, curdles into aggression.
Counterterrorism as institutional inertia
The Pakistani Taliban become the perfect instrument in this choreography. Their attacks justify operations; their persistence validates escalation. Cause and consequence collapse into ritual. Bomb, declare success, displace civilians, neglect reconstruction, wait for militants to return, repeat. This is not counterinsurgency. It is institutional inertia armed with airpower.
The human cost is vast and deliberately obscured. Families freezing in displacement camps are not policy failures; they are inconveniences. Children killed by errant fire are not moral ruptures; they are statistical residue. Accountability is deferred indefinitely because acknowledging it would require admitting that the strategy itself is the pathology.
When frontier repression becomes national experience
What makes this moment volatile is that Pashtun grievance now intersects with national recognition. The repression unleashed after Imran Khan’s removal did not remain provincial. Punjab — long insulated from the full architecture of coercive governance — has begun to recognise familiar patterns: censorship, judicial farce, economic predation, intimidation dressed as order. What was once frontier experience is becoming national knowledge.
This convergence terrifies the establishment.
A Pashtun protest can be dismissed as peripheral. A national awakening cannot. The danger is not rebellion; it is translation. That Pashtun experience becomes legible to others. That the frontier is no longer treated as exception, but as forecast.
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Hence the escalation. More operations. Harder rhetoric. Louder threats.
But each escalation reveals not strength, but panic. Each miscalculated strike exposes strategic hollowness. Each displaced family becomes evidence — not of necessity, but of collapse.
Strategic depth as strategic humiliation
Strategic depth was meant to secure Pakistan’s future. Instead, it has produced strategic humiliation. The western frontier has become a mirror, reflecting decades of manipulation back at its authors.
And when a state begins to wage war on its own reflection, it is no longer defending sovereignty or order. It is staging a confession — armed, unrepentant, and increasingly desperate — that it has mistaken domination for durability, and force for foresight, and now lacks the imagination to do anything else.
Prof. Junaid S. Ahmad teaches Law, Religion, and Global Politics and is the Director of the Center for the Study of Islam and Decolonization (CSID), Islamabad, Pakistan. He is a member of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST), Movement for Liberation from Nakba (MLN), and Saving Humanity and Planet Earth (SHAPE).
