Pakistan is Fighting the Militancy It Once Nurtured.

 

Pakistan Is Fighting the Militancy It Once Nurtured

Pakistan cannot bomb its way out of this crisis by killing Afghan civilians in the name of fighting the TTP. It needs to abandon its old approach of keeping Afghanistan under its thumb and adopt a citizen-to-citizen approach instead.

By Wahab Raofi

On Friday, September 18, 2026, worshippers gathered for prayers at a mosque inside the Old Police Lines in Kohat, in Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. A suicide bomber rammed an explosives-laden vehicle into the compound gate. Gunmen then stormed the site, and a second blast went off near the Special Branch building during the exchange of fire. At least 23 people were killed — including five police officers, eleven civilians, and seven of the attackers — and more than 50 were wounded. Security forces needed until the next morning to clear the compound.

The attack raised the familiar question: who is behind the violence? The answer is murkier than usual. Dawn reported that Ittehad-ul-Mujahideen Pakistan, an alliance formed in 2025 around Afghanistan-based commander Hafiz Gul Bahadur, claimed responsibility. Reuters, however, reported no immediate claim and said the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) denied involvement. The conflicting claims remain unresolved. But even the possibility that Gul Bahadur's network is responsible is telling: he was once counted among Pakistan's "good Taliban," a commander whose fighters were understood to focus on Afghanistan rather than the Pakistani state.

That history explains Pakistan's predicament. The TTP is not a simple Pakistani proxy; it has its own leadership, ideology, and grievances. But it did not emerge in a vacuum. For decades, Pakistan's security establishment cultivated and tolerated militant networks, sanctuaries, seminaries, and armed groups it believed could serve its strategic interests. Some eventually turned their weapons on Pakistan.

To understand how, go back to the 1980s, when Pakistan became the frontline state in the American-backed war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The United States and Saudi Arabia provided billions of dollars to the Afghan mujahideen, and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) served as the principal intermediary. Washington and Riyadh helped build the pipeline; Pakistan's generals built and kept the infrastructure on the ground, retaining it after the Soviets withdrew. In the 1990s, the ISI helped the Afghan Taliban emerge as a major force, supplying sanctuary, arms, funding, and recruits from Pakistani seminaries. Islamabad wanted a friendly government in Kabul and saw influence there as "strategic depth" against India.

After September 11, 2001, Pakistan joined the American-led war on terror, but elements of its establishment kept sheltering Afghan Taliban leaders and other militants. Washington accused Islamabad of playing a double game — using some militant groups as strategic assets while trying to prevent others from turning against the state. That distinction became harder and harder to maintain. In 2014, the Pakistani military launched Operation Zarb-e-Azb; that same year, militants attacked the Army Public School in Peshawar, killing more than 140 people, most of them children. The police officers and civilians killed in Kohat this month did not make the decisions of the 1980s and '90s. They are paying for them.

The scale of the current problem is stark. The 2026 Global Terrorism Index reported that 1,139 people were killed in terrorist attacks in Pakistan in 2025, across 1,045 recorded incidents — ranking Pakistan the country most affected by terrorism in the world.

Kabul is not blameless, either. The Afghan Taliban government bears its own share of responsibility. U.N. monitoring reports have repeatedly raised concerns about TTP fighters operating from Afghan soil. Pakistan says Kabul provides sanctuary to militants who then attack Pakistani territory; the Taliban government denies allowing its territory to be used that way. Islamabad has a legitimate security interest here — no government can simply absorb attacks launched from across its border.

But Pakistan's response deserves scrutiny too, and this is where the argument sharpens. Islamabad has carried out repeated airstrikes inside Afghanistan, and those strikes have killed Afghan civilians, not just militants. In March 2026, a Pakistani airstrike hit the Omid Addiction Treatment Hospital in Kabul; UNAMA reported the hospital was struck and that dozens of people were killed or injured. On September 21, 2026 — three days after Kohat — Pakistan carried out new airstrikes in eastern Afghanistan, saying it had targeted militants and killed 28 of them. Afghan authorities and the U.N. instead reported at least three civilians dead, including a child. Each round of strikes deepens the very cross-border distrust that lets militant sanctuaries persist. Military force can destroy a hideout; it cannot substitute for a political relationship between Islamabad and Kabul — and bombing Afghan civilians in the name of fighting the TTP does not make Pakistan safer. It hands the TTP and its offshoots a recruiting narrative and pushes Kabul further from any cooperation Pakistan actually needs.

The same principle applies to how Pakistan is treating Afghan refugees. Pakistan has every right to register and screen people entering its territory. But there is a real difference between identifying militants and treating an entire refugee population as a security threat. UNHCR reported that more than one million Afghans returned from Pakistan in 2025, many under mounting pressure, and warned of the humanitarian toll. A policy built around collective suspicion of Afghan civilians — rather than a citizen-to-citizen relationship between the two countries — corrodes exactly the goodwill Pakistan would need to get real cooperation against militants from ordinary Afghans and, eventually, from Kabul itself.

Ultimately, Pakistan has to confront the contradiction at the heart of its Afghan policy. It cannot demand that Kabul eliminate militants while still treating militancy as a strategic instrument to be turned on and off. The lesson of Gul Bahadur is blunt: a militant once judged useful can become an enemy. Once an armed group has its own organization, weapons, ideology, and funding, no government can assume it stays under control.

Pakistan needs a clean break from the old doctrine of sorting militants into "good" and "bad." That means leaning on diplomacy, trade, and border access to press Kabul toward verifiable action against groups operating from Afghan territory — and it means building a relationship with ordinary Afghans that isn't filtered entirely through security fears, mass deportations, and airstrikes. Military pressure may sometimes be necessary, but it cannot keep serving as a substitute for that diplomacy, or for treating Afghan civilians as people rather than as the price of hitting a militant target. The old doctrine of managing Afghanistan through proxies was supposed to make Pakistan safer. It didn't.

The TTP is not Pakistan's creation, and Kabul is not blameless. But Pakistan's history cannot be erased just because the militants it once tolerated now attack the Pakistani state itself. The lesson of Kohat is that a policy of sorting militants by strategic convenience carries a price, and that price keeps compounding. Pakistan can keep managing the consequences — striking across the border, expelling refugees, and burying its police officers. Or it can confront the deeper problem: a policy that spent forty years treating some militants as assets and others as enemies, and an approach to Afghanistan that still runs through domination rather than through its people. The victims in Kohat, including a four-year-old child, are casualties of a conflict Pakistan did not start alone and cannot end alone. It cannot end it while pretending it played no part — and it cannot end it by dropping bombs on the very civilians whose trust it will eventually need.