OpEd: Pakistan’s Crisis Is at Home, Not in Kabul

OpEd: Pakistan’s Crisis Is at Home, Not in Kabul

OpEd: Pakistan’s Crisis Is at Home, Not in Kabul najibullah.lalzoy Tue, 07/14/2026 - 14:39 Author Dawood Safi Opinion Pakistan can strike Afghanistan, close the border and intensify military operations. But it cannot bomb its way out of a political and legitimacy crisis at home. Pakistan fenced the border, closed the crossings and bombed targets inside Afghanistan. The insurgency inside Pakistan continued. That is the contradiction Islamabad’s security establishment has yet to confront. Pakistan can demonstrate military reach across the Durand Line, pressure Kabul, restrict trade and deport Afghans. But none of these measures explains why militant violence inside Pakistan keeps regenerating after years of operations, surveillance and emergency laws. Pakistan has genuine security concerns. Armed groups have killed civilians, police officers and soldiers, and Kabul should not permit Afghan territory to be used against neighbouring states. But sanctuary is only part of the picture. It cannot explain the persistence, geographic concentration and political resilience of militancy within Pakistan itself. The numbers expose the failure of the current diagnosis. The Pakistan Institute for Conflict and Security Studies recorded 1,066 militant attacks in 2025, the highest annual total since 2014 and 17 percent more than the previous year. Security-force actions rose 63 percent to 482 operations, and 2,138 militants were reported killed — more than double the previous year — yet attacks still increased. Most violence remained concentrated in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan. Pakistan is applying more force without producing more security. Military action can disrupt networks and prevent attacks. But force cannot perform the work of political legitimacy. An airstrike can destroy a compound; it cannot convince an alienated community that the state represents it. A checkpoint can control movement; it cannot restore confidence in courts, police or elected institutions. A military operation can clear territory temporarily; it cannot resolve generational grievances. Pakistan’s crisis is therefore not simply across the fence. It lies in a political order that has repeatedly placed military authority above civilian politics and treated dissent in peripheral regions as a security problem. Elected leaders are constrained or imprisoned, civilian institutions operate within military-defined limits, and opposition is too often managed through courts, detention and coercion rather than negotiation. In Pashtun areas, communities have experienced militant brutality and state coercion at the same time. The Pashtun Tahafuz Movement emerged as a peaceful campaign demanding accountability for extrajudicial killings, information about missing people, removal of landmines and an end to collective suspicion. The state’s response was largely securitisation. The movement was banned and activists repeatedly detained. Ali Wazir, despite serving in parliament, has faced repeated cases linked to his activism. When peaceful politics is treated as subversion, the state weakens the very alternative to militancy it claims to need. Balochistan reveals the same contradiction more starkly. The province supplies gas, minerals and strategic value to the federation, yet many communities remain poor, politically marginalised and excluded from decisions over their own resources. Enforced disappearances have become part of the province’s political memory. Pakistan’s own Commission of Inquiry recorded 125 new cases in the first half of 2025, while rights groups warned that many more were never formally registered. The life sentence imposed on Baloch rights activist Mahrang Baloch on June 22 captures the danger of this approach. While the matter is framed as legal by the provincial government, the political message will travel far beyond the courtroom. Mahrang became prominent because she gave peaceful expression to the anguish of families searching for disappeared relatives. A life sentence against such a figure tells many young Baloch that peaceful mobilisation leads not to dialogue, but to imprisonment. A state cannot repeatedly close peaceful political channels and then treat the growth of violent resistance as an entirely foreign invention. This is how a legitimacy crisis becomes a security crisis. Peaceful grievances are securitised. Political space contracts. Alienation deepens. Armed groups exploit the anger. Their violence then justifies further repression, expanding the military’s role while leaving the original grievance unresolved. Afghanistan is useful within this cycle because it offers an external explanation. Islamabad can point to cross-border networks, demand action from Kabul and present each new military operation as defence against an imported threat. The external dimension is real. But it becomes convenient when used as the complete explanation for a crisis with deep domestic roots. It shifts scrutiny away from governance, unequal development, disappearances and the failure to accommodate peaceful dissent. The latest escalation illustrates the cost. Pakistan says its strikes in Afghanistan destroyed militant camps and killed large numbers of fighters. Yet in the publicly available record since October 2025, no named senior TTP commander has been independently confirmed killed. Islamabad’s broader battlefield claims remain unverified. What independent monitors have documented more clearly is civilian harm: UNAMA recorded 372 Afghan civilians killed and 397 injured in cross-border violence during the first quarter of 2026, with airstrikes accounting for most casualties. Yet militant attacks inside Pakistan continued. Bombing Kabul and Kandahar did not resolve Pakistan’s strategic problem at home. Closing border crossings, weaponising trade routes and forcibly deporting millions of Afghans neither ended the insurgency inside Pakistan nor forced the Taliban to capitulate. Nor did these measures rebuild public trust in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa or Balochistan. The campaign demonstrated Pakistan’s military reach, but also the failure of its diagnosis. From Kabul, the miscalculation is difficult to miss. Pakistan expects pressure on Afghanistan to compensate for political deficits inside Pakistan. But a neighbour cannot supply legitimacy that a state has failed to build among its own citizens. Militants may still move across sections of the heavily fenced and monitored Durand Line, and both sides should do more to prevent such movement. Islamabad, however, cannot use this external dimension as an excuse to avoid domestic reform. That means restoring meaningful civilian authority, protecting peaceful political organisation, investigating disappearances, ending collective punishment and treating Pashtun and Baloch demands as political questions rather than foreign conspiracies. Pakistan may continue bombing Afghanistan to project strength and distract its own public from the failures of its security doctrine. But as long as militancy draws strength from alienation within Pakistan, the insurgency will continue. Hence, the centre of the crisis is not Kabul. It is the widening distance between the Pakistani state and many of its own citizens. About the author: Dawood Safi is a Kabul-based Afghan researcher, Fulbright scholar, and founder of the Afghanistan Bridging Initiative. He leads research and policy work on governance, youth, conflict, and Afghanistan–Pakistan relations. His work combines ground-level insight from Afghanistan with policy-oriented analysis of regional security and political developments.