Pakistan’s interference in Afghanistan returns as regional challenge: Report
Islamabad: Pakistan treated Afghanistan like a satellite, intervening in every internal conflict and sponsoring factions in Kabul, assuming it could dictate outcomes, a report said on Friday.
It added that the Taliban, shaped by decades of struggle and rooted in tribal ethos, refused to accept subservience.
“From its earliest days, Pakistan’s military establishment treated Islamist militancy as a strategic commodity. Under US patronage during the Afghan war, Pakistan built and maintained an ecosystem of proxy militias, madrassas, and jihadi networks, believing they would always be controllable. Once the Soviets withdrew and US interest waned, Islamabad simply pivoted that same machinery inward, directing it against Kashmir, India, and domestic dissent,” a report in ‘Global Order’ detailed.
“The result was a slow but steady internal disintegration. Through these decades, the ‘deep state’ cloaked its ambitions behind the cover of strategic depth and regional power. Meanwhile, the Pakistani polity hollowed out: civil institutions weakened, dissent was crushed, and a culture of impunity flourished. It is no surprise that today, the monster planted abroad has returned home,” it added.
The report stressed that Pakistan’s external misadventures may have been its original sin, but its tolerance for internal insurgency now serves as the final reckoning. The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), it said, has emerged with renewed vigour, bolstered by sanctuary in Afghanistan and Pakistan’s waning credibility in the region.
According to the report, the connection between the Afghan Taliban and TTP has complicated Islamabad’s stance. While Pakistan accuses Kabul of sheltering TTP cadres, the Taliban argue that they cannot or will not control the group.
“In border districts like Orakzai and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistani paramilitary and army units have sustained repeated ambushes and bombings attributed to the TTP. The insurgency is no longer confined to tribal margins, it is swelling into a full-blown internal crisis, exposing the central state’s impotence,” the report stated.
“So, Pakistan fights a two-front war: one with its former proteges in Kabul, and another with militants within its own territory. In many ways, the TTP embodied the ultimate backlash: the vacuum Pakistan created is now spilling back inwards,” it noted.
The report asserted that Pakistan is witnessing not merely a crisis but a reckoning, a convergence of consequences that the country’s establishment sowed decades ago. The border clash with the Taliban, the TTP’s resurgence, and protests in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir are features of the same rupture.
“Pakistan used terror as statecraft. Now the state is being consumed by terror. A failing economy, rampant corruption, hollow institutions, suppression of dissent, these were always unsustainable. The deep state chased strategic illusions while killing its own foundations,” the report highlighted.