Pakistan: Strategic failure in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has collapsed into ethnic security crisis

Islamabad, Feb 3 (SocialNews.XYZ) Pakistan's hostility towards Afghanistan is not about terrorism - as for Islamabad, terrorism has always remained negotiable - but the Taliban in Kabul acting like a sovereign authority - brutal, responsive, incompetent but independent, a report has highlighted. Taliban, it said, refused to take instruction, rejected hierarchy, and declined the role scripted for them in Pakistan’s strategic theatre.

The report in 'Counter Currents' stated that nothing makes a patron angry than a proxy that stops seeking permission.

"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," Junaid S Ahmed, Director of the Centre for the Study of Islam and Decolonization (CSID) in Islamabad, wrote in 'Counter Currents'.

"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," he added.

According to Ahmed, Pakistani authorities have considered Pashtuns as the population which it knows how to manage with force. Pashtuns, radicalised as suspect and governed as exception, are seen as the connective link between Afghanistan'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. Military operations in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the former tribal districts are not counterterrorism in any meaningful sense. They are disciplinary performances," he wrote.

Villages are destroyed to restore hierarchy, displacement is normalised as a method and suffering of people is invisible to authorities. Violence is not inflicted but processed and Pashtuns have lived under it for generations. The Pakistani state seeks to treat Pashtun resistance as cultural reflex instead of political response, according to the report.

This narrative is convenient as it absolves the centre of responsibility. However, the reality is different as Pashtun regions have faced securitised governance: collective punishment, economic abandonment, enforced disappearances, and episodic devastation marketed as stability. The military's anger towards Pashtuns is cumulative and the standoff with Afghanistan further increases the fury. Cross-border strikes are named self defence, however, they function politically as diversion.

"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 internalized 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," Ahmed opined in Counter Currents.

Source: IANS