Pakistan’s role as an incubator and launchpad for global jihad has come at a steep cost—but one that its military appears happy to pay.
Thursday, August 14, is Pakistan’s Independence Day, marking 78 years since the territory gained independence from the British Empire in 1947. In an odd coincidence, the following day is the fourth anniversary of the Taliban’s conquest of Afghanistan, with decisive support from Islamabad. On these two anniversaries, a sober assessment of Pakistan’s regional legacy is warranted.
Pakistan has long been accused of tolerating terrorist activity within its borders—undermining regional stability and nurturing global jihadist networks. For decades, Islamabad’s security establishment, particularly its politically untouchable military and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), has leveraged extremist proxies as a weapon against India and a tool for influence in Afghanistan. As part of this strategy, Islamabad has extended steady patronage, as well as a territorial safe haven, to a litany of jihadist terror groups—notably including the Taliban, but also anti-India organizations such as Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed.
This strategy reaped enormous rewards in 2021, when the Taliban took advantage of America’s departure from Afghanistan to once again seize power. In the aftermath of the chaotic collapse of the internationally recognized Afghan government and the fall of Kabul, billions of dollars of advanced American weapons and equipment have seeped into militant black markets, and ultimately into the hands of terrorists across the region.
Pakistan’s Islamist Strategy
Pakistan’s reliance on Islamist militias as tools of state policy goes back many decades. After suffering a string of conventional military defeats in its periodic wars with India, Pakistan’s leadership shifted its strategy to asymmetric warfare as a way to level the playing field. This shift crystallized into what became known as the doctrine of “bleeding India with a thousand cuts.” First articulated in the wake of Pakistan’s defeat in the humiliating 1971 war, this doctrine gained full momentum under military dictator Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq in the 1980s. Rather than confronting India face to face, this doctrine involved using insurgents to wage a slow and relentless campaign of attrition—keeping New Delhi off balance by inflicting damage under the radar of conventional war, and imposing a constant cost on India’s security and stability.
Zia and the ISI operationalized this concept in a variety of ways. Under the ISI’s leadership, Islamabad first organized and armed Sikh separatists in Indian Punjab during the 1980s. But by the end of the decade, as the Soviet war in Afghanistan drew to a close, it increasingly channeled hardcore Islamist militants searching for their next battle into Indian-administered Kashmir, with instructions to wage war against the Hindu apostates. To support these efforts, Pakistan built a sprawling terror infrastructure, including training camps, arms pipelines, and ideological indoctrination influenced by the Afghanistan jihad to fuel militancy in Kashmir and India proper.
Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, Pakistan-backed outfits carried out bombings, massacres, and assassinations inside India. In 2008, Lashkar-e-Taiba gunmen massacred 174 people in Mumbai, even as their handlers in Pakistan directed the assault in real time. In 2019, a Jaish-e-Mohammed suicide bomber in Pulwama killed 40 Indian security personnel, pushing both countries to the brink of a full-blown war. Most recently, the 2025 terror attack in Pahalgam led to a four-day war that drew to a close after American mediation.
Islamabad officially denies sponsoring terrorism, but the evidence—ranging from captured infiltrators to intercepted communications—is overwhelming that these groups are armed and abetted by Pakistan’s security apparatus.
Pakistan’s Double Game in the “War on Terror”
This patronage of Islamist militancy has not been limited to India’s borders. To influence Afghanistan’s politics and foreign policy, Islamabad midwifed the Taliban into existence in the mid-1990s, intending to use it as a tool to exert its influence in Afghanistan. According to contemporary reports, Pakistani officials viewed the Taliban as a “strategic asset” to secure “strategic depth” against India and ensure a compliant government in Kabul.
After the Taliban successfully captured the country in 1996, Pakistan was one of three countries to recognize its government, along with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. In the post-2001 era, during its time in the wilderness, Islamabad helped to keep the group alive, providing its members with arms, training, and sanctuary.
Even after officially joining the US “War on Terror,” Pakistan played a double game, simultaneously strengthening the Taliban and other jihadist elements while also presenting itself as an indispensable partner against terrorism. A 2010 cache of US military reports released by WikiLeaks, and published by The New York Times, revealed that although Islamabad received more than $1 billion per year from the United States to fight against Islamist militants, it allowed ISI representatives to meet directly with Taliban leaders to coordinate militant groups targeting American soldiers.
Over the course of the War on Terror, the United States grew increasingly frustrated with Pakistan’s duplicity. In 2009, US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates confirmed that a range of disparate terror groups, including Al Qaeda, the Taliban, the Haqqani network, the “Hezb-i-Islami” of notorious warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and other minor factions—many of which had opposed each other in the past—had all been brought on-side by the ISI and were “working together” in safe havens across Pakistan. By 2011, he had openly accused Pakistan of playing “both sides” in the war. Similarly, in 2011, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen bluntly informed Congress that Pakistan’s military was “choosing to use violent extremism as an instrument of policy.”
Though the United States continued its partnership with Pakistan—largely out of concerns that the problem could grow worse if their relationship turned openly antagonistic—Islamabad’s support for extremism led Afghanistan’s pre-2021 government to strengthen its ties to New Delhi instead. In short order, India became Afghanistan’s key development partner and trusted medical corridor. Hundreds of thousands of Afghans who could afford to travel flew to India each year for medical treatment, tourism, and education. At the same time, the Indian government built the Afghan Parliament, several trade routes, and the Salma Friendship Dam. Between 2001 and 2021, India committed billions of dollars across over 500 projects in Afghanistan, making it the fifth-largest bilateral aid donor to Afghanistan’s reconstruction.
Pakistan also became a safe haven for top global terrorists. Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden infamously lived for years in a compound in Abbottabad, down the street from Pakistan’s premier military academy, until American forces tracked him down and killed him in 2011. Bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, may have enjoyed shelter inside the country throughout the 20-year war; it was only after he reportedly left the safety of Pakistan and returned to Afghanistan that US intelligence targeted him in a drone strike in mid-2022. Under immense American pressure, Islamabad did help capture a handful of Al Qaeda operatives—notably September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in 2003—but the broader pattern was one of tolerance and clandestine hospitality to jihadists, so long as their violence was directed outward.
The Jihadists Have Come for Pakistan, Too
Pakistan’s role as an incubator and launchpad for global jihad has come at a domestic cost. As then-US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton prophetically warned Islamabad in 2011, “You can’t keep snakes in your backyard and expect them only to bite your neighbors.” Indeed, Pakistan’s dalliance with jihadists produced fierce blowback in the form of the Pakistani Taliban (TTP) insurgency, which has killed thousands inside Pakistan. Yet despite that pain, the security establishment clung to its other “snakes”—the Afghan Taliban, the Haqqanis, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and Jaish-e-Mohammed—it considered useful against foreign foes.
Pakistan persists with this strategy to the present day, in spite of its high human cost, because it continues to serve the generals’ calculus. Low-level proxy warfare and terrorism offer Islamabad plausible deniability, keeping India’s security forces occupied at a low cost to Pakistan—even as it ruins Islamabad’s international reputation. Backing jihadist groups also plays a role in domestic politics; it gives the army continued primacy in Pakistan’s political system, allowing it to market itself to conservative Pakistani Muslims as the “defender of Islam” and, in theory, keeping would-be homegrown jihadists focused on attacking other governments instead of attempting to overthrow their own.
Now that Afghanistan has fallen to the Taliban, it is unclear how much longer this logic will hold. Pakistan’s tolerance of jihadism has created a fertile ecosystem for all militants, including anti-Pakistani ones. Indeed, it is an open question whether the Taliban of Afghanistan is friendlier to its longtime patron in Islamabad or its spiritual comrades-in-arms in the TTP. There can be no question that their victory in 2021 supercharged the TTP, whose campaign of violence within Pakistan has reached epidemic proportions. Islamabad’s pleas to the Afghan Taliban for help against TTP have gone largely unheeded—a grim irony, given Pakistan’s long support for the Taliban in pursuit of “strategic depth” against external enemies.
Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the Arms Trade
Since the Taliban’s August 2021 takeover, a second-order threat has emerged. The US and NATO weapons left in Afghanistan have supercharged global jihadist networks. The collapsed Afghan army’s stocks, worth an estimated $7 billion, included tens of thousands of M4 rifles and machine guns, night vision goggles, drones, armored vehicles, and even some aircraft. After August 2021, these weapons rapidly found their way into black markets around the world, mainly through the Taliban. According to a BBC report, half of the weapons that America left in Afghanistan can no longer be accounted for—most of these having been sold to terrorists and criminal groups around the world. Similarly, per the UN, Al Qaeda affiliates, including Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, and Yemen’s Ansar Allah movement—better known as the Houthis—have all accessed Taliban-captured weapons or bought them on the black market.
Taliban commanders, flush with excess inventory and badly in need of cash from any available source, sell weapons through networks that span Pakistan’s frontiers. This deliberately permissive ecosystem includes porous borders, middlemen, and arms bazaars like Dara Adamkhel—all of which allow terrorist groups to buy weapons openly. From these bazaars, guns flow to wherever demand exists; by relying on brokers and cash markets rather than direct transfers, the pipeline becomes extremely difficult to trace.
All this means, in effect, that Pakistan is the fulcrum through which the Taliban’s “spoils of war” reach terror outfits near and far. Notably, the beneficiaries of this arrangement are not always friendly toward Islamabad. For instance, the TTP and Balochi separatist groups are able to acquire weapons in the same manner, for use against the nation that helped transfer them.
Pakistan Must Not Escape Punishment
Despite overwhelming evidence that the Pakistani government has systematically sponsored and sheltered terrorist groups, it has never been held to account. The furthest the international community has gone is placing Pakistan on the FATF “grey list” from June 2018 to October 2022. Had any other country acted with such impunity, it would likely have faced far more serious consequences.
During his first administration, President Donald Trump blasted Pakistan, saying, “The United States has foolishly given Pakistan more than $33 billion in aid over the last 15 years, and they have given us nothing but lies and deceit.” His administration also canceled aid to Pakistan over its record on militants. Now, in his second administration, Trump’s approach has changed. Last month, he touted a trade deal and wrote: “We have just concluded a deal with Pakistan to develop their massive oil reserves… Who knows, maybe they’ll be selling oil to India someday!”
In today’s world, interests and economics matter, but not at the cost of leaving a global sponsor of jihad untouched. Pakistan’s oil deal must not be allowed to launder its record of terror sponsorship. A stricter approach must raise the costs of continuing to harbor and export jihadism. Pakistan’s military must come to feel that its reckless and destabilizing adventurism has penalties.
Short of a politically difficult “state sponsor of terrorism” designation, the United States and the Western world should intensify diplomatic and economic pressure, targeted sanctions on Pakistani officials tied to terror financing, travel bans on leaders involved in promoting terrorism, and support for India’s self-defense measures against Pakistan-based threats.
This is not collective punishment of Pakistanis. The Pakistani people are victims of their government’s policies, not least because they, rather than the army, are the overwhelming victims of the terror groups that the government has created. Sanctions measures are instead a badly-needed course correction aimed at the state machinery that treats terrorism as policy. Until that machinery is dismantled, the cost of Pakistan’s proxy war must keep rising.
About the Author: Natiq Malikzada
Natiq Malikzada is a journalist and human rights advocate from Afghanistan. He holds an MA in International Relations and an LLM in International Human Rights Law from the University of Essex, which he attended as a Chevening Scholar. Since 2013, he has focused on countering religious extremism and promoting democracy and pluralism. In 2020, he co-founded Better Afghanistan, an organization dedicated to fighting extremism, supporting education, documenting human rights violations, and empowering civil society. The organization also provides a platform for Afghan women’s rights activists to mobilize, engage in dialogue, and advocate for freedom and justice under increasingly repressive conditions.
Image: Mirko Kuzmanovic / Shutterstock.
