Pakistan’s ruinous trajectory is a cautionary tale for all

While trends in insurgency and terrorism across South Asia have been broadly encouraging, with dramatic declines in fatalities in most theatres, Pakistan stands out with its steadily worsening profile. In 2024, Pakistan alone accounted for 2,236 of South Asia’s 2,930 terrorism (76.3 per cent). By February 1, 2025, another 303 persons had been killed (all data from the South Asia Terrorism Portal).

Pakistan had experienced 12 straight years of high intensity domestic conflict (with more than a thousand fatalities each year), between 2006 and 2017, with a peak of 11,317 killed in 2009, but by 2019, fatalities had bottomed out at 365. Since 2020, however, the trajectory has reversed, with a steady rise in killings, as well as a variety of indices that suggest a consolidation of militant power.

In one of the most dramatic of recent incidents, on January 8, a band of Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) insurgents seized control of the whole of Zehri town in the Khuzdar District of Balochistan for almost eight hours, during which they stormed, occupied, ransacked and burned a Levies Force Thana, and burnt down several other government buildings.

The BLA cadres subsequently withdrew on a number of Levies’ vehicles, taking 29 Ak-47 rifles and 4,000 rounds of ammunition with them. There were 774 insurgency/terrorism-linked fatalities in Balochistan in 2024, and another 129 lives had been lost in the current year, by February 1.

Balochistan is not, however, the epicentre of armed violence in Pakistan—that distinction belongs to Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, which recorded 1,363 fatalities in 2024, up from 941 in 2023. The principal architect of this violence is a resurgent Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which has grown from strength to strength since the consolidation of the Afghan Taliban in Afghanistan, after the signing of the Doha Agreement in February 2020, and even further, after the Taliban’s return to power in Kabul on August 15, 2021.

This has been perhaps the gravest failure of Pakistan’s imagined strategy of securing ‘depth’ by installing a ‘proxy regime’ in Kabul. Decades of manipulation by Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) have created a deep hatred among the Taliban leadership, and this compounds the fundamental conflict between the two countries over the disputed legitimacy of the Durand Line, which successive regimes in Kabul have refused to recognise as the lawful border between the two countries.

Border clashes between Taliban and Pakistani are now routine, as Pakistan seeks to seal off the border with a fence and a network of forts and posts—contested at each stage by the Taliban. The Taliban has, moreover, taken a page out of the ISI’s playbook, covertly backing the TTP and Baloch insurgents, as well as other groups, to operate across the border into Pakistan, even as the Islamic State-Khorasan Province, finds sufficient spaces in the borderlands to strike on both sides.

TTP has an estimated current strength of over 6,500 fighting cadres, and these are swelling as a slew of other groups and factions combine with it. At least 56 terrorist formations have merged with TTP since July 2020, when this process commenced, 14 of them in 2024 alone. The group is motivated by the very ideology—extremist Islam—that Pakistan has long harnessed against its neighbours. In an evident blowback, TTP now seeks to overthrow the political order in Pakistan, to establish an Islamic Emirate of Pakistan, based on Sharia law.

Pakistan has, as a result of its support to terrorism and disruption, not a single friend in its immediate neighbourhood, other than China—border friction and mutual accusations of support to cross-border terrorism have destroyed relations with Afghanistan, Iran and India. The ‘all-weather friendship’, moreover, is also at risk as a result of the terrorist threat to China’s flagship China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) project, with both the Baloch and the Islamists targeting CPEC projects, infrastructure and workers.

Pakistan has, of course, survived multiple crises through its history—but the reality is that it has emerged weaker after each of these. Today, the country is struggling with uncertainty and chaos, politically and economically. Staggering debt and a sluggish economy, undermined further by strident Islamist extremism and a fractious politics, are creating challenges that the country’s traditional ‘crisis manager’—the Army—is finding increasingly difficult to contend with.

Crucially, the Army’s unchallenged sway and public credibility has suffered dramatically over the past years, with protestors violently confronting the Army on multiple occasions, particularly since the engineered collapse of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf government in 2022, and subsequent arrest of former Prime Minister Imran Khan. The Army’s habitual responses of brutal suppression are failing, even as dissension within military ranks becomes manifest.

Pakistan’s ruinous trajectory is a cautionary tale for states that exploit religious identity to construct the core of their political and national project. The blowback is now visible on all aspects of the life of the people—in the increasing role of religious bigotry and extremism, and in the collapse of education, of politics, of industry and of the economy.

Ajai Sahni

Executive Director, Institute for Conflict Management, South Asia Terrorism Portal

ajaisahni@gmail.com