By Junaid S. Ahmad
Pakistan’s generals have rediscovered their favorite political reflex: when legitimacy collapses at home, bomb a frontier and call it doctrine. The latest war against Afghanistan is being sold, with familiar deadpan absurdity, as a campaign of precision, necessity, and national resolve. One almost has to admire the performance. A state that spent decades cultivating militant infrastructure now speaks in the clipped prose of counterterror professionalism, as though its past can be neutralized by a change in vocabulary. Since late February, the fighting has become the worst in years, with major cross-border strikes, repeated clashes, and more than 100,000 people displaced in Afghanistan alone.
The grotesque culmination, for now, is Kabul. Afghan officials say Pakistan’s latest strike hit a drug rehabilitation hospital in the capital, killing roughly 400 people and injuring around 250. Pakistan denies targeting civilians and insists it struck “military installations” and “terrorist support infrastructure” in Kabul and Nangarhar. That phrasing is a textbook example of modern statecraft. It is the language states use when they vaporize people first and classify them later. Even by regional standards, this is a grim accomplishment: to bomb a rehabilitation center and still speak as though one has merely updated a report.
What Rawalpindi cannot admit is that this war is less a strategy than a tantrum. Pakistan’s security establishment did not merely tolerate the Afghan Taliban; it helped midwife the political order it now denounces. The outrage today is not that Kabul is Islamist, brutal, or administratively deranged. Those qualities were never disqualifying. The real offense is sovereignty. The Taliban have refused the role Pakistan wrote for them: obedient proxy, grateful client, strategic furniture. Nothing enrages a patron quite like a former instrument developing a will of its own. The shift is stark: the sponsor now confronts its former ward as adversary.
Because Pakistan’s rulers cannot confront this failure, they translate it into something more familiar: a domestic security drama with Pashtuns cast as the usual suspects. This is not incidental. It is the old “War on Terror” script, reheated and presented to a public expected to applaud its own political diminishment. Pashtun regions are treated not as communities with memory and rights, but as expandable zones of punishment. The center falters in Kabul, and a village in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is expected to absorb the lesson. This is not counterterrorism. It is ethnicized state discipline.
The logic is as convenient as it is corrosive. Afghanistan resists subordination; therefore Pashtuns are suspect. The border frays; therefore Pashtun life must be tightened and monitored. Militancy persists; therefore civilians become administratively negotiable. It is governance reduced to classification. An entire population is turned into a category of risk so the state can avoid examining the risks embedded in its own policies.
Those policies now return as consequence. Attacks attributed to the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) have intensified within Pakistan, and Islamabad accuses Kabul of harboring those responsible. The charge may carry elements of truth. But its historical echo is unmistakable. For two decades, Afghan governments — backed by the United States — leveled the same accusation at Pakistan: that it sheltered the militants destabilizing Afghanistan. What was once dismissed as hostile narrative now returns as official grievance. The symmetry is not coincidence; it is the residue of a system that normalized ambiguity as policy and now confronts it as threat.
Diplomacy circles without resolution. Mediation flickers, ceasefires collapse, and civilian casualties accumulate. None of this alters the core reality: Pakistan’s establishment still believes force can repair a crisis produced by its own long investment in managed militancy. The premise endures even as its consequences deepen.
The most reactionary feature of this war is not only its brutality or recklessness, but what it reveals: a ruling elite incapable of learning. Every failed frontier adventure is repackaged as resolve. Every displaced family becomes collateral to a theory already discredited. The military continues to treat domination as intelligence and bombardment as analysis, expecting populations to forget who armed whom and to what end.
But the frontier remembers. Pashtuns remember. Afghanistan remembers. And that is what unsettles Pakistan’s rulers most. Not simply the loss of control, but the loss of narrative. Once people recognize that the language of security often masks impunity, the performance weakens. The uniforms still glitter, the briefings still thunder, the maps still glow — but the script has collapsed. What remains is a state bombing the consequences of its own illusions and calling the smoke sovereignty.
Prof. Junaid S. Ahmad teaches Law, Religion, and Global Politics and is the Director of the Center for the Study of Islam and Decolonization (CSID), Islamabad, Pakistan. He is a member of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST – https://just-international.org/), Movement for Liberation from Nakba (MLN – https://nakbaliberation.com/), and Saving Humanity and Planet Earth (SHAPE – https://www.theshapeproject.com/).
17 March 2026
Junaid S. Ahmad
Professor of Law, Religion, and Global Politics
Director, Center for the Study of Islam and Decolonization (CSID)
Islamabad, Pakistan
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