In the early hours of March 18, the Pakistan Air Force conducted strikes on multiple targets in the Spera district of Khost province, and Barmal district of Paktika province, inside Afghanistan. The Foreign Office issued a press release stating that in addition to the outlawed Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), commanders of the Hafiz Gul Bahadur Network (HGB) were also the “prime targets” of these airstrikes.
The strikes were carried out after seven Pakistan Army soldiers, including two officers, were martyred in a terror attack in Mir Ali, North Waziristan tribal district, on March 16. On March 17, newly-elected Pakistani president Asif Zardari vowed to avenge these deaths, promising that “the blood of the martyrs would not go in vain”.
‘Radd-ul-Fasaad’ Plus?
Sources report that fighter jets as well as unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs or “armed drones”) were deployed in the March 18 strikes, which have yet to be given an operational codename like “Operation Marg Bar Sarmachar” of January 18, carried out in retaliation to Iranian attacks on Pakistani soil. Sources have claimed that, among others, the home of a TTP commander by the name of “Abdullah Shah Mehsud” was targeted in these strikes; the banned TTP released a video of said commander in an attempt to prove that he had survived the airstrikes. Afghan Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid has said that only eight people – five women and three children – died due to the Pakistani airstrikes.
Pakistan's transactional approach methodically ignored the symbiotic affiliations between the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban, which are now evident with the Afghan Taliban retaliating against Pakistan after the Pakistan Air Force struck TTP targets inside Afghanistan.
The Foreign Office (FO) asserted that since 2022, Pakistan had “repeatedly conveyed its serious concerns to the Interim Afghan Government over the presence of terror outfits including TTP inside Afghanistan” who “pose a grave threat to Pakistan’s security and have consistently used Afghan territory to launch terror attacks inside Pakistani territory”. However, the FO press release reiterated that it “accords prime importance to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Afghanistan” and “has great respect for the people of Afghanistan”, ostensibly to prevent any escalation of the ongoing asymmetric conflict with TTP and allied terrorist factions into a full-fledged confrontation with the Afghan Taliban.
Escalation by the Taliban
These diplomatic proclamations proved futile, as the Afghan Taliban attacked Pakistani checkposts on the Pak-Afghan border – also known as the “Durand Line”, which the Afghan Taliban call a “hypothetical” border – with heavy weapons during the afternoon of March 18. A statement from the Afghan interim ministry of defense noted that “Pakistani war and reconnaissance jets” had “once again” raided Afghan territory to carry out bombings: Pakistan has yet to officially confirm or deny whether it has conducted any airstrikes in Afghanistan prior to March 18. Zabihullah Mujahid told an international news media outlet that Taliban border forces in Paktia, Paktika and Khost provinces were “ordered to attack the Pakistani military”. By the evening, at least three Pakistani military officials were reported injured in the Afghan Taliban’s bombardment directed at the Pak-Afghan border from the Dand-e-Patan district of Afghanistan’s Paktia province. By nightfall, at least one Pakistan Army officer of the rank of captain was reportedly martyred in these clashes, while two other soldiers were injured, as per district police officer (DPO) Kurram tribal district, Mazhar Jahan.
The Pakistan Army, paramilitary and police forces are stuck in a reactive posture instead of a proactive one, mostly responding to terror attacks instead of actively rooting out terrorist cells and networks, thereby rendering them incapable of reversing the state's losses even in the kinetic domain.
On the diplomatic front, the Afghan interim ministry of foreign affairs summoned the Pakistani chargé d'affaires in Kabul, Obaidur Rehman Nizamani, and issued him a letter protesting the airstrikes. Ambassador Nizamani himself narrowly survived an attempt on his life while within the confines of the Pakistani diplomatic facility at Kabul in December 2022, and had met Afghan interim foreign minister Amir Khan Muttaqi as recently as March 15, 2024.
The Taliban Nexus
The Afghan Taliban’s takeover of Kabul on August 15, 2021 was hailed as a “victory of the forces of Islam” against yet another superpower, this time the United States of America, by many in Pakistan. Then-prime minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan, commended the Afghan people on “breaking the shackles of slavery” by militarily overthrowing the Ashraf Ghani government, which was supported by the West and recognized internationally as the legitimate government of the-then Republic of Afghanistan.
Behind the scenes, Khan’s government was negotiating a ceasefire with the banned TTP, as his intelligence chief traveled to Kabul on September 4, 2021, and furtively assuaged a Western journalist’s concerns with the remark; “don’t worry, everything will be okay”. Even as the Afghan Taliban mediated the talks between the Pakistani government and the proscribed TTP, Pakistan continued to suffer relentless terror attacks – responsibility for which was claimed by other terrorist groups and not TTP – throughout 2021 and 2022. By the end of November 2022, TTP announced the end of their ceasefire with Pakistan, and ordered their operatives to conduct attacks whenever and wherever they could.
It is now painfully obvious that Pakistan’s purported policy of “strategic depth” in Afghanistan has been a catastrophic failure. Pakistan's approach towards a negotiated settlement with TTP was either foolishly optimistic or absolutely ill-advised.
Pakistan then witnessed a sharp increase in terror attacks in 2022 – many of which went unreported due to the mainstream media’s focus on political upheavals in the country since April 2022, and also perhaps due to lack of clarity or “permission” from the “relevant quarters”. This vicious trend continued throughout 2023, as many attacks caused far too many casualties to be ignored by the national electronic media and its obsession for “breaking news”. After the US-NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan, the jihadist ecosystem of that war-torn country has found a new target in the form of Pakistan.
It is now painfully obvious that Pakistan’s purported policy of “strategic depth” in Afghanistan has been a catastrophic failure. Pakistan's approach towards a negotiated settlement with TTP was either foolishly optimistic or absolutely ill-advised. The Afghan Taliban’s role as a reliable mediator between TTP and Pakistan overlooked the actual sentiments of Taliban rank and file, insofar as they concern the Pakistani state and especially its military. Pakistan's transactional approach methodically ignored the symbiotic affiliations between the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban, which are now evident with the Afghan Taliban retaliating against Pakistan after the Pakistan Air Force struck TTP targets inside Afghanistan. Such a potential conflagration had been predicted as early as December 2022.
Preventing a ‘Strategic Death’
It was only a matter of time before Pakistan was forced to realize that any distinction between “good Taliban” and “bad Taliban” is as fictitious and imprudent as the rest of the world believed it to be. A rogue militant organization, regardless of how operationally dominant it could become, can be overpowered and tamed with a coherent national strategy and an effective tactical approach to internal policing and border security. But a distressing ambiguity on its counterterrorism strategy – and a dangerous deficiency of national cohesion even more so – continues to prevent Pakistan from devising and implementing a strategy that could contain the asymmetric terror threat from growing into a conventional threat from the “interim” Afghan government.
The Pakistan Army, paramilitary and police forces are stuck in a reactive posture instead of a proactive one, mostly responding to terror attacks instead of actively rooting out terrorist cells and networks, thereby rendering them incapable of reversing the state's losses even in the kinetic domain. During the 2021-2022 “ceasefire”, TTP was able to reorganize itself and attain sufficient respite to pose a serious threat to the Pakistani state once again. But unlike previous episodes, this time TTP has a blueprint to replicate in Pakistan: that which the Afghan Taliban undertook in their country in 2021. Moreover, no sane voice in Pakistan would be blaming Pakistan’s “traditional adversary” India for supporting, financing or arming TTP this time around. The real and present danger that the Taliban pose to Pakistan cannot be tackled through deploying hordes of vitriolic keyboard warriors on social media: also known as “fifth-generation warfare”, which is yet another policy that has backfired as spectacularly as “strategic depth.”
Most importantly, the Pakistan Army – and more specifically, the Pakistani deep state or the so-called “military establishment” – must relinquish its primacy in matters of national governance which have neither relation to nor impact upon security affairs, and focus emphatically on its constitutional role of protecting Pakistan’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.
In essence, harsh rationality and evidence-based, stoic policymaking must guide Pakistan’s security strategy: meetings of military commanders and the National Security Committee proclaiming an undeveloped policy of superficial “zero tolerance for terrorism” will no longer suffice. The newly-elected government must account for Pakistan’s contemporary strengths and weaknesses in order to develop a truly efficient national security policy that is implementable and contains objective performance indicators to gauge its effectiveness. Moreover, a “whole of nation” approach will be difficult to adopt, given that a sizable proportion of Pakistani society is poisonously disillusioned since April 2022.
Most importantly, the Pakistan Army – and more specifically, the Pakistani deep state or the so-called “military establishment” – must relinquish its primacy in matters of national governance which have neither relation to nor impact upon security affairs, and focus emphatically on its constitutional role of protecting Pakistan’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. The Pakistan Army and the Pakistani state’s overbearing intelligence apparatus must be refocused towards the real threats, instead of being ‘overstretched’ into matters of government or distracted by national politics.
Reactionary tactical responses are woefully insufficient in terms of the hard calculus of deterrence. In fact, the Taliban are only incentivized to respond to Pakistani conventional strikes in a sub-conventional domain, with the former retaining dominance on the escalation ladder by responding in the conventional domain along the Pak-Afghan border. If a thoroughly calibrated long-term policy – one that clearly delineates operational as well as politico-strategic goals – is not formulated and implemented immediately, TTP could well be on their way to Islamabad, just as their Afghan cousins were en route to Kabul in August 2021.