For the Pashtun people, questioning Pakistan Army’s role and pointing its misconduct in the tribal belt is to invite accusations of treason as the state did with PTM.

Pakistan’s relations with Afghanistan have plunged to their lowest point in years. The recurrent clashes across the Durand Line that divides the two countries are often framed as a dispute over the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), a Pashtun Islamist insurgent group which has become Achilles heel for the Pakistani state. But, beneath the surface of this conundrum lies a much older struggle that predates the Taliban and the war on terror. It is the decades long tension between Pashtun nationalism and a Punjabi-dominated Pakistani state.

The TTP is often described purely as an umbrella militant organisation. Yet it represents a fusion of Islamism and ethnic grievance and is a product of decades of marginalisation of the Pashtun heartland by a state that has alternated between military repression and strategic manipulation. To understand why the conflict refuses to end, one must revisit how Pakistan’s power structure was built on the exclusion of its largest ethnic periphery.

Pashtun nationalism did not begin with neither Afghan Taliban nor Pakistan Taliban. Its current incarnation dates to Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, or Bacha Khan, also known as the “Frontier Gandhi,” who led the non-violent Khudai Khidmatgar (“Servants of God”) movement in British India. Bacha Khan, as a staunch secularist as an ideological commitment opposed India’s religion-based partition of 1947. However, when partition became a fait accompli, he, and others in the tribal leadership, demanded that the Pashtuns be allowed the choice of creating their own Pashtunistan (the Bannu Resolution of 21 June 1947).

In the years that followed, Bacha Khan and his followers were vilified, jailed, and banned and their demands for provincial autonomy was branded as treason by the Pakistani state which increasingly became military dominated. This set the template for how the country’s overwhelmingly Punjabi-dominated ruling establishment would treat dissent from the peripheries: with suspicion, suppression, and militarisation.

Despite extreme suppression and oppression, the legacy of Bacha Khan’s peaceful struggle survives to this day through movements like the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM) and Awami National Party (ANP) by highlighting Pakistan Army’s misconduct through enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings and sexual violence across the tribal belt.

The PTM’s rallies were filled not with insurgent slogans but with portraits of missing persons, chants for accountability, and the insistence that their blood be valued as much as any Punjabi. While PTM has been proscribed by the Pakistani state and its leaders like Manzoor Pashteen routinely silenced, yet their demands echo the same call made nearly eight decades ago which is that of dignity, rights, and an end to collective punishment.

If history began with exclusion, it was the Pakistani military that institutionalised control. The colonial-era Frontier Crimes Regulations (FCR) that represented a draconian legal code denying tribal residents due process remained in place as recent as 2018. For over seven decades, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) were governed this FCR that granted local tribal lords with autonomy thereby treating people treated as subjects rather than citizens.

The tragedy of Pakistan’s Pashtuns is that they have been both the sword and the sacrifice of the state being deployed in its proxy wars and displaced in its peace. Their land has been used as a laboratory for proxy wars, their people as cannon fodder for strategic depth. The Pakistani military viewed these borderlands less as communities and more as a strategic buffer.

In the 1980s, during the U.S.-backed Afghan jihad against Soviet forces in Afghanistan, the Pashtun belt was turned into a staging ground for mujahideen recruitment and weapons smuggling. After 2001, it became a battleground again but this time for Pakistan’s ambiguous war on terror. While Islamabad allied with Washington, its intelligence services sheltered the Afghan Taliban, seeing them as a tool of regional influence.

Caught in the crossfire were ordinary Pashtuns. Between 2004 and 2024, according to various estimates including South Asian Terrorism Portal (SATP) and CRSS Annual reports, at least 20,000 Pashtun civilians have been killed in Pakistan Army’s anti-insurgency campaigns and militant violence between 2004 and 2024. Besides, over 4000 people were also killed in hundreds of American drone strikes greenlighted by Pakistan Army according to a report by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

Moreover, thousands of people were internally displaced, their homes flattened, family members disappeared, and entire villages across North and South Waziristan were razed under Pakistan Army’s counterterrorism operations like Rah-e-Rast (2009) and Zarb-e-Azab (2014). To this day, thousands remain unaccounted as victims of “enforced disappearances” with Pakistan military and its intelligence agencies as prime accused, with at least 3485 cases reported by the Missing Person’s Commission established by the Supreme Court.

As such, rather than peace, Pakistani state’s reliance on militarisation in the peripheries has only produced alienation. On ground, it reflects in the garrisoning of the Pashtun heartland with checkpoints dotting every artery and locals subjected to random searches and collective reprisals. A generation and two of Pashtuns have grown up knowing only checkpoints, recurrent curfews, and ever-present drones sounds and strikes.

If muscular policy of subjugation in their homeland was not enough, Pashtuns have long been cast as the “other” in Pakistan’s social imagination as ‘rough’ and ‘uncouth’ cousin to the so-called urbane Punjabi. This cultural stereotyping has been deeply ingrained in Pakistani cinema and literature with Pashtuns often portrayed as tribal, backward, and violent. Such characterisation has helped the state justify its decades of systemic exclusion of Pashtuns as well as normalise Pakistan Army’s misconduct.

This is also achieved by domination of the Punjabi elite within the politics and media of the country as well as the officer corps of its powerful army. While Punjab is Pakistan’s largest province by population, comprising 53 percent of its total population, it has a disproportionate share of senior military positions and federal bureaucratic positions with some estimates putting it above 70 percent In contrast, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, including FATA, has been grossly underrepresented in the corridors of power in Islamabad and Rawalpindi with less than 12 percent and 10 percent share in federal bureaucracy and officer corps of armed forces respectively.

The costs of this hierarchy are stark. KPK remains among Pakistan’s poorest provinces, with nearly 30 percent of the population enduring multidimensional poverty, which is nearly double that of Punjab. Literacy among women in former FATA tribal districts hovers below 15 percent, which is nearly three times less than KPK (39 percent) and four times lesser from women in Punjab (58 percent). Infrastructure spending per capita in KPK is a fraction of that in Punjab’s major cities. The region’s development budget has often been slashed to subsidize military operations or bailouts for state-owned enterprises concentrated in Punjab and Sindh.

Such disparities are not accidental function as the political architecture of a state that conflates security with ethnicity. For the Pashtun people, questioning Pakistan Army’s role and pointing its misconduct in the tribal belt is to invite accusations of treason as the state did with PTM. Even the merger of FATA into KPK in 2018 (25^th Amendment), which was hailed as a democratic milestone has changed little on the ground. At best, it remains an annexation on paper rather than empowerment in practice.

Perhaps the darkest face of this militarised policy of the state is the impunity with which Pakistan Army conducts itself across the Pashtun heartland. For Pashtuns, the state’s “war on terror” is simply a war on being who they are and their identity often conflated with extremism and militancy. Islamabad and Rawalpindi never seem to understand that the killing of a family member, an arbitrary arrest or an enforced disappearance and every other misconduct of its military only fuel resentment and rebellion.

Detestably, Pakistan’s Punjabi-centric political and military elite often view Pashtun nationalism as an existential threat with a fear that such calls for justice and accountability might evolve into secession. Yet it is not separatism the demand for equal citizenship that drives the new generation of Pashtuns.

Islamabad’s refusal to reckon with this sentiment carries peril. The more the state relies on coercion, the more it alienates the very population it claims its own. The Afghan frontier may remain under barbed wire and drones, but the deeper frontier of Pakistan’s powerful Punjabi core and its neglected peripheries continue to widen.

Nevertheless, if Pakistan is to find stability, it will need to must start by listening to its margins be it Pashtuns, Baloch, and Sindhis, among others. But that would mean an end to its current policy of militarisation, accountability of its past actions and to the human rights violations of its military, and importantly allowing Pashtun people shape their own governance than dictating it from the garrisons of Peshawar. Until the Pashtun heartland is treated not as a frontier to be controlled but as a homeland to be respected, Pakistan’s both internal and external wars will never truly end.

Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not reflect Milli Chronicle’s point-of-view.

This duality—preaching unity while practicing duplicity—has become Pakistan’s diplomatic hallmark.

When the Taliban stormed into Kabul in August 2021, Pakistan’s powerful intelligence chief, Lt. Gen. Faiz Hameed, appeared at the Serena Hotel and assured journalists, “Everything will be okay.”

His confident smile captured Islamabad’s belief that decades of strategic maneuvering had finally paid off. Pakistan, long accused of nurturing the Taliban, assumed it would now wield decisive influence over its western neighbor.

Four years later, those hopes have turned to ashes. The Taliban’s rise, once hailed in Islamabad as a geopolitical triumph, has become a source of profound insecurity and humiliation.

The Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), emboldened by its ideological kin in Kabul, has unleashed a deadly insurgency across Pakistan’s tribal belt. Hundreds of Pakistani soldiers have been killed in cross-border raids. The Taliban, despite Pakistan’s past support, has refused to curb the TTP.

The so-called “strategic depth” has instead exposed Pakistan’s strategic shallowness. A state that once boasted of controlling its proxies now finds itself hostage to them. The illusion of regional mastery has dissolved into a grim reality: Pakistan is isolated, insecure, and rapidly losing credibility.

Weaponizing Refugees

Having failed to tame the Taliban, Pakistan turned its frustration toward Afghan civilians. In October 2023, Islamabad launched the Illegal Foreigners Repatriation Plan (IFRP), targeting nearly 1.7 million undocumented Afghans. For decades, Afghan refugees had lived, worked, and raised families in Pakistan. Suddenly, they became scapegoats for Islamabad’s security failures.

By mid-2025, more than 600,000 Afghans had been deported in what international observers described as one of South Asia’s largest forced repatriations in decades. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch chronicled chilling stories of police harassment, arbitrary detentions, and family separations.

Pakistan justified the campaign as a counterterrorism measure, accusing Afghan refugees of harboring TTP militants. But analysts saw it differently: an act of political retribution against the Taliban regime. Kabul condemned the deportations as a breach of international law and accused Islamabad of deepening Afghanistan’s humanitarian catastrophe.

This was more than just a border dispute—it was a symptom of Pakistan’s broader malaise. A state that once prided itself on being a refuge for the oppressed had turned into a place of fear and hostility. The moral cost of Islamabad’s Afghan policy was now unmistakable.

Airstrikes and Escalation

Pakistan’s response extended beyond deportations. Under the guise of pursuing TTP sanctuaries, it began conducting airstrikes inside Afghan territory.

In April 2022, bombings in Khost and Kunar killed 47 civilians, mostly women and children. Similar attacks followed in March and December 2024, targeting Paktika and Khost. In January 2025, fresh strikes were launched along the volatile Durand Line. Over a hundred civilians have died since 2021, according to regional monitors.

Each operation fuelled anger and anti-Pakistan protests across Afghanistan. The Taliban government condemned the attacks as violations of sovereignty, accusing Pakistan of hiding its failures behind a counterterrorism narrative.

By 2025, Pakistan’s western frontier was once again aflame—only this time, without American troops to share the blame. The Afghan war that Islamabad once believed it had outsourced had come home, exacting both human and diplomatic costs.

Diplomacy as Deception

The crisis reached a symbolic peak in September 2025, when Islamabad hosted the “Towards Unity and Trust” conference under the South Asian Strategic Stability Institute.

Despite the event’s conciliatory title, the Taliban government was conspicuously excluded. Instead, the gathering featured anti-Taliban activists and politicians, turning what was billed as a dialogue into an exercise in diplomatic provocation.

Just days later, Defense Minister Khawaja Asif labeled Afghanistan an “enemy state”—a stunning reversal from Pakistan’s earlier rhetoric of “brotherhood.”

This diplomatic whiplash mirrors a deeper inconsistency at the heart of Pakistan’s foreign policy. It speaks of a nation perpetually caught between ambition and insecurity, between Islamic solidarity and realpolitik.

Even its domestic realities now echo this hypocrisy.

In early October 2025, a story broke that underscored how deeply investor confidence has eroded under the current administration. Out of 23 oil and gas exploration blocks offered for bidding, no local or foreign bids were received for 22. The only bid came from Mari Gas, and even that was for a small block with negligible output.

Taimur Saleem Khan Jhagra, Pakistan’s opposition leader, wrote “investors know this is an illegitimate govt,” saying no company—foreign or domestic—was willing to invest in a country “without rule of law.” He accused the government of driving away foreign direct investment through arbitrary governance, economic mismanagement, and political repression.

This episode is emblematic of Pakistan’s larger credibility crisis. When even domestic energy firms shy away from state-backed ventures, the problem is not market dynamics—it is a collapse of trust. The same lack of accountability that defines Pakistan’s regional duplicity now poisons its economic foundations.

The Iran Paradox and the Palestine Hypocrisy

Pakistan’s double-dealing extends far beyond its Afghan misadventure.

In June 2025, Islamabad publicly condemned U.S. airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, declaring solidarity with Tehran. Yet, only days earlier, Army Chief Gen. Asim Munir had met privately with Donald Trump, reportedly discussing “regional stability.” In a surreal twist, Pakistan went on to nominate Trump for the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize, effectively undercutting its supposed alignment with Iran.

This duality—preaching unity while practicing duplicity—has become Pakistan’s diplomatic hallmark.

The same contradictions stain its stance on Palestine. While Pakistani leaders have long professed unwavering support for the Palestinian cause, history tells another story. During Black September 1970, Brigadier Zia ul-Haq, later Pakistan’s military ruler, helped Jordan crush the Palestine Liberation Organization, a massacre that claimed thousands of lives.

In July 2025, Pakistan awarded the Nishan-e-Imtiaz to U.S. CENTCOM Commander Gen. Michael Kurilla, despite his role in coordinating American military support for Israel during its Gaza operations.

At the UN General Assembly’s 80th session, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif met Daniel Rosen, head of the American Jewish Congress, signaling a quiet but unmistakable outreach to pro-Israel circles.

For a country that brands itself the guardian of Muslim causes, the hypocrisy is striking. From Amman to Gaza, Pakistan’s leaders have consistently traded principle for expediency.

A Consistent Inconsistency

Across every theater—Afghanistan, Iran, Palestine, and even its own energy sector—a single pattern emerges: Pakistan’s promises collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.

It seeks influence in Kabul but alienates Afghans through bombings and deportations. It pledges brotherhood with Tehran while courting Washington. It proclaims solidarity with Palestine while decorating America’s military commanders. And now, it claims to welcome foreign investment while creating an environment so lawless that even local companies refuse to bid.

In the end, Pakistan’s gravest betrayal is not of its neighbors, but of itself. The erosion of credibility abroad mirrors the decay of governance at home. As investors flee, allies distance themselves, and insurgents advance, the message is clear: a nation that manipulates every alliance eventually stands alone.

For decades, Pakistan’s generals and politicians have built policies on the illusion of control. The Afghan gamble was meant to cement regional influence; instead, it has exposed a state adrift, distrusted by friends and foes alike.

The “everything will be okay” optimism of 2021 now rings hollow. For Pakistan, everything is decidedly not okay—and the world, finally, has stopped believing its promises.

Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not reflect Milli Chronicle’s point-of-view.

The week-long visit, cleared for October 9–16, signals a pivotal chapter in India-Taliban engagement—an axis once considered unthinkable given decades of mistrust.

Months of quiet diplomacy

Indian officials have been laying the groundwork for this diplomatic breakthrough for months. Since January, Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri and senior South Asia envoy J.P. Singh have held multiple rounds of dialogue with Taliban representatives, often in neutral venues such as Dubai.

One such meeting in Dubai between Misri and Muttaqi focused on India’s humanitarian commitments—particularly strengthening Afghanistan’s fragile health sector and supporting refugees.

The real turning point, however, came on May 15, just hours after New Delhi concluded its successful Operation Sindoor against Pakistan-backed networks. External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar held a landmark phone call with Muttaqi—the first ministerial-level contact since 2021—where he welcomed the Taliban’s condemnation of the Pahalgam terror attack in Indian-administered Kashmir and reaffirmed India’s “traditional friendship with the Afghan people.”

Earlier in April, Taliban officials had already signaled a shift by publicly condemning the same attack in a meeting with Indian envoys in Kabul, suggesting rare convergence between the two sides against Pakistan-sponsored terrorism.

Humanitarian aid as bridge-building

India has since expanded its humanitarian footprint in Afghanistan. New Delhi has delivered nearly 50,000 tonnes of wheat, 330 tonnes of medicines and vaccines, 40,000 litres of pesticides, and thousands of tents, blankets, and hygiene kits.

When a devastating earthquake struck Afghanistan in September, India was among the first to respond, airlifting 1,000 family tents, 15 tonnes of food supplies, and 21 tonnes of emergency medical aid. These relief efforts underscore India’s strategy of engaging the Afghan people directly, bypassing geopolitical hesitations.

Taliban authorities, sources confirm, have also provided India with a list of formal requests—ranging from energy cooperation to infrastructure support—indicating Kabul’s readiness to broaden ties beyond humanitarian channels.

A setback for Pakistan

Muttaqi’s visit is being closely watched in Islamabad, where policymakers see the development as a direct erosion of Pakistan’s influence over Kabul. Relations between Pakistan and the Taliban have soured this year, particularly after Islamabad deported more than 80,000 Afghan refugees back across the border, sparking anger in Kabul.

For decades, Pakistan has positioned itself as the Taliban’s primary patron, with many Taliban leaders educated in its Deobandi seminaries, particularly Darul Uloom Haqqania in Akora Khattak. But the current rift has opened diplomatic space for India to step in—something analysts say Pakistan did not anticipate.

India’s strategic gamble

For New Delhi, engaging the Taliban is a calculated risk. On one hand, it allows India to protect its long-term security interests in Afghanistan, counter terror threats emanating from the region, and blunt the combined influence of Pakistan and China. On the other, it requires navigating sensitivities, given the Taliban’s contested legitimacy and internal human rights record.

Yet officials argue that isolation is no longer an option. “We cannot afford to ignore Kabul,” a senior Indian diplomat was quoted as saying. “Engagement is the only way to protect our security and humanitarian interests.”

A new chapter in South Asia

Muttaqi’s planned meeting with Jaishankar on October 10 could prove decisive in setting the tone for this emerging relationship. While both sides are likely to proceed cautiously, the symbolism of an Afghan foreign minister under the Taliban walking into New Delhi is not lost on observers.

If successful, the visit may well redraw South Asia’s balance of power, tilting Kabul closer to India and away from Pakistan. It would also mark a striking reversal: a Taliban once nurtured by Islamabad now seeking space with its historic rival.

As the region braces for this diplomatic milestone, one thing is clear—the Taliban’s outreach to India is not just a courtesy call. It is a signal that Afghanistan, under Taliban rule, is recalibrating its foreign relations in ways that could echo far beyond Kabul and New Delhi.