Pakistan has howled wolf the past decades over unchecked militancy spillover in Afghanistan and its insidiously creeping into the country. These had echoed so far as political hysteria, but now echoed as unescapable facts beyond argument in the form of independent reports and eye-witness testimonies. Afghanistan has emerged as the hotbed of international terrorism, and Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) is dominating the attacks jeopardizing not only the security of Pakistan but also the thin line of regional peace.
The explosion of a United Nations report in February 2025 uncovered the fact that more than a dozen terror groups remain operational in the Afghan borderlands without any bounds. The report confirmed Pakistan’s continuous claims by terming Afghan soil as being at the center of a paralyzing hub of terrorism. Such assessments have not been limited to being external. Top Afghan figures such as former Afghan Army Chief Lt. Gen. (R) Sami Sadat and National Resistance Front leader Ahmad Massoud have categorically concurred that Afghanistan has emerged as an international hotspot of terrorist outfits. These open admissions leave little to the imagination and expose the complicity of Afghan authorities whose inaction or refusal to act makes the threat credible.
Adding yet another dimension of complexity to this crisis is the work of proxy warfare. Evidence in the form of testimony by senior-level Afghan officials has surfaced that Indian money, channeled through Taliban brokers, is financing TTP’s insurgency. This revelation reveals the destabilizing agenda of New Delhi, to which terrorism is employed as a tool to attempt destabilizing Pakistan. Through its politicking with the terror networks in Afghanistan, India not only harms its bilateral relations with Islamabad but disqualifies itself globally as a so-called responsible democracy. It is such a hypocricy that poisons international counterterrorism conventions and destabilizes the global struggle against militancy as an international public good.
The source of the issue lies within the Afghan Taliban administration itself. By giving room to outfits like TTP to reorganize, recruit cadres and establish training camps in Afghan land, Kabul has transformed Afghanistan into a potential stabilizer to become a chronic destabilizer. This is a clear denial of its global obligations that Afghan soil would never be used as a launching pad for cross-border terrorism. Pakistan has paid heavily for this deceit. The country’s security forces have had to carry out extensive counterterrorism campaigns along the western border. An April 2025 three-day clearance campaign killed 17 militants sheltered within cross-border hideouts. Scarcely a few months later, 33 India-sponsored agents were neutralized in Balochistan’s Zhob district. These are not disconnected events but are the continuation of long trend of coordinated activities from Afghanistan.
The regional implications of this volatility are significant. Afghanistan still remains a place of recruitment, training, and facilitation of logistics for militancy. Militancy trained in the other side of the border likes to cross over into Pakistan to target civilians, security personnel, and strategic infrastructure. Apart from outright violence, such figures also discourage regional economic cooperation and jeopardize efforts such as the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). The China-Pakistan-Afghanistan trilateral cooperative mechanism, being exemplified as a symbol of interdependence and mutual prosperity, now hangs in the balance with the adoption of militancy by Afghanistan.
Serious is the transnational spread of the TTP itself. Earlier confined to Pakistani terrain, now the outfit survives on foreign designations, international recruitment, and an expanding constellation of safe havens across international borders. Bangladeshis arrested for being part of TTP operations reflect its expanded reach and aspirations. Not addressed, the TTP can be a regional terror franchise that can destabilize South Asia and Central Asia as well.
Complacency finds no space in the world. The fact that Afghanistan has become a base for global terror threatens to upset the region’s fragile peace equation. Diplomatic and economic pressure must be mounted so that Kabul fulfills its responsibility of rooting out terrorist havens and eliminating border-crossing infiltration. For Pakistan, the path forward is twofold: routine counterterrorism to eliminate threats in the near term, combined with strong diplomacy to identify and isolate outside actors—predominantly India—enabling militancy through proxy. No less noteworthy are Islamabad’s continued efforts at exporting cooperative models, reminding the world that South Asia can have peace only if it comes on the Afghanistan track of its development as a stabilizing force.
Afghanistan stands at the crossroads today. It must choose to embrace peace, interdependence, and integration or continue to be a hub of violence and isolation. For Pakistan, the price is existential; for the remainder of South Asia, so too is it. Terror knows no boundaries, and unchecked expansion of Afghan-centric militancy threatens to reverse the years of painstakingly achieved gains in integration and progress. Short of massive international action, Afghanistan will remain not a peace friend but the very source from which terrorist attack continues to strike us.
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