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Pakistan’s National Security Strategy Is Broken. Reform Must Begin at Home
In 2021, the Pakistani government introduced its inaugural National Security Policy, asserting that “the safety, security, dignity, and prosperity of citizens in all their manifestations will remain the ultimate purpose of Pakistan’s national security (p. 6).” To many, this appeared to mark a shift—at least rhetorically—towards a more citizen-focused and comprehensive understanding of security, moving away from the historically military-centric framework. Yet, four years on, such declarations appear increasingly unfulfilled.
From Balochistan to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan remains challenged by escalating internal insurgencies. The Baloch nationalist movement, in particular, has withstood decades of state repression and, in recent years, has expanded both in territorial scope and tactical capability. Concurrently, Pakistan’s regional stance—especially its policy alignment with the Afghan Taliban and its enduring engagement with extremist proxies—has resulted in diplomatic isolation and increased domestic exposure to militant reprisals.
If Pakistan aspires to become a secure state, it must first confront a difficult truth: national security cannot be sustained on the basis of repression, strategic ambiguity, and denial. Instead, it must be re-envisioned to include justice, political reconciliation, and an honest reckoning with historical missteps. This transformation must commence with Balochistan.
For decades, the Pakistani state has approached Baloch nationalism not as a legitimate political grievance requiring resolution, but as a security challenge to be forcefully suppressed. This approach has involved enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings, and aggressive military interventions. Consequently, a profound sense of alienation has taken root among Baloch communities, many of whom, having suffered state violence, now view the state more as a colonising force than a protective authority. It is therefore unsurprising that leading non-violent advocates for justice in the province, such as Mahrang Baloch, have personally experienced repression, with numerous family members subjected to enforced disappearances or extrajudicial killings.
Despite ongoing state abuses, the insurgency has persisted—and indeed, it has adapted. Organisations such as the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) have extended their activities beyond traditional rural strongholds, increasingly targeting economic infrastructure and security personnel across the province, and occasionally in major urban centres such as Karachi. In recent years, Baloch insurgents have repeatedly attacked Pakistani military facilities and China-backed development projects, resulting in the deaths of several Chinese nationals. This trajectory does not reflect a weakening movement; rather, it underscores the failure of the Pakistani state’s militarised strategy.
The government continues to portray the insurgency as externally orchestrated, particularly by India. This narrative serves to conveniently sidestep the deeper, legitimate grievances of Baloch citizens, including political exclusion, resource extraction without local benefit, and a lack of essential public services. Notably, Balochistan—despite its substantial mineral wealth—remains among the most impoverished and underdeveloped regions in the country. It is this stark disjunction between the state’s strategic priorities and the lived experiences of its people that lies at the core of Pakistan’s faltering national security framework.
Pakistan’s prevailing security architecture has been predominantly shaped and directed by the military establishment. Its conventional orientation has remained India-centric, interpreting national security primarily through the limited perspective of perceived external threats. This strategic outlook has fostered three deeply detrimental tendencies within the country’s policymaking.
Firstly, it has resulted in the systematic securitisation of internal dissent. Movements advocating for ethnic rights, such as the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement, calls for democratic reform, and even critical journalism are frequently perceived as threats to “national unity.” The state’s response has often been coercive, ranging from censorship to outright violence—as recently witnessed during the Baloch Yakjehti Committee’s protest march against extrajudicial killings and ongoing state-enforced disappearances in Balochistan. This approach has only exacerbated public distrust and further eroded the cohesion of the social fabric.
Secondly, it has normalised the deployment of non-state actors as tools of regional influence. From Kashmir to Afghanistan, Pakistan has supported extremist groups that serve its strategic objectives. While this proxy strategy may have yielded short-term gains, it has come at a significant cost, as several of these groups have turned against the state itself—most notably the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which has resurged in strength in recent years.
Thirdly, this strategy has contributed to Pakistan’s diplomatic isolation. Its ongoing support for, or at least tolerance of, the Afghan Taliban has estranged key allies, including the United States and the wider international community. Repeated statements by US officials accusing Pakistan of exploiting its partnership with Washington for counterterrorism purposes while simultaneously shielding such groups underscore this duplicity. Moreover, Pakistan’s failure to present a coherent counter-extremism policy has rendered it an unreliable actor in global counterterrorism initiatives. Arguably, Pakistan’s national security doctrine has, paradoxically, undermined its own security.
For Pakistan to break free from this cyclical pattern, it requires more than a mere superficial adjustment to its national security policy. A profound transformation is necessary, starting with a shift in focus from safeguarding the interests of the military establishment to prioritising the welfare of its citizens.
This entails prioritising political dialogue over military repression in Balochistan and other turbulent regions. Additionally, it must recognise that dissent is not an act of treason, that ethnic grievances do not constitute national threats, and that lasting peace is achieved through negotiation, not eradication.
This also requires rejecting the militarised approach in favour of empowering civilian institutions to lead on internal security. The intelligence and military apparatus must not serve as both judge and executioner in matters of internal dissent. Pakistan’s democracy, despite its fragility, cannot thrive under the strain of a constant state of emergency and dominant military control.
Moreover, it is crucial to abandon the “good Taliban, bad Taliban” policy, which has always been driven more by strategic considerations than by moral principles. The Taliban’s resurgence in Afghanistan represents a model that Pakistan should avoid, as it has strengthened jihadist networks across the region. Pakistan must end its strategic ambivalence and decisively distance itself from all extremist groups. No state can achieve stability while harbouring forces fundamentally opposed to the very concept of the modern nation-state. Pakistan has options, but lacks the political will.
The path to reform will be challenging. It will necessitate the military’s relinquishment of some control over internal policy decisions, as well as political leaders demonstrating the courage to confront uncomfortable truths. Additionally, it will require society as a whole to call for a new definition of security—one that is not merely the absence of conflict, but the presence of justice, opportunity, and dignity. For Pakistan, the stakes are immense. The choice is no longer between change and continuity, but between transformation and ongoing disintegration.
In the aftermath of India’s Operation Sindoor on May 7, which targeted militant infrastructure in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, a familiar cycle of accusations and denials has resumed. Pakistani officials immediately labelled the operation a strike on civilians insisting that places of worship, and religious schools, were among the many targets.
Particular attention has been drawn to Markaz Subhan Allah in Bahawalpur, a facility long known as the headquarters of the Deobandi militant group Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM).
It was here, notably, that Masood Azhar, the proscribed group’s founder, reappeared in December 2024 after years of purported house arrest, a stark reminder of how Pakistan’s most dangerous extremists often operate with impunity, even when officially designated as threats by the international community.
This narrative may resonate in some quarters of the international community, but it masks a deeper, long-running reality which is that many of Pakistan’s religious seminaries, or madrassas, have long played a central role in incubating violent extremism. While not all madrasas are complicit, thousands have served as ideological and operational feeders for some of the region’s most dangerous militant groups.
The connection between Pakistan’s madrassa network and its decades-old strategy of cultivating proxy groups is well documented. And yet, it remains largely absent from current discourses on terrorism globally. To understand the roots of regional instability and why efforts to counter terrorism often flounder, the international community needs come to terms with this institutional reality.
An Infrastructure of Indoctrination
Since the 1980s, after President General Ziaul Haq thrust Pakistan into the frontline of global jihad against Soviet Communists in Afghanistan with the support of United States and Saudi Arabia, the country’s intelligence services, particularly the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), have cultivated relationships with a range of militant groups. As the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan folded in the late 1980s, Pakistani Army, having adopted the doctrine of “strategic depth,” the notion that non-state actors could serve as force multipliers in conflicts with neighboring states, redirected these Afghan Jihad returnees to Kashmir. Moreover, an umbrella of Kashmir-centric anti-India groups, such as Hizbul Mujahideen (HM), Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT), and Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM), were created to sustain the insurgency in Kashmir. It is instructive when Former President General Pervez Musharraf acknowledged as much in 2010 admitting how Pakistan had supported militant groups to “pressure India.”
But the more pressing question is how Pakistan’s military and its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) continue to sustain such a vast militant ecosystem. The answer lies in the decades-old nexus between militant outfits like Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, and a wide network of religious seminaries (madrassas) that serve as sources of both ideological indoctrination and recruitment.
While madrassa system of education is not new to Pakistan, but their explosive growth over the last few decades has altered the country’s educational and religious landscape. From just a few hundred at independence in 1947, their numbers have ballooned to more than 30,000 today, a conservative estimate, with nearly half of these operating without state oversight.
While some offer basic religious instruction, many propagate an austere, puritanical version of Islam, often influenced by Saudi Wahhabism and Deobandi orthodoxy — that fosters sectarian intolerance and glorifies armed struggle. For instance, many of these madrassas, as highlighted by M. W. Malla (2020), have relied on curriculum which emotively glorifies “jihad – Islamic holy war – through vivid imagery for whom alif (A) was meant Allah, be (B) meant Bundook (Gun), jim (J) meant jihad, and ha (Ha) meant hathiyar (arms) and likewise.”
A Pipeline to Militancy
In theory, madrassas are meant to provide education and social support to the underprivileged. However, in case of Pakistan, a significant proportion of these Islamic schools serve as gateways to radicalization. The situation is compounded by lack of governmental oversight. For instance, while the officially registered madrasas, numbering nearly 17500 as per governmental statistics, cater over 2.2 million students, millions more are enrolled in the unregistered ones. Consequently, orphaned and impoverished children, often with no other schooling options, are drawn into a closed system where anti-Western and anti-Hindu narratives are presented as divine truth. Recruitment for jihadist groups often begins in these classrooms.
Incidentally, some of the most prominent Islamic religious seminaries of Pakistan such as Jamia Ashrafia in Lahore, Dar-ul-Uloom Banori Town in Karachi, and Jamia Haqqania Akora Khattak have been repeatedly linked to known extremist organizations. Take the case of Jamia Haqqania, which has been referred to as the “University of Jihad” and its former Vice Chancellor Maulana Samiul Haq as the “Father of Taliban.” Much of the Haqqania network leadership and cadre, which is part of Afghan Taliban, has received their religious training from these institutions with a number of them currently surving in the transitional government of Taliban in Afghanistan.
Even as international pressure has mounted, reform efforts have faltered. It is instructive how Pakistan’s current government quietly abandoned the 2019 requirement for madrassas to register with the Ministry of Education, a modest reform that aimed at bringing religious seminaries under state oversight. The reversal came in December 2024, as part of a political bargain with Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Islam (Fazl), Deobandi religious party led by Maulana Fazlur Rehman, to secure the party’s support for a constitutional amendment that expanded the powers of the military establishment while curbing the judiciary’s independence. Pakistan’s leaders have often found it easier to co-opt these groups than to challenge them — a compromise that comes at significant cost.
Beyond the Madrassa
The culture of radicalization in Pakistan does not stop at religious schools. State-run public schools often include textbooks that promote intolerance, framing India and the West as existential threats. Clerics like Maulana Abdul Aziz, once the head of Islamabad’s infamous Lal Masjid, openly issue calls to violence. He has faced little accountability despite repeated clashes with the state.
This radical ecosystem is self-reinforcing. With 39 percent of Pakistan’s population living below the poverty line, many families have little choice but to send their children to madrassas that offer free food and shelter. But the pattern is not limited to the poor. In recent years, Pakistan has witnessed recruitment by extremist groups among the educated elite, including medical students and professionals drawn to the ideology of ISIS and its affiliates.
This widening appeal underscores that extremism in Pakistan is not simply a problem of poverty or illiteracy — it is one of systemic indoctrination and strategic tolerance. The madrassas are just the most visible node in a much broader network of radicalization.
The Global Dimension
That Pakistan has managed to sustain this infrastructure with relatively few consequences is, in part, a reflection of international inconsistency. During the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, Islamabad was seen as a necessary, if difficult, partner. More than $33 billion in U.S. aid flowed into Pakistan post-9/11, even as evidence mounted that its military continued to support insurgent groups like Afghan Taliban, LeT, HM and JeM.
What is more problematic is how China, too, despite vying for the global leadership and having endured terrorism in its Xinjiang province, has largely refrained from pressuring Pakistan. This is being justified by its investment in the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and its geopolitical competition with India. Moreover, while the state patronage of funding conservative religious education from Gulf countries has gone down, the role of religious groups has continued to foster this ecosystem.
In addition, in terms of global oversight, even the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the global watchdog on terror financing, has struggled to enforce long-term compliance. Though Pakistan was removed from the FATF’s “grey list” in 2022, much of the underlying infrastructure remains intact.
A Familiar Playbook
The claims that India’s recent strikes targeted civilian infrastructure follow a well-established script. In 2019, following the Balakot airstrikes, it denied that any militant camp had been hit, despite independent verification of the target’s history as a JeM facility.
What makes Operation Sindoor different is not the nature of Pakistan’s response, but the context in which it occurs. Militant violence inside Pakistan has surged, with a 79 percent increase in attacks in 2023 alone. Many of these attacks have been carried out by groups the state once sheltered. The Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), now re-empowered by the Taliban’s return in Afghanistan, has turned its guns inward.
In effect, Pakistan is now haunted by its own proxies, groups once deployed as strategic assets have grown autonomous and hostile. The madrassas that fed them remain largely untouched, a sign of the state’s reluctance, or inability, to dismantle the very apparatus it helped create.
The Consequences of Denial
The madrassa-militancy nexus is not the only reason for instability in South Asia, but it is a critical one.
As long as Pakistan continues to shield this infrastructure behind religious rhetoric and claims of victimhood, genuine counterterrorism cooperation will remain elusive.
For the international community, the lesson is clear: treating Pakistan as a willing partner while ignoring its internal contradictions only delays the reckoning. Madrassa reform, state accountability, and a broader ideological shift are not just domestic imperatives for Pakistan, but they are regional and global necessities.
Until then, any claims of targeting civilians in strikes like Operation Sindoor must be weighed against a broader, uncomfortable truth: some of the very institutions Pakistan defends as sacred have long functioned as sanctuaries for those who preach and practice violence.
Over the past couple of decades, Pakistan has steadily lost favours it once enjoyed with key allies, including the US, for its incessant instrumentalization of terrorism as state policy. As the post 9/11 world increasingly adopted global norms on no tolerance for terrorism, Pakistan remained stuck in its tactics of viewing militant networks as strategic assets, particularly deployed against India. Embarrassingly exposed time and again, the country currently finds itself amid multiple crises at once, from a precarious economic state to existentially threatening insurgencies, all exacerbated by a severely weakened global standing. This was laid bare during its recent hostilities with India, following the blood-curdling Pahalgam attack of April 22, as countries that have traditionally aligned with Pakistan refused to come to its aid.
Pakistan’s role in the proliferation of global terrorism began with its alliance with the CIA in arming the Afghan Mujahideen against the USSR in the 1980s. However, this policy of using militant proxies for geopolitical ends was soon institutionalized by the Pakistani establishment which then deployed the same tactics to undermine India, and specifically stir up Islamist militancy in Kashmir. Even as it projected itself as a US ally in the global war on terror, it continued to shelter and support radical elements, reflected in its infamous distinction between ‘good Taliban’ and ‘bad Taliban’. The primary reason why it covertly backed the Afghan Taliban was again as to secure an allied Islamist regime in Afghanistan as a counter to India. This could not be concealed for long and the US, frustrated by Pakistan’s duplicitous designs, significantly cut down on its economic and military aid to the country, in addition to distancing itself diplomatically.
On the other hand, the continuous terrorist attacks in India, evidentially linked to Pakistan, such as the 2001 Parliament attack, 2008 Mumbai attacks, 2019 Pulwama attack, among others, tarnished the latter’s global reputation as the epicentre of terrorism. In recent years, even Muslim majority nations such as the Persian Gulf countries, particularly Saudi Arabia and UAE, have shifted their foreign policy rationale from religion and ideology-based alignment with Pakistan to a more forward-looking cooperation based on the imperatives of economic pragmatism, regional stability and security, and the emerging new world order, with India.
Similarly, the Organization of Islamic Countries (OIC) has, in the past few years, demonstrated its respect and willingness to engage with India, much to the distaste of Pakistan. The first and quite heavy blow came when the forum invited India’s then Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj as a ‘guest of honour’ in its 2019 meeting in Abu Dhabi, despite Pakistan’s objections. The next year, in a departure from its usual stance, the OIC declined to have Kashmir on its agenda, reflecting Pakistan’s deteriorating standing in the forum and India’s increasing global clout. Although amid the recent military escalations between the two neighbours in the wake of the Pahalgam terror attack, the OIC appears to have favoured Pakistan’s narrative on Kashmir, inciting censure from India, it remains questionable how long it is going to last, given Pakistan’s free-falling economic, security and diplomatic situation as well as the organisation’s history of snubbing the country’s requests more often than not.
Destabilizing Pakistan’s strategic calculus and exacerbating its internal crisis is its once intimate ally- the Afghan Taliban. Since returning to power in August 2021, an event that was looked at with much optimism and triumph in Islamabad, the Afghan Taliban have turned sour with their neighbour that accuses them of supporting the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) or the Pakistani Taliban. The TTP has recently emerged as the most potent insurgent group within the country, in addition to the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA), launching relentless attacks on security forces and civilians, and increasingly establishing proto-state pockets in Pakistani territory. The loss of the Afghan Taliban as a reliable ally against India despite years of covert and risk-laden backing certainly constitutes an existential setback for Pakistan, made worse by the growing engagement between the Afghan Taliban and India.
The decades of Pakistan’s instrumentalization of terror have left it in a position that it itself finds difficult to get out of. Not only has the sponsorship of terrorism backfired on its own people as it ranks 2nd in the Global Terrorism Index 2025, but the years of neglect of its internal issues has bred insurgencies that have attacked even Chinese workers and projects, jeopardizing its most strategic partnership. As Pakistan suffers from alarming inflation, dropping currency and foreign exchange reserves, and dependence on IMF bailouts and bilateral loans, its internal security crises have not only weakened it politically but also economically by staving off any potential investment.
Therefore, in order to prevent its own unravelling, Pakistan must take stock of the shifting geopolitical landscape wherein nations prioritize stability, economic cooperation, and counter-terrorism over religious or ideological affiliations. Its continued backing of terror has already cost it irreparably, both internally and externally. Unless it radically recalibrates its geopolitical strategy, one that has no space for militant proxies, the future seems grim for the country.
In the aftermath of the Pahalgam massacre, the fingerprints of Pakistan’s proxy militant infrastructure were all but unmistakable. For decades, the military establishment in Rawalpindi has relied on asymmetric warfare through its proxy militant networks to provoke India while shielding itself behind the veneer of plausible deniability. The latest attack in Jammu and Kashmir’s Pahalgam on April 22, killing 26 civilians, followed a familiar script—designed not only to stir unrest in the region but also to bait an Indian response that could be leveraged for domestic political consolidation.
But this time, the playbook seems to be unravelling.
The Pakistan Army, under the leadership of General Asim Munir, seemed to have calculated an anticipated Indian retaliation with such a provocation that could be choreographed into a nationalistic rallying cry in its aftermath. Such manufactured moments of crisis have historically served the military’s purpose of reasserting its primacy in the country’s political and national security discourse. However, the sociopolitical terrain of Pakistan today is no longer the same as it was during previous confrontations.
India did respond to the Pahalgam attack with a calibrated military operation. On the night of May 7, under Operation SINDOOR, Indian armed forces targeted the infrastructure of long-operating terrorist groups, including Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), and Hizbul Mujahideen (HM), across nine places in Punjab and Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir (PoJK). It was precise, strategic, and aimed at sending a clear signal: India will not tolerate cross-border terrorism and retains the right to act pre-emptively against threats originating from Pakistani soil.
Far from uniting Pakistan behind its army, the attack and subsequent Indian response have only magnified the deep fractures that lie within the country. While the government attempted to stage a performative show of national unity, the absence of solidarity from Pakistan’s historically marginalized ethnic groups has been glaring. Neither the Baloch nor the Pashtun communities—both of whom have long endured the brunt of the military’s repression and counterinsurgency operations—showed any overt inclination to stand with the state or the generals now appealing for unity. Instead, a suicide blast killed seven Pakistan Army soldiers in Balochistan on the very day of Op Sindoor.
At a time when Pakistan has effectively become a ‘Punjabistan’, given the dominant control that Punjab exerts over key state institutions, including the military, as well as disproportionate hold over to national resources, this raises a stark question: in the event of an escalated military confrontation with India, who will fight for Pakistan?
The Limits of the “External Enemy” Narrative
The Pakistan Army has always thrived on the construction of an “external enemy,” most prominently India, to maintain its unrivalled influence over national affairs. Whether in times of political upheaval or economic crises, the spectre of Indian aggression has been cynically deployed to suppress dissent, justify military budgets, and delegitimize civilian political actors. But the effectiveness of this narrative is fading, especially when the legitimacy of the military itself is in question.
The ongoing human rights violations, extrajudicial killings and state-enforced disappearances in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan have damaging the trust people had towards the army. The Baloch insurgency continues to simmer, with growing calls for outright independence, something that was earlier limited to internal autonomy. The Pashtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM) has exposed the military’s brutal tactics in tribal regions, and although the movement is often silenced through intimidation and arrests, its underlying grievances remain potent. Alongside this, the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has also increased the intensity of their armed insurgency, with hundreds of attacks in the last few years.
In such a climate, the attempt to whip up nationalist fervour around an India-Pakistan confrontation appears hollow and self-defeating. The ethnic periphery, long disenfranchised and suppressed, sees little reason to rally behind a state apparatus that has never treated them as equal stakeholders in the Pakistani project.
A Calculated Indian Doctrine
India, for its part, has signalled a significant shift in its approach to cross-border terrorism. “While earlier responses were largely diplomatic or defensive, India’s actions following the 2016 Uri attack, culminating in the 2019 Balakot airstrikes, marked a shift toward a more proactive and pre-emptive counterterrorism strategy. Now the post-Pahalgam strike under Op SINDOOR is different in both scale and message. New Delhi’s intent is now unambiguous: there will be no tolerance for Pakistani state-sponsored terrorism, and any provocation will invite proportionate, and possibly pre-emptive, military action.
By targeting terror infrastructure and avoiding civilian casualties, India walked a fine line, reflective of its doctrine of minimising collateral damage, to ensure on its part that this response does not spiral into a full-blown war. This strategic restraint while establishing its deterrence arc is designed as a demonstration of maturity and not as a sign of weakness.
What complicates matters for Pakistan is that this shift in Indian posture arrives at a moment of acute internal fragility. Its economy is in tatters, inflation is high, and the IMF continues to hover over its fiscal policy decisions. Politically, the country remains in turmoil following a deeply controversial general election, widely seen as manipulated by the military establishment to sideline populist leader Imran Khan, who remains jailed since 2023. Protests, arrests, and media censorship have become routine. Interestingly when on a day India undertook its cross-border strikes on terror assets, Pakistan Army secured a Supreme Court adjudication that allows it to try the civilians in military courts.
In this context, a military misadventure with India risks not only a humiliating defeat but also a domestic backlash that could irreparably damage the army’s authority.
Escalation Without Strategy
The temptation for Rawalpindi to escalate, either through additional proxy attacks or border skirmishes, remains high. While it has increased its cross-border shelling targeting civilians, which has killed over a dozen border residents of Jammu and Kashmir, a move of direction escalation would be nothing but deeply unwise. “By now, it should be clear to Pakistan just how vulnerable it remains, especially after India followed up with a coordinated drone strike across nearly nine cities, including the neutralization of an air defence system in Lahore on May 8, in response to attempted attacks by Pakistan’s armed forces on Indian military installations in the Northern and Western sectors.
For one, the geopolitical climate is no longer conducive to Pakistan’s old strategy of continuing to use terrorism as statecraft. The Financial Action Task Force (FATF), though it removed Pakistan from its grey list in 2022, remains watchful and it should be seen as a forgone conclusion that this continued patronisation of terror groups will put it back as a nation of terror sponsors. The international opinion following Pahalgam massacre which was condemned globally, with major powers acknowledging India’s right to defend itself from such terror elements, is an eye opener to that end, bringing swift international condemnation and furthering its diplomatic isolation. Pakistan’s Gulf allies, increasingly aligned with India on economic and strategic fronts, are unlikely to bail it out in the event of another full-scale crisis. Their post-Pahalgam opinion is a testament of this reality.
Moreover, China, Pakistan’s all-weather friend, has grown weary of instability. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), once hailed as a transformative initiative, has stalled due to security concerns in Balochistan and beyond. Beijing is unlikely to support any adventurism that could jeopardize its investments despite some of the Chinese strategic hawks seeking China’s declare its commitment to defend Pakistan sovereignty in any eventuality.
Thus, escalation without a clearly defined strategic goal would amount to national self-sabotage. The army must instead reckon with its internal legitimacy crisis, reassess its use of proxies, and confront the reality that its traditional levers of control are weakening.
A Moment of Reckoning
The fallout from the Pahalgam massacre and now Operation Sindoor marks a turning point, not only in Indo-Pak relations, which remain perennially fraught, but also in Pakistan’s internal balance of power. The military’s attempt to engineer a patriotic revival through orchestrated conflict seems to be backfiring, revealing a brittle state hollowed out by decades of ethnic suppression, institutional decay, and misgovernance.
What Pakistan needs is not another external confrontation but an honest reckoning with its domestic contradictions. It must initiate a political process that includes, rather than marginalizes, its ethnic peripheries. It must reorient its security doctrine away from India-centric paranoia toward genuine internal stability. And above all, it must curb the military’s ability to unilaterally dictate the nation’s trajectory through violence and manipulation.
Until then, the question will continue to haunt Rawalpindi’s corridors of power: if not the Baloch, not the Pashtuns, not even the disillusioned urban middle classes—then who will fight for Pakistan?
Pakistan has dozens of terrorist organisations which operate from its soil and export terrorism to rest of the world. These organisations have a financial ecosystem that has survived the international scrutiny and multiple operations from international agencies to stop terror financing.
Pakistan has five broad categories of terrorist organisations: (1) Globally oriented; (2) Afghanistan-oriented; (3) India-oriented; (4) Domestically oriented; and (5) Sectarian (anti-Shia).
The India-oriented terrorist organisations include: Lashkar-e-Taiba (LET) formed in the late 1980s; Jaish-e-Mohammed (JEM) founded in 2000; Harakat-ul Jihad Islami (HUJI) formed in 1980; Harakat ul-Mujahidin (HUM) was established in 1998; Hizbul Mujahideen (HM) was formed in 1989.
According to a study paper “Pakistan Army and Terrorism; an unholy alliance” done by Amsterdam based, European Foundation for South Asian Studies (EFSAS), Amsterdam, “Pakistan… plays a key role in funding these terrorist organizations. As per reports, the yearly expenditure of ISI(Pakistan’s intelligence agency) towards the terrorist organizations runs between 125-250 million USD, covering salaries, cash incentives for high-risk operations and retainers for guides, porters and informers.”
An internal report of Pakistan governments Financial Monitoring Unit(FMU) , titled “National Risk Assessment on Money Laundering and Terrorism Financing 2017” has details of how terror groups are generating funds in Pakistan. This report was never made public but excerpts of these reports were quoted by Noor Zahid and Madeeha Anwar in a Voice of America report published in 2017. The duo exposed the funding of Pak terror groups in a report titled ‘Pakistan Terror Groups Get Rich From Crime, Money Laundering’
According to Zahid and Anwar, “Waves of crime in Pakistan — including extortion, smuggling and kidnapping for ransom — are major sources of terrorist financing for extremist groups in the country. “Main sources of income of terrorists in Pakistan include foreign funding, drug trafficking, kidnapping for ransom, extortion from business, vehicle snatching,” according to the 45-page confidential report by FMU, which is an intelligence service department within Pakistan’s Ministry of Finance.
“The report, which had not been released publicly, says over 200 local and international terrorist organizations generate billions of Pakistani rupees to fund their activities. Annual operational budget of terrorist organizations is from 5 million rupees [about $48,000] to 25 million rupees [about $240,000],” the report said, according to The News website, which published these excerpts.
‘Terrorism Monitor’ of Jamestown Foundation revealed in December 2024 another important facet of terror funding in Pakistan. It said, “Terrorist groups in Pakistan frequently use high-denomination currency to finance their operations. Permitting a large number of high-value notes to be in circulation makes it easy for bad actors to transfer considerable amounts of money without a digital footprint, making illicit activities easier to conduct.”
The relatively high availability of such bills in circulation in Pakistan is due to the country’s underutilization of electronic payment systems, it added.
According to this report, Tunda, a notorious bomb expert for Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) who reportedly masterminded more than 40 bombings in India had told the Indian law enforcement agencies after his arrest with huge amount of Pakistan currency that large denomination bills were “kings who could do anything for them.”
“Pakistani denominations currently in circulation include 10-, 20-, 50-, 100-, 500-, 1,000-, and 5,000-rupee notes. It is noteworthy that Pakistan, which makes up 3 percent of the world’s population, accounts for 7.1 percent of the world’s unbanked adults,” says this report.
According to a research brief prepared by US Congressional Research Service in 2023, “Although Pakistan’s 2014 National Action Plan to counter terrorism seeks to ensure that no armed militias are allowed to function in the country, several United Nations- and U.S.-designated terrorist groups continue to operate from Pakistani soil.”
Islamic Charities
Almost all the terrorist organisations have set up Islamic charities as their fronts in Pakistan. These charities operate globally. In fact, USAID had funded many of these charities, revealed a recent report by the Middle East Forum, a US based think tank revealed. In addition the ‘Zakat’ collected from common people during the month of Ramadan by these charities are also funnelled to fund these terrorist organisations.
Since the 1980s, Pakistan has had a system of compulsory collection of zakat, relying on a state-administered zakat fund and zakat councils at federal, provincial and district levels. In 2024, the average zakat giver paid about 15,000 Pakistani rupees with over 50 million Pakistanis contributing. The total funds generated in Pakistan through Zakat was over 600 billion Pakistani rupees in 2024. A large chunk of this money goes for oiling the terror infrastructure established by Pakistani state and their proxy terrorist groups.
In a turn of events that lays bare the enduring proclivity of Pakistan’s military-intelligence apparatus for perfidious adventurism, the subcontinent has once again been plunged into the vortex of tragedy and retribution. On 22 April, the scenic tranquillity of Pahalgam in Jammu and Kashmir was shattered by a heinous act of terror—an attack carried out by assailants of Pakistani provenance, leaving in its wake a trail of innocent blood, most of it that of unsuspecting tourists.
This egregious violation of human sanctity provoked an unequivocal and resolute response from New Delhi. In a swift Cabinet Sub-Committee review chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on 23 April, the Indian government charted a bold course of action, announced by India’s Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri. Among the arsenal of retaliatory instruments under consideration, it was the suspension of India’s obligations under the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) that emerged as the most telling—and symbolic—rebuke to Islamabad.
This abrupt departure from what has long been a pillar of regional diplomacy signals a watershed moment—both literally and metaphorically—in South Asia’s geopolitical tapestry. For more than six decades, the IWT has served as an improbable exemplar of bilateral cooperation, a rare artefact of amity amidst a chronically discordant relationship. That India should now suspend this treaty reflects a fundamental recalibration of its strategic posture, particularly vis-à-vis Pakistan’s sustained dalliance with proxy terrorism. But before one delves into the ramifications of this audacious move, one must first examine the edifice of the Indus Waters Treaty—its origins, its operational architecture, and the significance it has come to assume in both geopolitical and existential terms.
A Riverine Pact Forged in Discord
Conceived in the crucible of Cold War anxieties and brokered under the watchful eyes of the World Bank, the IWT was inked in 1960 after an arduous nine-year negotiation. At the heart of the agreement lay the equitable distribution of the six rivers of the Indus basin—the Indus, Jhelum, and Chenab in the west; and the Ravi, Beas, and Sutlej in the east.
In what can only be described as an act of magnanimous restraint, India ceded exclusive control over the three Western rivers—comprising nearly 70% of the total water volume—to Pakistan, while retaining dominion over the three Eastern ones. This asymmetry, while glaring, was accepted in the spirit of regional stability and the hope that water, the most elemental of life’s resources, might also irrigate the parched soil of subcontinental peace. But alas, that noble aspiration has withered. Successive regimes in Islamabad have weaponised non-state actors, cultivating a cottage industry of jihadist terror that has repeatedly spilled across the Line of Control and stained Indian soil with blood. And yet, even amidst war and vitriol, India abided by the treaty, honouring its commitments with a stoic discipline that belied the provocations it endured. This forbearance, however, is not inexhaustible.
The Cost of Generosity
To understand the magnitude of India’s concession, consider the numbers. The Eastern rivers—Ravi, Beas, and Sutlej—over which India has unfettered rights, collectively yield about 41 billion cubic metres of water annually. The Western rivers, gifted to Pakistan, deliver nearly 99 billion cubic metres—more than double the volume under Indian control. This hydrological largesse has become the very artery of Pakistan’s survival. In a nation where agriculture constitutes over 25% of GDP and sustains approximately 70% of the populace, water is not a mere resource—it is an existential imperative. The Indus basin fuels its farms, powers its turbines, and feeds its people. To perturb this flow is to imperil the nation’s economic equilibrium and societal cohesion.
And yet, Pakistan’s security establishment has long treated this precious accommodation as a given—immutable, untouchable, and immune to the vagaries of geopolitical conduct. This misplaced confidence has emboldened it to pursue a duplicitous doctrine—of nurturing militant proxies even as it benefited from the benevolence of Indian water diplomacy.
The Straw That Broke the Canal
By suspending the IWT, India is sending a message steeped in symbolism but not lacking in substance. This is not merely an outburst of indignation—it is a calibrated policy shift. The message is unequivocal: India shall no longer subsidise its adversary’s antagonism with strategic concessions. If Pakistan insists on fomenting unrest through insidious means, it must also be prepared to forfeit the privileges accorded to it under treaties predicated on good faith.
One may argue, with some justification, that India’s current water infrastructure lacks the immediate capacity to divert or fully harness the Western rivers. The requisite reservoirs, barrages, and canal systems for such a hydrological overhaul are still under development. But in geopolitics, perception often precedes practice. The very act of invoking the treaty’s suspension has rattled the strategic calculus in Islamabad and laid bare the fragility of its assumptions.
For decades, Pakistan has operated on the belief that India’s strategic restraint—especially in the hydrological domain—was sacrosanct. It misread India’s civility as weakness. That illusion has now been spectacularly shattered.
A Faustian Bargain That Failed
What, then, has Pakistan gained from its Faustian pact with terror? Has its strategy of bleeding India through a thousand cuts yielded dividends? On the contrary, the costs have been profound and self-defeating.
Far from “liberating” Kashmir or coercing India into negotiations on its own terms, Pakistan finds itself internationally isolated, diplomatically suspect, and economically anaemic. Worse still, the terror groups it once mentored have now metastasised, turning their guns inward and threatening the cohesion of the Pakistani state itself. The logic of proxy warfare—premised on the deniability of violence and the expendability of cannon fodder—has unravelled. In its place stands a polity riddled with extremism, plagued by economic fragility, and mired in geopolitical ignominy. The international community, once indulgent of Pakistan’s strategic anxieties, now views its double game with growing exasperation.
The Geopolitical Ripple Effect
India’s suspension of the IWT, while unilateral in action, has multilateral implications. It signals to the world that New Delhi is prepared to reframe the contours of South Asian diplomacy. Water—long considered sacrosanct—can no longer be divorced
To paraphrase the ancient wisdom of the East, one cannot bathe twice in the same river—because the water has moved on, and so has time. Pakistan, too, must now move on—from the shackles of militancy, from the dogmas of military overreach, and from the delusion that duplicity can be a permanent policy.
If it fails to do so, history may not be as forgiving as the Indus once was.