Editorial: Karma comes back

The airstrikes against TTP militants holed up deep inside Afghanistan reflect Pakistan’s duplicity on terrorism

For a country that has made terrorism an instrument of state policy to push its strategic goals, Pakistan is now forced to taste its own medicine. The airstrikes against the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) militants holed up deep inside Afghanistan reflect Pakistan’s duplicity on terrorism and demonstrate how nurturing terror elements can turn them into Frankenstein monsters. Unless Islamabad abandons its long-held binary narrative of ‘good terrorists, bad terrorists’ and turns over a new leaf, the country will continue to suffer the misery that its military establishment has inflicted on others in the past. Pakistan’s fighter jets recently struck at two provinces in Afghanistan, a country that it once fondly believed would provide strategic depth in its existential war against India. The offensive resulted in the death of five women and three children while the Pakistani foreign ministry said terrorists belonging to the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan’s Hafiz Gul Bahadur group were targeted after the outfit claimed responsibility for the March 16 attack on an army outpost in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province in which seven personnel, including two officers, were killed. The infringement of Afghan airspace has triggered a war of words between the two countries, once seen as allies. Islamabad alleged that the recent wave of terrorism had the full support and assistance of Afghanistan, a charge denied by the Taliban regime in Kabul. The boot, it seems, is firmly on the other foot.

For over three decades, the same charges have been levelled against the ISI and the Pakistan army by India, Iran and the former Afghan governments led by Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani. In a twist of irony, Pakistani launched airstrikes in areas that were once the ISI’s favourite breeding grounds in Afghanistan for exporting terror to Kashmir and other places. Now, the ISI says anti-Pakistan militants are using this rugged terrain as a safe haven. India has been a victim of terrorism exported by Pakistan through infiltration across the border. The TTP, set up in 2007 as an umbrella group of several militant outfits with the aim of imposing a strict version of Islam on the country, has ideological linkages with the Afghan Taliban, whom the Pakistani security establishment had nurtured for many years. Pakistan had expected that the Taliban regime that came to power in Kabul in August 2021 would stop the use of Afghan soil against Pakistan by expelling TTP operatives. However, it now says Kabul has refused to rein in the TTP. The TTP has gathered strength after the Taliban takeover of Kabul in August 2021. The group is aligned with the Taliban in Afghanistan and managed to gain tactical experience while fighting Afghan security forces alongside the Taliban during the US troop withdrawal. It has stood firm on its conditions of implementing Sharia in Pakistan and a demerger of tribal areas from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.