Reaping What They Sowed: Pakistan’s Taliban Problem

Pakistan’s decades of sowing terrorism across the region have now bitten its own feet, and the country is bleeding.

For years, the power elite in Islamabad and Rawalpindi treated terrorist groups as tools for cheap leverage to bend Afghanistan, injure India, and implement its influence they couldn’t earn through economic strength or internal governance. They called it “strategic depth,” which, in practice, it meant outsourcing anti-India foreign policy to terror groups, who see guns and sermons as the only way of living. Today’s Pakistan border firefights with the Taliban, a group Islamabad sheltered and fed for decades, are not a mystery. They are just harvesting what they sow.

Pakistan midwifed and sheltered the Taliban for years, offering sanctuary, medical care, and fundraising routes through Friday-prayer networks in its mosques. The bet was simple: a friendly Islamic emirate in Kabul would keep India out, give Pakistan room to maneuver, and keep its western border calm. Instead, the Taliban are behaving exactly as they always have: an ideologically hardline movement that puts creed and internal cohesion above anyone else’s wish list. Even Pakistan’s defense minister, Khawaja Asif, has admitted this, saying, “The Afghan Taliban are our own creation; we nurtured them ..., but they have now become untrustworthy.” Islamabad now calls this a “betrayal.” It isn’t. It’s blowback. When you train yourself to believe a tiger can be a house pet, the problem isn’t the tiger; it’s your stupidity.

Today, when they are seeing the wrong calculated policy bet harming them with bombs going off or border posts burning, Pakistan's favorite and laziest excuse is: “India did it.” The claim is that New Delhi manipulates the situation, funds Baloch movements, and whispers in the Taliban’s ear. One of the reasons is India's recent close engagement with the Taliban and the group Foreign Minister's recent visit to India, where India offered humanitarian aid and announced the opening of its embassy in Kabul. Perhaps, India, unlike all other regional states, has kept a cautious diplomatic relationship with the Taliban. All other countries in the region have their embassies open and have strong relations with the group, and India, for its interest, needed it too. But India still has not embraced the Taliban as partners in progress; it has only kept engagement, technical, and humanitarian aid. India, as a victim of decades of cross border terrorism, understands that an outfit that bans girls from school and fetishizes a seventh-century social order will never be a trustworthy partner for a modern state. India is careful because the Taliban are predictable in one way: they will always choose ideology over interdependence.

Meanwhile, Pakistan continues to pay for the same strategic delusion. It still armed narratives and networks that keeps bleeding Afghanistan for 40 years, and they are still nurturing terrorist groups in Kashmir to regularly target India. This trend even reaches globally. The 2005 London bombers who traveled to Pakistan before the attack; Najibullah Zazi, who trained in Pakistan’s tribal belt for a plot against the New York subway; Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square bomber, who admitted training in Waziristan. These names and trails that came to light over the past two decades have all been byproducts of a state that sponsored ecosystems of militancy, and whenever they have been questioned for it, they have acted surprised, as if it had nothing to do with long aimed “strategic depth,” for which it risked its reputation and became a safe haven for terrorist groups.

Now to the other side of the border, the Taliban’s stance toward Pakistan’s terrorism problem is because the Taliban do not see the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) as “terrorists.” They see them as ideological kin, men who fought alongside them, share madrassa lineages, and attended the same funerals over the twenty years of war they carried with the previous government of Afghanistan. Taliban spokesmen, a while ago even scolded Pakistani clerics for using the label “khawarij” for the TTP, which means rebels against Islam, and called the term inflammatory. When Pakistan says to the Afghan Taliban, “close TTP camps,” the Taliban hear “turn your guns on your cousins," which is impossible for them to do. Taliban always claim that there are no terrorist groups in Afghanistan, as Taliban's foreign minister did during his India trip. This indicates the Taliban fundamentally do not view the TTP as a terrorist group, but rather as an Islamist opposition that should be dealt with through talks, reintegration, or, at most, gentle pressure.

Now that the Pakistani jets crossed into Afghanistan airspace multiple times in recent years, claiming to target TTP leaders, often killing civilians as well, the Taliban, eager to posture as guardians of Afghanistan and remove the tag of being Pakistani product in the minds of the Afghanistan people, fired back along the border. Both sides now claim victories and inflated body counts, while ordinary Afghan people and Pakistanis pay the price in the middle of the fire. The tragedy is not that this is happening; the tragedy is that it was always going to happen once Pakistan chose supporting terrorism as a language for foreign policy and the Taliban chose militancy as a state.

Sympathy? It’s hard to conjure it for Islamabad’s elite. They built this, brick by brick. They spent years underwriting the men who blew up schools, assassinated police chiefs, and erased girls from classrooms and women from society. They used Afghanistan as a chessboard and Kashmir as a pressure valve on India. They ignored the simplest lesson in statecraft: you cannot subcontract your sovereignty to zealots and expect them to obey the contract. And when the same zealots turned their guns toward Pakistan, the instinct in Rawalpindi was not repentance but PR, find a camera, say “India,” and wait for applause. It’s a tired routine, and the world is yawning.

None of this exonerates the Taliban. They run a regime of fear and exclusion. They’ve turned a generation of Afghan girls into prisoners of their homes and a generation of Afghan boys into props for a medieval project and sustaining the future of global terrorism. Their claim to “secure Afghanistan's borders” is in direct conflict with their refusal to stop movements of their allies like Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, who dream of global jihad. They say they protect Afghanistan’s territory, then give safe passage to global terrorists into the same territory, paving the way for other countries’ invasion of Afghanistan's territory. They are not a victim of circumstance; they are an author of it. When they posture as defenders of Afghanistan's dignity against Pakistan, don’t forget that their definition of dignity excludes half the country, women. A border skirmish does not whitewash a war on women.