Pakistan’s military and intelligence establishment has long been accused of using proxy jihadist groups as tools of its foreign policy. From Kashmir to Afghanistan, Pakistani-backed terrorist groups have waged war in pursuit of Islamabad’s strategic goals. From the first Kashmir war, soon after independence, to the Taliban’s return in Kabul, the Pakistan behaviour has been the same: armed non-state groups are treated as low-cost tools to pressure stronger rivals, avoid direct war, and keep influence in neighboring countries. What seems rational to Rawalpindi’s strategists has produced decades of destabilizing outcomes for the neighborhood and even for Pakistan itself. What’s alarming is how little the world has done to change it. The only way to stop it is to make the strategy unaffordable, both politically and financially, and in terms of reputation.
How the proxy habit began
Since 1947, Kashmir and Afghanistan have been the primary theaters of Pakistan’s proxy wars. From its earliest days as a nation, Pakistan sought to gain control of Kashmir, a Muslim-majority region in India, by using different militant groups recognized as terrorist groups by the UN. It all started only months after independence in 1947, after Pakistani leaders sent tribal militias into Kashmir which led to the first Indo-Pakistan war. This set a pattern: Pakistan repeated the tactic in 1965 in Operation Gibraltar and again in 1999 in the Kargil conflict, trying to seize Kashmir with covert forces and minimal cost.
Since the beginning, Pakistan’s military intelligence (ISI) has actively continued cultivating an insurgency by islamist jihadist groups in Indian-administered Kashmir, providing support and training to militant groups. These groups, such as Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, carry out attacks in Kashmir and India while allowing Pakistan to deny direct involvement. Despite formal bans, these groups continued operating from Pakistan. The 2008 Mumbai massacre, planned by LeT, exposed the depth of this Pakistan strategy further, as later testimoniesrevealed that the handlers were in Pakistan and belonged to ISI.
Across the western border in Afghanistan, Pakistan followed a similar playbook. During the 1980s Soviet-Afghan War, Pakistan with US and Saudi help, armed and trained the Afghan mujahideen fighters. This proxy jihad succeeded in driving out the Soviets, and Pakistan gained tremendous influence over Afghanistan’s different factions. After the Soviet withdrawal, Islamabad continued its interference in Afghanistan’s civil wars. It supported the rise of the Taliban in the 1990s, seeing the Taliban as a friendly force that could secure Pakistan’s interests in Kabul. Pakistani support, which included weapons, funds, training, and even Pakistani fighters, was critical in bringing the Taliban to power by 1996. The Taliban regime provided Pakistan “strategic depth” against India, meaning Afghanistan would be free of Indian influence and effectively become a Pakistani-aligned backyard.
After 2001, while the Taliban were out of power, Pakistan helped sustain them by offering safe haven, training, and weapons. Even as Islamabad publicly signed on to the US “War on Terror,” it ran a double track, behind the Nato allies, bolstered the Taliban and other jihadist networks while portraying itself as an essential counterterror partner. Leaked US military documents from 2010, published by The New York Times, indicated that, despite receiving over $1 billion annually from Washington to fight terror groups, Pakistan permitted ISI officials to meet Taliban commanders and coordinate attacks against American forces.
The use of proxy jihadists in both Afghanistan and India, innitially, had several advantages from the perspective of the Pakistani security establishment. First, it provided asymmetric leverage against India, a much larger rival from an economic and military perspective. Pakistan’s conventional military is smaller than India’s, so supporting insurgencies and extremist militias became a way to carry the doctrine of “bleed India with a thousand cuts” without risking full-scale conventional war. Second, the jihadist groups are non-state actors, so Pakistan can insist that any cross-border terror attacks are beyond its control and deny any involvement. This cloak of deniability makes it hard to pin responsibility directly on Islamabad. Third, Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, developed by the late 1990s, act as an umbrella under which it can sponsor sub-conventional warfare with less fear of massive Indian retaliation.
This calculus has now even burning Pakistan itself as well. Some of those militants, or their splinters, that were supposed to harm across the Pakistan borders, have turned on Pakistan. The Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) is the most lethal example which massacred 141 children in an attack on Army Public School in 2014. That attack remains a national trauma and a stark lesson that terrorists do not stay “useful assets” forever. As then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned Islamabad in 2011, “You can’t keep snakes in your backyard and expect them only to bite your neighbors.” The Pakistan bit that return of the Taliban to Kabul in 2021 would change the situation in home, did not happen either. In fact, the TTP has intensified attacks from Afghanistan safe havens, leaving Islamabad now complaining about cross-border sanctuaries, an echo of years when others said the same about Pakistan.
The question often asked is then why if the costs have been so high, Pakistan still continuing same path?
The Pakistan security establishment, that is the main body running the country, in their narrow short-term calculation, proxy war still works as it keeps Kashmir unsettled at a relatively low upfront cost, gives leverage in Afghanistan politics and allows plausible deniability to bypas any international punishment.
This persistent use of terrorist proxies unfortuantely hasn’t been dealth with proper consequences. It’s stricking how limited international pressure has been in forcing pakistan to change this behaviour. Even when there had been pressure, the signals are mixed. Western aid has swung between generosity and strictness; deep sanctions have been discussed but rarely imposed. The country was put in FATF “grey list” but it was removed in 2022, even though most terrorist infrastructure on the ground has not been dismantled.
As long as the perceived benefits outweigh the costs, a state may continue such destructive behavior. Pakistan’s generals have calculated that supporting jihadists is a low-cost, high-payoff strategy – and historically, they largely got away with it.
The cost for such behaviour by any country must be fundamentally raised to the point where continued sponsorship of extremist and terrorist groups hurts more than it helps. Raising the cost can take multiple forms. Diplomatically, by candidly calling out and shaming any state that support terror. Multilateral forums like the UN could be used to condemn countries that wage proxy wars. Economically, tools like sanctions and aid cuts are powerful and could be considered formally designating states sponsor of terrorism. Financial bodies like FATF will also continue to monitor and pressure countries with such record, until they fully crack down on terror financing.
In Pakistan’s case, the clearest lever is to freeze military aid, diplomatic clarity and implement financial pressure and military sanctions until there is verifiable, and sustained action against all terrorist groups, without exceptions or rebranding. This should start with the United States and be echoed by all other countries in international community. Aid and security cooperation must be strictly conditional on closing camps, prosecuting leadership, seizing assets, ending cross-border facilitation of terror, and cooperating against sanctuaries across the Durand Line. If the international community does its job, then the calculus in Rawalpindi will finally shift. Proxy jihad will stop looking like a smart shortcut and start looking like what it is: a path to isolation, crisis, and self-harm.
Author: Natiq Malikzada is a journalist and human rights advocate. He holds an MA in International Relations and an LLM in International Human Rights Law from the University of Essex.
This op-ed is published by Amu TV and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of the outlet.
