Pakistan has continued to face a worsening internal insurgency despite years of border fencing, crossing closures, and cross-border airstrikes into Afghanistan, according to an analysis published in Tolo News on 15 July 2026. The piece argues that Islamabad's external military campaign serves as a distraction from deep-rooted domestic political failures rather than a genuine counter-terrorism solution.

The insurgency numbers Pakistan cannot explain away

According to the Pakistan Institute for Conflict and Security Studies (PICSS), Pakistan recorded 1,066 militant attacks in 2025 — the highest figure since 2014 and 17 per cent higher than the previous year. Security forces conducted 482 operations and reportedly killed 2,138 militants — more than double the prior year's toll — yet the attack count still rose. The bulk of violence remained concentrated in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan.

What the analyst argues

Dawood Safi, an Afghan researcher and Fulbright scholar, wrote in Tolo News that while Pakistan has genuine security concerns — armed groups have killed civilians, police officers, and soldiers — sanctuary across the border is only part of the picture. 'Sanctuary is only part of the picture. It cannot explain the persistence, geographic concentration and political resilience of militancy within Pakistan itself,' Safi wrote.

He argued that military action can disrupt networks and halt specific attacks but cannot substitute for political legitimacy. In Pashtun areas, he noted, communities have faced what he described as military brutality and state coercion. Pakistani authorities banned the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM) and arrested several of its activists — a group that had demanded accountability for extrajudicial killings, information on enforced disappearances, landmine removal, and an end to collective suspicion of Pashtun communities.

Balochistan: Resources without representation

The analysis also pointed to Balochistan — a province that supplies gas, minerals, and strategic value to Pakistan — where residents have reportedly remained poor, politically marginalised, and excluded from decisions over their own resources. Enforced disappearances in the province have drawn sustained criticism, and the life sentence handed to Baloch rights activist Mahrang Baloch in June has been cited as emblematic of the state's approach to dissent.

The civilian toll of cross-border strikes

Pakistan has claimed that its airstrikes inside Afghanistan have destroyed militant camps and killed large numbers of fighters. However, no named senior Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) commander has been independently confirmed killed in the publicly available record since October 2025. Meanwhile, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) reported that 372 Afghan civilians were killed and 397 others injured in cross-border violence during the first quarter of 2026, with airstrikes accounting for the majority of fatalities.

The diagnosis problem

'Bombing Kabul and Kandahar did not resolve Pakistan's strategic problem at home. Closing border crossings, weaponising trade routes and forcibly deporting millions of Afghans neither ended the insurgency inside Pakistan nor forced the Taliban to capitulate,' Safi wrote. He concluded that as long as militancy draws strength from alienation within Pakistan, the insurgency will persist. 'The centre of the crisis is not Kabul. It is the widening distance between the Pakistani state and many of its own citizens,' he added.

The analysis surfaces a structural tension that Islamabad has yet to publicly address: whether its Afghanistan policy is a security strategy or a political deflection — and whether the two can be separated at all.