A recent report by the European Union Agency for Asylum (EUAA) has punctured the foundational myth of Pakistan's counterterrorism doctrine, acknowledging that Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) and Harakat-ul-Mujahideen are among the factions linked to the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). The EUAA Country Guidance: Pakistan, released on 1 October 2026, has drawn sharp analytical attention for what it reveals about the structural incoherence of Islamabad's militant management strategy.

What the EUAA Report Says

Italian journalist and South Asia expert Francesca Marino, writing for Parrhesia News, notes that the EUAA document stops short of claiming JeM takes direct orders from the TTP. However, it concedes that Pakistan's militant landscape resists the neat compartmentalisation that the state has long projected. 'The walls between the organisations have always been porous. Men move, commanders defect, factions merge, seminaries supply recruits to more than one battlefield, and ideological affinities survive changes of name or patronage,' Marino wrote.

The 'Good Taliban, Bad Taliban' Doctrine Unravelled

The roots of Pakistan's bifurcated Taliban policy, according to the analysis, lie in a state decision to sort armed Islamist groups by their strategic utility — treating those fighting in Afghanistan as assets, those targeting India as proxies, and reserving the terrorist label exclusively for groups that turned on Pakistan itself. 'The policy assumed that organisations sharing seminaries, clerics, veterans, financiers, and a Deobandi-jihadist vocabulary would respect the filing system of the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate. They did not,' the analysis stated.

Marino characterised Islamabad's long-standing framing of the TTP as an Afghan export as 'incomplete to the point of dishonesty.' 'But geography is not genealogy. The presence of militants in Afghanistan does not make Afghanistan the author of a movement created by Pakistani commanders, rooted in Pakistan's former tribal areas, and shaped by decades of Pakistani jihadist policy,' the analysis said.

The Bahawalpur Double Standard

The analysis highlighted a pointed contradiction: even as Pakistan bombs Afghan territory and demands Kabul dismantle militant sanctuaries, JeM's headquarters in Bahawalpur — struck by India during Operation Sindoor — is reportedly being repaired. 'Apparently, the principle that governments are responsible for militant infrastructure on their territory becomes geographically flexible somewhere near the border,' Marino wrote.

Following Operation Sindoor, which demonstrated that India could locate and strike visible terror infrastructure, JeM has reportedly shifted from concentration to dispersal — rebuilding Markaz Subhan Allah in Bahawalpur while simultaneously expanding digital fundraising channels.

Blowback Rebranded as Foreign Aggression

Blaming Afghanistan for the TTP allows Pakistan to reframe domestic blowback as cross-border aggression, the analysis argued. The 'good Taliban, bad Taliban' doctrine, Marino contended, 'failed because the categories were never real to the militants themselves.' The strategic wager that a proxy infrastructure could be confined to external theatres ultimately ran up against a basic reality: 'Pakistan built a proxy system for wars beyond its borders and eventually discovered that borders were the one thing the system did not respect.'

The EUAA report's timing — arriving weeks after fresh India-Pakistan tensions — gives its findings added resonance, and analysts say it could inform how European governments assess asylum claims from Pakistani nationals as well as broader policy conversations on Islamabad's counter-militancy credibility.