How Pakistan’s ‘strategic depth’ on terrorism turned into a ‘strategic trap’

Pakistan is no longer “unstable”; it is unravelling in real time. A former prime minister held incommunicado, an army trapped in a border war it cannot win, and a Taliban regime that no longer obeys Pakistan but openly accuses it. For decades, Islamabad stood on two pillars — an army that dominated at home and proxies that dominated Afghanistan. Today, one is cracking and the other has turned into a predator.

A State in Decomposition, Not Just a Government in Crisis

Imran Khan’s fate is less a human-interest story than a stress test of Pakistan’s institutions. A single claim by a minor Kabul outlet that he had been “mysteriously killed” in Adiala Jail triggered global uproar and forced multiple state denials, yet no institution could immediately produce independent verification of a former prime minister’s basic condition.

More from Opinion

What Putin’s visit next week means for India-Russia ties in a turbulent world Illegal and outrageous detention of Indian passenger in Shanghai shows India’s strategy of ‘managing’ China is not working

In stable states, leaders lose elections. In decaying states, leaders simply disappear from public verification.

That opacity sits atop a security system coming apart. PIPS recorded 521 terrorist attacks in 2024 — a 70 per cent jump — killing 852 people, with 95 per cent concentrated in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan. CRSS logged 2,546 fatalities the same year — a 66 per cent rise, including 685 security personnel, the worst toll in nearly a decade.

Overlay this with an economy kept alive by two dozen IMF programmes since 1958, the latest a $7-billion rollover. This is not a crisis; it is managed collapse: a state solvent enough to service debts but too hollowed-out to secure provinces, control its borders, or even account for its former leader.

Quick Reads

View All

What Putin’s visit next week means for India-Russia ties in a turbulent world

How Pakistan’s nuclear-terror nexus enters its most dangerous phase under Munir’s dictatorship

‘Strategic Depth’ That Became ‘Strategic Trap’

For years, Pakistan invested in a doctrine that sounded bold but was fundamentally ahistorical: Afghanistan would be shaped, constrained, and stabilised through Pakistani proxies. The Taliban were cultivated not only to deny India room in Kabul but also to keep Pashtun nationalism from turning inward and questioning the Durand Line itself. In Islamabad’s strategic imagination, Afghanistan was never a neighbour with its own memory; it was an expandable security perimeter.

The doctrine cracked the moment the Taliban gained something Pakistan never planned for: independence of external support. When the United States exited in 2021, Rawalpindi assumed it had regained a loyal client. Instead, the Taliban returned with their own ideology, their own constituency, and, most dangerously for Pakistan, their own diplomatic options in Beijing, Tehran, Moscow, Doha, and Central Asia.

A proxy with its own sources of legitimacy will eventually stop behaving like a proxy. That is the flaw at the heart of Pakistan’s Afghan project.

The consequences were immediate and structural. Militant violence inside Pakistan surged as groups aligned with the Taliban gained ideological confidence and territorial breathing room across the Durand Line.

Provinces once celebrated as Pakistan’s “strategic depth” — Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan — are now insurgency belts where the state loses soldiers faster than it can rotate reinforcements. The very geography that was supposed to protect Pakistan has become the geography through which violence returns to it.

Then came open confrontation. Pakistan’s airstrikes in Kabul, Khost and Paktika, meant to restore deterrence, instead revealed how much leverage had drained away. The Taliban responded not as insurgents but as a sovereign state: overrunning border posts, tearing down Pakistani fencing, and issuing public warnings of retaliation. The language of sovereignty Pakistan once used against Kabul is now used by Kabul against Pakistan.

Even Islamabad’s coercive tools backfired. Mass expulsions of Afghan refugees were meant to pressure the Taliban; instead, they gave Kabul a narrative of Pakistani cruelty and sent hundreds of thousands of embittered returnees back into a political environment where anti-Pakistan sentiment is the cheapest, most potent currency.

At the heart of this strategic inversion lies Pakistan’s fatal misreading of geography:

It believed proximity guaranteed influence.
Afghanistan has proved proximity guarantees vulnerability.

What was marketed as “strategic depth” has become strategic exposure. The depth now lies on the Afghan side of the Durand Line; the trap lies on the Pakistani side.

This doctrine did not simply fail; it reversed.

Afghanistan’s New Leverage: Less Dependent, More Defiant

Taliban can defy Pakistan today because, for the first time in decades, Kabul’s survival no longer runs through Islamabad. The Taliban now command enough diplomatic, economic and strategic oxygen to act as an autonomous state rather than a Pakistani extension.

China’s quiet courtship — from interest in lithium and copper concessions to security dialogues around Belt-and-Road corridors — gives Kabul alternative patronage. Iran offers assured access to Chabahar; Central Asian states provide northern transit routes; and Russia maintains open channels for leverage against the West. Together, these options have eroded Pakistan’s long-standing role as Afghanistan’s gatekeeper.

Islamabad’s own pressure tactics — most notably the mass expulsions of Afghan refugees — have boomeranged, handing the Taliban a ready-made narrative of Pakistani hostility and amplifying anti-Pakistan sentiment across the border.

The result is an inversion of dependency: Afghanistan now has the external support to say “no”, and Pakistan no longer has the tools to enforce a “yes”. Kabul’s reduced reliance has translated into a sharper posture, from tolerating Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) sanctuaries to openly challenging Pakistan along the frontier.

The Border Problem Pakistan Cannot Solve

The Durand Line is not just a border; it is the original fracture running through Pakistan’s strategic imagination. Drawn in 1893 and rejected by every Afghan government since, it splits Pashtun tribal homelands in a way no political settlement can reconcile.

For Pakistan, even acknowledging that the line is “disputed” risks reopening the question of territorial integrity in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan. For the Taliban, recognising it would betray their single largest support base and concede to a colonial geography they have resisted for over a century. The line exists on maps, but not in Afghan political memory and certainly not in the Taliban’s narrative of sovereignty.

This unresolved cartography is now producing a real, escalating frontier. The 2025 clashes — Taliban fighters overrunning Pakistani posts around Spin Boldak, Pakistani airstrikes destroying Afghan border positions, and days of retaliatory shelling — mark a shift from episodic friction to sustained militarised contestation.

What Islamabad once brushed off as “skirmishes” now resembles a low-grade border conflict between two heavily armed actors: a nuclear-armed but internally weakened Pakistan on one side, and a battle-hardened, internationally unconstrained Taliban regime on the other. The danger is not just miscalculation; it is structural. A border neither side can formally concede is a border neither side can stabilise, and that makes the Durand Line the most combustible faultline in the Indian subcontinent’s west.

A Multiplier of Risk

Pakistan’s unravelling is no longer a bilateral problem; it is a regional risk multiplier. A state that is politically opaque, economically brittle, and militarily overstretched behaves unpredictably, not from strategy, but from weakness. For India, this means fewer calibrated, state-directed provocations but greater danger from freelance jihadist actors, accidental escalations, and a nuclear command chain exposed to internal chaos.

For China, China-Pakistan Economic Corridor once its flagship corridor, now runs through territories under insurgent pressure, and its hoped-for Afghan extension depends on a Taliban that Pakistan can no longer influence. Iran and Central Asian states face refugee surges, narcotics flows, and ideology spilling across porous borders.

At the core of this regional insecurity lies the collapse of Pakistan’s two foundational assumptions: that its military-intelligence establishment could indefinitely manage domestic politics, and that Afghanistan could be engineered into a controllable hinterland. Both illusions have disintegrated. The Taliban are defiant, the TTP resurgent, and Pakistan’s internal legitimacy eroded.

The Indian subcontinent’s central strategic question is no longer what Pakistan will do, but what Pakistan will become and how the region will manage the fallout. The earthquake of this decade has already begun in Islamabad.

(The author is a practicing advocate. She writes articles on women’s rights, politics, and law. The views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)