THERE is a particular cruelty in fighting a war that your neighbours are permitted to sustain indefinitely. Pakistan has lived with that reality for about three decades, confronting militant groups that repeatedly regroup across a border it cannot fully control. More than 80,000 Pakistanis have lost their lives to terrorism since 2001. Soldiers, police officers, teachers, labourers, worshippers and schoolchildren have paid the price of a conflict whose origins increasingly lie beyond Pakistan’s frontiers. The casualties continue, while the sanctuaries that sustain the violence remain largely untouched.
The scale of the current threat should command far greater international attention than it does. According to the Global Terrorism Index, terrorism-related deaths in Pakistan rose by 66% in 2024, making it the country’s deadliest year in a decade. Terrorist attacks more than doubled, increasing from 517 in 2023 to 1,099 in 2024, the first time Pakistan has crossed the one-thousand-attack threshold in a single year. Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) alone accounted for more than half of all terrorism-related deaths, carrying out 482 attacks that killed 558 people, its deadliest operational year since 2011. Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) also intensified its campaign, with fatalities linked to its attacks increasing from 88 to 388 within a year. More than 96% of all attacks and deaths occurred in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan, the two provinces bordering Afghanistan. Pakistan now ranks second globally on the Global Terrorism Index, behind only Burkina Faso. For a nuclear-armed country of more than 250 million people, that is not merely a statistic but an indictment of a regional security environment that continues to permit cross-border terrorism with insufficient international accountability.
The question of Afghan complicity is no longer a matter of Pakistani allegation alone. The planning of the Bannu cantonment attack inside Afghanistan, Pakistan’s cross-border strikes on TTP hideouts in March 2024 and evidence presented by Pakistani authorities of dozens of terrorist camps operating from Afghan territory all point to the same conclusion. From these sanctuaries, groups including the TTP, the BLA, Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP) and the East Turkestan Islamic Movement continue to organize, recruit and launch attacks inside Pakistan. Kabul continues to deny their presence even as TTP leaders operate openly from Afghan territory and the organization rebuilds capabilities that Pakistan’s security forces spent years dismantling at enormous human and financial cost. Denial, under these circumstances, ceases to be neutrality, it becomes complicity through inaction.
Against this backdrop, Washington’s recent approach represents a significant, though incomplete, shift. The United States has designated the BLA as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, expanded counterterrorism cooperation with Pakistan against the BLA, TTP and ISKP and publicly affirmed Pakistan’s right to defend itself against terrorist attacks under international law. These developments provide Pakistan with stronger diplomatic recognition than it has previously received and acknowledge the scale of the threat confronting the country.
Yet recognition has not always translated into meaningful international action. Pakistan and China jointly sought to place the BLA and its Majeed Brigade under the UN Security Council’s 1267 sanctions regime, but the proposal was blocked by the United States, the United Kingdom and France on technical grounds, arguing that locally focused militant groups do not automatically fall within the committee’s mandate. The contradiction is difficult to overlook. A group recognized as terrorist in national policy remains outside the principal multilateral sanctions framework. The result is a counterterrorism architecture that too often appears selective in its application. Terrorism directed against Western interests usually attracts coordinated legal, financial and diplomatic pressure. Terrorism directed against Pakistan receives sympathy, but far less collective action.
The same contradiction surfaced during the ninth review of the UN Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy, adopted on 1 July. Pakistan expressed disappointment that the resolution failed to address persistent gaps or adequately reflect the concerns of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, whose member states remain among those most heavily affected by terrorism. The United States, joined by Israel and Argentina, voted against the resolution, arguing that it had become overly broad and lacked strategic focus. The contrast is difficult to ignore. Washington has reaffirmed Pakistan’s right to self-defence, yet remains reluctant to strengthen multilateral mechanisms that could reinforce the international response to the very threats Pakistan confronts. Bilateral cooperation has improved, but multilateral consensus continues to lag behind. Pakistan’s case for greater international support rests not on sentiment but on evidence. It has conducted some of the world’s largest counterterrorism operations, dismantled extensive militant infrastructure, absorbed enormous economic losses and sacrificed tens of thousands of civilian and military lives. Despite these efforts, it continues to confront organizations that exploit cross-border sanctuaries and regional instability. No state can permanently defeat terrorism while neighbouring territory remains available for planning, recruitment and logistical support.
The international community frequently describes terrorism as a shared global threat. If that principle is to retain credibility, it must be applied consistently. Militant organizations that kill Pakistani civilians and security personnel deserve the same international treatment as those targeting citizens elsewhere. Selective counterterrorism weakens collective security and encourages impunity. Pakistan is not asking the world to fight its war. It is asking the world to stop allowing others to sustain it. Until safe havens are dismantled, international standards are applied consistently and state responsibility is matched by meaningful accountability, this will remain the war that never ends, measured not in communiqués or resolutions, but in funerals, one attack at a time.
—The writer is PhD in Political Science, and visiting faculty at QAU Islamabad.
