The first Afghan war left Pakistan with heroin, guns and protected networks. The second pushed the battlefield itself across the border. After 9/11, militants driven from Afghanistan found routes, kinship ties and refuge in Pakistan’s former Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). The State that had cultivated armed proxies for strategic depth now confronted armed organisations claiming religious authority over Pakistani territory. The distinction between an asset abroad and an enemy at home began to collapse.

This was not simply an invasion from outside. Pakistan had already inherited the infrastructure described in Part III: weapons markets, smuggling corridors, seminaries linked to mobilisation, informal finance and officials accustomed to treating selected illegality as strategy. The United States-led intervention supplied the shock. Pakistan’s unresolved political order supplied the transmission system.1

General Pervez Musharraf’s government responded through a divided policy. It helped arrest al-Qaeda operatives and deployed the army in the tribal areas. At the same time, sections of the security establishment sought to retain influence over Afghan Taliban and other groups regarded as useful against India or in Afghanistan. The labels “good Taliban” and “bad Taliban” were journalistic shorthand, but they described a real hierarchy: the militant threatening Pakistan was to be fought; the militant serving an external purpose could remain negotiable.

Violence could not be confined within that hierarchy. Foreign fighters, Afghan insurgents, Pakistani commanders, sectarian organisations and criminals used overlapping territory and services. They did not share one command or source of finance, but benefited from the same gaps in law. A route protected for one organisation could carry another. A weapons market did not ask where a rifle would be fired.

The army’s entry into South Waziristan in 2002 marked a profound reversal. A region long governed through colonial regulations, political agents and negotiated autonomy became a battlefield. Early operations met fierce resistance. Islamabad then alternated force with agreements that required militants to expel foreigners or stop attacks. These bargains brought pauses, not disarmament. Commanders used the intervals to recover, recruit and impose authority over local communities.2

The first known United States drone strike in Pakistan killed Nek Muhammad in South Waziristan in June 2004, weeks after his agreement with the State. It introduced the method of the covert war: Washington selected targets, Pakistan publicly protested or denied cooperation, and citizens were asked to accept secrecy as policy. Drone attacks removed senior militants and disrupted plots, but displaced constitutional responsibility. No transparent process told Pakistanis who authorised force on their territory or how civilian deaths would be investigated.3

Drones did not create the militancy. The jihad infrastructure, sectarian organisations and state bargains pre-dated them. Their political effect still mattered. A tactic could remove leaders while deepening anger against a State unable or unwilling to explain the violation of its sovereignty. Tactical success and strategic damage could occur together.

By December 2007, disparate Pakistani militant groups had gathered under the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), led by Baitullah Mehsud. The United Nations records that the alliance arose after Pakistani military operations against al-Qaeda-related militants in FATA. Its declared enemy was no longer a distant occupation alone. It attacked Pakistan’s security forces, public institutions and civilians. The proxy model had produced an insurgent franchise directed against its former rear base.4

The July 2007 siege of Lal Masjid in Islamabad accelerated the confrontation. Suicide attacks multiplied. Benazir Bhutto was assassinated in December 2007. Police, intelligence offices, mosques, markets and political gatherings became targets. Pakistan was discovering that a doctrine which sanctified private armies could not reserve violence for officially approved theatres.

Swat exposed the cost to ordinary citizens. Militants imposed rule through intimidation, executions and the destruction of schools. The State first negotiated and then launched a major military operation in May 2009. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reported that more than two million people fled in one of the largest and fastest displacements of its time. Families paid for the recovery of territory with lost homes, livelihoods and education.5

Operation Rah-e-Rast in Swat and Operation Rah-e-Nijat in South Waziristan broke militant control in important areas. They also revealed the limit of a campaign measured by territory cleared and commanders killed. Unless civilian administration, policing, courts and schools followed, the State returned as an operation rather than a durable constitutional presence.

The same cycle returned in North Waziristan. Operation Zarb-e-Azb began in June 2014 after years of hesitation and pressure. It struck sanctuaries used by the TTP and foreign militants and substantially reduced their room for open operation. Many fighters were killed; others crossed into Afghanistan, dispersed or reassembled under new names. A border that had once exported insurgency now allowed Pakistan’s insurgents to acquire external shelter.6

The attack on the Army Public School in Peshawar on December 16, 2014, removed every excuse for ambiguity. The murder of children forced a national consensus behind the 20-point National Action Plan (NAP). Its promises were an indictment of previous policy: armed militias would not be allowed to operate; terrorist finance would be choked; proscribed organisations would not reappear; hate speech and extremist material would be curbed; seminaries would be registered and regulated; and FATA would be reformed.7

The plan correctly recognised that terrorism was not only a military target. It was a system of money, propaganda, recruitment, weapons, administrative absence and selective permission. Implementation, however, remained uneven. Military courts and executions moved quickly. 

Reform of criminal justice, police investigation, prosecution, education and local government moved slowly. Organisations could be banned on paper while their personnel, charities or narratives survived under altered identities.

This imbalance preserved the political economy of militancy. Narcotics did not finance every attack, and every smuggler was not a militant. The relationship was more practical. Armed groups and traffickers could share couriers, hawala channels, forged documents, weapons suppliers, transporters and protection. A State that chased gunmen but left their financial and criminal services intact treated symptoms while preserving capacity.

Pakistan paid twice again. Citizens financed military campaigns through taxes and debt, then bore displacement, destroyed markets, closed schools and diminished liberties. Security institutions received larger budgets and wider authority, while civilian institutions responsible for lawful order remained weak. Emergency became a mode of government. The crisis generated resources for those managing it and liabilities for those living through it.

The original thesis of “heroinisation and militarisation” must now be enlarged. Heroinisation described illicit capital acquiring power. Militarisation described weapons and coercive authority escaping the battlefield. After 9/11, a third process became visible: internalisation. A war managed through proxies, secrecy and exceptional law returned as insurgency within Pakistan. The State could defeat formations without ending the rules that reproduced them.

Military operations were necessary when armed groups seized territory and murdered citizens. They were not sufficient. A durable victory required one law for every armed organisation, civilian control over security policy, traceable finance, effective border management, credible courts and a political order that did not purchase short-term influence with long-term violence. Pakistan announced much of this after the Army Public School massacre. It did not enforce all of it.

The Taliban’s return to Kabul in August 2021 completed the circle. The United States departed; the TTP found renewed space across the border; and Pakistan again faced violence from an Afghan order it had expected to provide strategic comfort. Part VI will examine the result: how a country that had announced victory repeatedly reached the top of the Global Terrorism Index, why the old remedies failed, and what a measurable national reversal now requires.8

Endnotes

1. Ikramul Haq, Pakistan: From Hash to Heroin (Lahore: Annoor Printers and Publishers, 1991), chapters 2, 4 and 12; Ikramul Haq, “Twenty-five years after 9/11—III: Heroin out, guns in”, Minute Mirror; National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, The 9/11 Commission Report (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 2004), pp. 367–371.
2. K. Alan Kronstadt, Pakistan–U.S. Relations, Congressional Research Service, July 1, 2009, sections on counterterrorism and FATA; K. Alan Kronstadt and Susan B. Epstein, Pakistan: U.S. Foreign Assistance, Congressional Research Service, July 1, 2013.
3. New America, “The Drone War in Pakistan”, database and analysis; K. Alan Kronstadt, Pakistan–U.S. Relations, Congressional Research Service, June 24, 2012, section on drone strikes.
4. United Nations Security Council, “Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP)”, ISIL (Da’esh) and Al-Qaida Sanctions List narrative summary; United States Department of State, Country Reports on Terrorism 2019, “Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan”.
5. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, “A year on from the massive Swat exodus, the need for help remains acute”, April 30, 2010; Human Rights Watch, “Pakistan: Allow Time for Civilian Evacuations”, June 15, 2009.
6. K. Alan Kronstadt, Pakistan–U.S. Relations: Issues for the 114th Congress, Congressional Research Service, May 14, 2015, pp. 14–20; Human Rights Watch, “Pakistan: Get Aid to Civilians Caught in Fighting”, October 28, 2009.
7. National Counter Terrorism Authority, “National Action Plan, 2014”, approved December 24, 2014; Ministry of Human Rights, Government of Pakistan, “Action Plan Against Religious Persecution”, account of the post-Army Public School consensus.
8. Congressional Research Service, Pakistan and U.S.-Pakistan Relations, May 22, 2023, sections on renewed terrorism threats and Afghanistan; Ikramul Haq, Pakistan: From Drug-trap to Debt-trap, edited by Huzaima Bukhari (Lahore: Lahore Law Publications, 2003), Preface, pp. xiii–xiv.

[To be continued]

Dr. Ikramul Haq, Advocate Supreme Court, Adjunct Faculty at Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), member Advisory Board and Visiting Senior Fellow of Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE), holds LLD in tax laws. He was full-time journalist from 1979 to 1984 with Viewpoint and Dawn. He also served Civil Services of Pakistan from 1984 to 1996.