Pakistan fights its fiercest Taliban insurgency in a decade

Islamabad: In the rugged mountains of Pakistan, the resurgent Pakistani Taliban are waging a relentless and deadly guerrilla war against Pakistani security forces, in the biggest terrorism threat the South Asian nation has faced in a dozen years.

Pakistan has responded to the insurgency, which was nearly defunct just four years ago, with drone strikes and what it has called targeted operations. But in the process, the military has lost hundreds of armed personnel, displaced tens of thousands of people and stoked anger among local communities.

Pakistan’s shaky grip on its mountainous western regions, along the border of Afghanistan, is compounded by the presence of Islamic State fighters in the same areas. The increasing militant activity has threatened Pakistan’s positioning as a military powerhouse in South Asia, a status that it has been taking measures to consolidate this year.

Pakistan’s powerful army chief, Gen Syed Asim Munir, met President Donald Trump at the White House last month — their second meeting in just over three months. The Pakistani military downed Indian jets with Chinese technology earlier this year. And Pakistan’s government signed a defense pact with Saudi Arabia last month.

Yet the Pakistani Taliban have presented Pakistan with its fiercest security challenge in years, security analysts say.

Since the Taliban took power in Afghanistan in 2021, the Pakistani Taliban, known as Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP, have grown into a powerful and well-structured group. The leadership has received financial support from the Taliban-run government in Afghanistan, and its fighters have trained and retreated freely across the border, according to Pakistani military officials and independent and United Nations experts. The Taliban in Afghanistan deny backing the Pakistani group.

“The Pakistan Taliban have been able to assert themselves, and the balance of power is starting to lean against Pakistan’s security forces,” said Asfandyar Mir, a senior fellow in the South Asia program at the Stimson Center in Washington.

As TTP operations have grown more sophisticated, the group has more often targeted Pakistani police and soldiers instead of civilians, though regular people are still routinely caught in the crossfire. On Thursday, the group claimed responsibility for a car bomb explosion that killed at least 10 people Tuesday, most of them civilians, outside the regional headquarters of a paramilitary force.

Terrorist attacks in Pakistan surged last year to their highest levels since 2015, driven largely by TTP operations, according to the Pak Institute for Peace Studies, a research center. The attacks have made Pakistan the second-most-affected country by terrorism, according to a global terrorism index.

In response, the Pakistani military launched a large-scale offensive this summer in the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa region, a province that borders Afghanistan and where the Taliban have mostly been operating. The military has claimed the killing of militants every few days.

But isolated communities, already scarred by hundreds of US drone strikes a decade ago and the subsequent Pakistani military campaign that uprooted the militants and pushed them into Afghanistan, have once again been caught in the middle of armed conflict.

Tens of thousands of people have been displaced since the beginning of the year. The military operation has been contained to a few districts for now, but local leaders and security experts fear it will spread throughout Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa as it did in the early 2010s.

The district of Bajaur, at the border with Afghanistan, has become the center of the ongoing conflict in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. Local communities have been fleeing their homes as the Pakistani military fights with the Pakistani Taliban. Schools have been converted into shelters, the desks once lined in neat rows now stacked against the walls to make space for families uprooted by the fighting.

“Every time the government starts an operation and displaces us, militants cross back into Afghanistan and later return,” Abdul Rahim, a street hawker, said recently from a classroom.

The TTP was created in 2007 as a reaction to Pakistan’s support of the US invasion of Afghanistan. An alliance of militant groups, it implemented Shariah law in what were then tribal areas subject to colonial-era regulations and launched attacks on Pakistani security forces as well as foreign troops in Afghanistan.

TTP militants indiscriminately targeted universities, religious leaders and civilian targets, including in Pakistan’s largest cities and abroad with an attempted Times Square bombing in New York.

But a combination of military operations, US drone attacks that killed key militant leaders and rifts within the group left the Pakistani Taliban weakened. In 2018, Pakistan declared victory over the group and incorporated Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and what had been known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas into the country’s provincial framework with a pledge to bring economic growth and curb violence.

The promises have sounded hollow for many across the territories.

Strengthened by the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan in 2021, the TTP has since consolidated splinter factions, absorbed al-Qaida’s local affiliates and escalated attacks in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, using drones and American-made weapons and equipment abandoned in Afghanistan, including sniper rifles and night goggles. The group is also seeking to expand its influence into Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous, prosperous and politically powerful province.

“TTP has become more focused on direct clashes and attacks on military forces,” said Pearl Pandya, an analyst at Armed Conflict Location & Event Data, which collects information on conflicts around the world. Pakistan has tried to avoid a full-scale military operation but has also been unwilling to engage with local grievances, Pandya added. “Its preferred approach of temporary, localized operations is unlikely to be successful in the long term,” she said.

The permissive environment the Pakistani Taliban enjoy in Afghanistan has infuriated Pakistani officials, who have accused the Afghan Taliban of being complicit in the attacks carried out across the border.

“We ask for one thing: Don’t allow your space to be used as a ground for destabilization inside Pakistan,” Lt. Gen. Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry, the spokesperson for the Pakistani Armed Forces, said about Afghanistan in an interview with The New York Times.

A senior Pakistani military official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to discuss national security matters publicly, accused the TTP of being “hand in glove” with the Afghan Taliban, but acknowledged that, by sparing civilians, the Pakistani Taliban had avoided widespread backlash from local communities.

Officials in Afghanistan have denied the presence of armed groups in the country. “The Islamic Emirate will not allow anyone to use Afghanistan’s land to pose a threat to neighboring countries, the region or the world,” Hafiz Zia Ahmad Takal, a spokesperson at the Afghan Foreign Ministry, told the Times.

Both Pakistani Taliban and Islamic State militants operate in Bajaur, a district of nearly 1.3 million people that has faced many violent events in recent years. At least 48 drone strikes carried out by the military, the Pakistani Taliban and other groups have hit the broader Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province since the beginning of the year, the highest number in more than half a dozen years, according to Armed Conflict Location & Event Data.

The recent displacement has revived scenes long familiar to Bajaur: narrow mountain roads jammed with convoys of battered trucks overloaded with bedding, cooking pots, sacks of grain and families in haste. Many have sought refuge in schools, government offices and private homes in safer parts of the district.

Rahim, the street hawker, has had his life shadowed by conflict since US forces pushed the Taliban and al-Qaida across the border from Afghanistan in 2001 and 2002.

He was 9 when American missiles struck his village, Damadola, in 2006, targeting a Qaida leader, Ayman al-Zawahri, but killing several civilians instead.

Two years later, his family joined tens of thousands of people fleeing Pakistan’s large-scale campaign against Taliban and Qaida militants.

“After eight months in displacement, we returned to find our home ruined by shelling,” Rahim said. He now fears the same fate awaits him.

The Pakistani military has not announced a timeline for its ongoing operation. Rahim said he did not know when he would be able to return this time, nor what condition his home might be in once he did.