Pakistan suffers violence of its own making. West’s refusal to learn is even more tragic

The suicide bombing in North Waziristan, claimed by the Hafiz Gul Bahadur faction of TTP, is the latest manifestation of a fatal logic that has long guided Pakistan’s suicidal statecraft and self-delusion.

File photo of Pakistan Army | Commons

In the arid valleys of North Waziristan, where the dust hangs heavy and silence is often broken by the thud of helicopter blades or the distant crackle of gunfire, a convoy of Pakistani soldiers met their tragic end. Sixteen men, extinguished in a single assault by a suicide bomber’s calculated violence.

Claimed by the suicide bomber wing of the Hafiz Gul Bahadur faction of Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), the attack, at first glance, is but another episode in the grim ledger of the subcontinent’s senseless bloodletting; yet to treat it as such is to miss the deeper, tragic direction of Pakistan’s politics. This is the latest manifestation of a fatal logic that has long guided Pakistan’s suicidal statecraft and self-delusion

This incident – one of the deadliest single-day attacks on Pakistani security forces in recent months in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa – is emblematic of the persistent instability that has gripped North Waziristan, a region long regarded as a stronghold for militant groups such as the TTP.

Despite repeated counterinsurgency operations and government pledges to restore peace, the area remains a flashpoint for insurgent violence. The latest assault reflects not only the resilience and adaptability of these militant networks but also the enduring challenges faced by Pakistan’s security apparatus since the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan.

Pakistan: a study in contradiction

The cycle of militant violence in North Waziristan is the reverberation of a deeper, historical dissonance – snowballing because of strategic miscalculations and unresolved grievances – that continues to shape, and perhaps distort, Pakistan’s trajectory.

Pakistan has always been a study in contradiction – a nation forged in the fires of British India’s Partition, steeped in trauma and displacement, yet perpetually seeking coherence through the manipulation of identity and enmity. It is a militarised polity defined less by what it is than by what it is not – not India, not secular, not reconciled. In this desperate search for national cohesion, the architects of the state turned to the expedient tools of religious fundamentalism and proxy warfare. The attack in North Waziristan is thus the harvest of seeds sown over decades: a policy of nurturing militant groups as instruments of strategic depth, first against the Soviets in Afghanistan, then against India in Kashmir.

Once tactically useful, these groups now turn upon their erstwhile patron in Rawalpindi with the cold logic of history’s recurring ironies.

Folly in governance is not merely an error; it is the deliberate pursuit of policies contrary to self-interest, even when their consequences are manifest and mounting. The Pakistani military’s double game – proclaiming itself a victim of terror while abetting its architects – has produced a landscape where the boundaries between state and non-state, between friend and foe, have been blurred to the point of absurdity.

The North Waziristan suicide bombing is thus not a rupture, but a fulfilment. The Pakistani state’s own monsters, having tasted blood, now feast upon their creators without any shame or restraint.

If Pakistan’s duplicity is the proximate cause of its turmoil, the West’s strategic myopia is its indispensable enabler. The American embrace of the Pakistani military during the Cold War and again during the War on Terror was animated not by trust, but by expedience – a willingness to overlook Islamabad’s flirtations with jihadist ideology so long as those ideologies bled in directions favourable to Washington.

Western diplomacy often operates on the dangerous assumption that alliances of convenience can be sustained without moral or strategic cost. It is this blindness – this transactional hubris – that allowed the Pakistani military to thrive in duplicity, to wear the mask of an ally while undermining the very goals it pretended to pursue.

Confront the monsters within

The March 2025 attack by the Baloch Liberation Army on Jaffar Express, killing scores of innocent passengers, also offers a grim counterpoint to the North Waziristan carnage – a reminder that Pakistan’s crisis is not merely religious or ideological. It is also ethnic, economic, and political. Long marginalised and brutalised, the Baloch have found in violence the only language Rawalpindi seems to understand. The grievances are not obscure: decades of resource extraction without benefit, political exclusion from the corridors of power, and the suffocating embrace of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), which transforms Balochistan into a logistical backyard for Beijing while its people remain dispossessed. 

And yet, the state responds not with reform, but repression; not with dialogue, but with drone strikes and disinformation. The narrative of external enemies – India, the West, Zionists – is cultivated like a national crop, while the internal rot deepens.

Amid this maelstrom, the promotion of anti-India hatred remains the Pakistani elite’s most dependable tool of social control. As exemplified by the Pahalgam attack, proxy terror against India is not merely a matter of policy – it is the glue that binds a fractured polity, the narcotic that numbs the masses to their own dispossession. A nation that defines itself by perpetual grievance can never know peace, only escalation.

What emerges from this picture is not simply chaos, but folly – of a state that, in seeking security through duplicity, has rendered itself insecure; of a society manipulated into perpetual mobilisation against imagined enemies, while the real threats fester within.

Instead of confronting the internal rot, Islamabad went to ridiculous lengths to accuse New Delhi of orchestrating the attack through a proxy outfit – a claim India swiftly and contemptuously rejected. Pakistan’s persistent attempts to externalise blame on every internal security failure only serve to expose its duplicity in combating terrorism. And as demonstrated by India’s refusal to sign the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) joint statement after Pakistan and China blocked strong language on terrorism, the world remains complicit through its silence and convenience. India, ever the target, is vindicated in its warnings.

Pakistan’s tragedy is not that it suffers violence, but that it suffers violence of its own making. And more tragically, the West – having seen this play before – refuses to learn anything. The ghosts of past alliances, broken promises, and abandoned morals now haunt the corridors of global power, yet the lessons remain unread. Pakistan’s present agony is the fruit of choices made in defiance of prudence and morality. For the West, especially the United States, the refusal to confront this duplicity will haunt them still – as surely as the ghosts of Kabul now haunt Washington.

India, for its part, must remain vigilant. It faces not merely a hostile neighbour, but a neighbour at war with itself – a far more unpredictable, unreasonable, and dangerous adversary. The reckoning, when it comes, will not be confined to the mountains of Waziristan or the treacherous passes of the Hindu Kush. It will echo through the capitals of the world, a thunderclap of warning. In geopolitics, as in life, the wages of folly are always paid with interest.

Vinay Kaura is Assistant Professor, Department of International Affairs and Security Studies, at the Sardar Patel University of Police, Security and Criminal Justice in Rajasthan. Views are personal.

(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)