It would come to be called ‘Pink’s War’ – a name redolent of cocktails at the Bristol Hotel in Karachi and the scent of frangipani. Three weeks after the regime of Emir Amanullah Khan declared jihad against the British in the summer of 1919, hoping to regain his independence, a Handley Page V/1500 four-engine bomber—designed to attack Berlin, but then given over for joyrides to the Bombay elite—lumbered over the Khyber Pass. Four 112-pound bombs and 16 20-pound bombs were dropped on the royal palace in Kabul.
Air warfare had arrived in the region, and Wing Commander RCM Pink proved its foremost practitioner and theorist. For 54 days in 1925, Pink’s fleet of Bristol F.2B and De Havilland DH.9A fighters savaged Mahsud rebels in southern Waziristan. Two British personnel and one aircraft were lost; there are no records of Mahsud deaths.
This week, though, a suicide bomber tore through a military convoy at Mir Ali, killing 13 soldiers and injuring dozens more. Troops in the region have been under relentless assault for over a year. Eight soldiers were killed in a similar suicide attack in Bannu in July 2024. The losses of security force personnel, according to the South Asia Terrorism Portal, stood at 754 last year, the worst in over a decade.
Faced with these attacks, the Pakistan Army has tried to delegitimise its jihadist and ethnic-Baloch enemies, drawing on theological terms in its official discourse to cast them as agents of Fitnah, or strife, sponsored by India. The story hasn’t been particularly persuasive. There are, after all, no seminaries in India recruiting cadres to fight in the country, nor training grounds and fundraising rallies.
The real story, as Pakistan’s military-dominated establishment understands perfectly well, is more complex. After the fall of Kabul in 2021—enabled, in no small part, by thousands of fighters from the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa—jihadists began returning home, seeking to exercise power and harvest wealth like their one-time allies across the border. For the Pakistan Army, these are potential allies, not enemies. For all the angry words, India remains the enemy, not the jihadists who have seized control of parts of Pakistan.
Like colonial authorities did before them, Pakistan’s military has carried out air strikes in Afghanistan and used drones in an effort to degrade jihadist strongholds. This pressure, it is hoped, will bring the jihadist leadership into line. Likely, the army will discover that bombing its enemies into good behaviour is harder than it seems.
Good, Bad & Ugly Taliban
Hafiz Gul Bahadur, the man who publicly proclaimed responsibility for this week’s suicide-bombing, was born around 1961, to the Mada Khel clan of the Utmanzai Wazir tribe in North Waziristan. Gul Bahadur’s family claims direct descent from Mirza Ali Khan Wazir, the Faqir of Ipi, who had led a long campaign against the British. Following Independence in 1947, the Faqir continued his campaign for autonomous power in the tribal lands, now against Pakistan. The Pakistan Air Force bombed his forces in 1949 in Mughalgai, killing several.
Little is known about Gul Bahadur’s early life. However, he is reputed to have studied at a seminary in Multan, earning the title of Hafiz—or one who can recite the Quran by memory—a distinction he shares with Field Marshal Asim Munir. Following this, he became an activist for the theocratic Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam party led by Fazl-ur-Rahman.
The jihadist leader emerged into prominence in the years after 9/11, when he fled south across the Afghan border, in the face of the collapse of the Taliban’s First Islamic Emirate. Together, with hundreds of Uzbek and Chechen fighters linked to al-Qaeda, Gul founded a base in North Waziristan.
Islamabad quietly encouraged the formation of these mini-emirates on its territory, but pushed their leaders to expel the foreign fighters within their fold. This, journalist Daud Khattak has written, led to a series of peace deals from 2004, with prominent jihadists like Nek Muhammad Wazir, Baitullah Mehsud, and Mullah Fazlullah. The state even proved willing to cede legal authority to some jihadists, enforcing the Shari`a-based Nizam-e-Adl regulation in Swat in 2009.
Few of the deals lasted, though, Khattak notes—in part, because jihadist commanders were unwilling to give up their core group of foreign fighters, and because of arguments over revenues from kidnapping, extortion, and protection-money rackets. The drone-warfare campaign conducted against al-Qaeda by the United States further angered the Pakistan Army’s client jihadists.
Gul, for his part, continued to use North Waziristan as a staging ground for attacks against American and Afghan forces, promising only that he would not target the Pakistan Army. That agreement fell apart, too, and in 2012, Gul barred the government from conducting polio vaccinations in his territories. Gul, scholar Didier Chaudet notes, argued that drone strikes were killing far more people than those claimed by the poliovirus.
Then, in 2014, under intense pressure from the US, the Pakistan Army launched Zarb-e-Azb—a massive military operation intended to destroy these groups, which had coalesced into the Tehreek-e-Taliban. The TTP lost thousands of men in the fighting, but largely succeeded in fleeing north, where it received sanctuary from powerful Taliban leaders like the current second-in-command of the Taliban’s Second Islamic Emirate, Sirajuddin Haqqani.
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The war in Pakistan
The fall of Kabul created new problems for the Pakistan Army. A generation of semi-educated and prospectless youth, with no life experiences other than those of permanent jihad, began returning home from Afghanistan. The Pakistan Army saw these forces as allies against the new Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement, founded in 2014 by a group of students to demand an end to extrajudicial executions and the alliance between jihadists and the state. The leaders of the group were incarcerated, and the organisation was proscribed last year.
Leaders of the jihadists, though, soon began seeing themselves as more than mere clients of the military. From mid-2023, analyst Ricardo Valle writes, a welter of small groups—among them, the Jabhat Ansar al-Mahdi Khorasan, Majlis-e-Askari, Jabhat al-Junud al-Mahdi, and Jaish-e-Fursan-e-Muhammad—began to coalesce around Gul.
Last year, Gul’s organisation laid out rules for governance in the territories it controls, including the collection of religious donations and taxes, a prohibition on shaving, and dress codes for women. Videos have regularly emerged, over the last year, of TTP jihadists checking the identities of passengers on roads through the region and taxing trucks.
For three reasons, Field Marshal Asim Munir likely views this as an acceptable price to pay for broader strategic objectives. First, the TTP has deep ties with the global jihadist movement, which is now resurgent across much of Africa and the Middle East. As the scholar Antonio Guistozzi has written. Pakistan’s intelligence services allowed al-Qaeda some freedom of operation after 2019, seeing it as an asset in Kashmir and other parts of India.
Earlier phases of cooperation between the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Directorate and al-Qaeda were seen, Giustozzi notes, prior to the killing of al-Qaeda chief Osama Bin Laden, and again in 2014. The ISI also cooperated, fitfully, with elements of the Islamic State, hoping it might prove a useful asset against India.
A second important role played by the jihadists is that they serve as assets in containing secular-democratic struggles for greater democracy and human rights in Pakistan. The rise of movements like the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement and the Baloch Yakjehti Committee represents a new force in Pakistani politics, using constitutionalism as a weapon against the military’s chokehold on power. Terror, in the military’s imagination, is a necessary tool to ensure they do not succeed.
Finally, a deal with jihadists in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa will help consolidate Field Marshal Munir’s credentials as a defender of Islam and Pakistan’s religious identity. This objective is also evident in Punjab, where Munir has been silent on violence against religious minorities and killings of alleged perpetrators of blasphemy.
As a succession of generals before him learned, however, co-optation of Pakistani jihadism is a dangerous—and mostly short-lived—enterprise. General Pervez Musharraf found himself targeted at least four times for assassination during his tenure, his intelligence services had once patronised. General Raheel Sharif, architect of many of the peace deals with the TTP, found himself forced to go to war in 2014. The fall of Kabul, General Qamar Javed Bajwa soon discovered, exposed Pakistan to more dangers than it solved, with jihadists returning home armed with large stockpiles of weapons and ideological ambitions.
The only option to this perilous course, though, is opening Pakistan’s troubled borders to genuine democracy—one step too far for this Field Marshal, or any other.
Praveen Swami is Contributing Editor at ThePrint. His X handle is @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)