Pakistan

Pakistan's relationship with jihadist groups as instruments of state policy began in earnest in the late 1970s, when General Zia ul-Haq — who had seized power in a 1977 military coup and hanged elected Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto — launched a systematic programme of Islamisation of Pakistani society and state institutions. Zia's dual project served both domestic and strategic purposes: Islamisation consolidated his political authority by aligning the state with Pakistan's powerful religious establishment, while the ISI's cultivation of Afghan mujahideen groups — funded by the CIA and Saudi Arabia in Operation Cyclone — positioned Pakistan as the indispensable pivot of the anti-Soviet Afghan jihad and dramatically expanded the ISI's institutional power and external resources.

The doctrine of "strategic depth" — articulated most explicitly by General Mirza Aslam Beg and successive ISI chiefs — holds that Pakistan requires a compliant, Pakistan-friendly government in Afghanistan as a buffer against encirclement by India, and that jihadist proxies operating in Indian-administered Kashmir provide Pakistan with asymmetric leverage against a conventionally superior adversary without triggering a conventional war response. This doctrine has remained the operational foundation of ISI policy for over forty years, surviving repeated Pakistani pledges to Western partners to dismantle it, surviving the post-9/11 US alliance that flooded Pakistan with counter-terrorism funding, and surviving the Taliban's ultimate return to power in Afghanistan in 2021 — an outcome that ISI had been working toward throughout two decades of nominal cooperation with the US-led mission.

The ISI's management of its jihadist portfolio has been characterised by a consistent distinction between groups it considers strategically useful — the Afghan Taliban, the Haqqani Network, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and Jaish-e-Mohammed — and groups it considers domestically threatening, primarily the Pakistani Taliban (TTP). This distinction has been the source of Pakistan's most blatant double-dealing with Western partners: Islamabad has selectively cooperated against groups that attacked Pakistani targets while actively protecting those directed against India and Afghanistan, a policy that senior US officials have described repeatedly in classified assessments that have since been leaked or declassified. The 2011 discovery that Osama bin Laden had been living in Abbottabad — 800 metres from the Pakistan Military Academy, in a compound that Pakistani intelligence had almost certainly monitored — crystallised the fundamental nature of Pakistan's enabling posture in a single, undeniable fact.

Pakistan's nuclear weapons programme provides the structural foundation of its immunity from accountability. No state — not the United States, not India, not the international community collectively — has been willing to press Pakistan to the point of regime or state destabilisation, given the consequences of a nuclear-armed state's collapse or the risk of nuclear weapons falling under jihadist control. Pakistani military planners have understood and exploited this calculus with extraordinary sophistication for decades, using the implied threat of state fragility and nuclear insecurity as leverage to extract aid, avoid sanctions, and escape the consequences of documented jihadist sponsorship that would result in designation if applied to any non-nuclear state.

Pakistan's enabling doctrine is military-institutional rather than ideological in the manner of Iran or Turkey. The ISI's jihadist proxy strategy was not born from religious conviction but from a cold strategic calculation: that non-state armed groups directed against India and Afghanistan provide Pakistan with asymmetric leverage it could never achieve through conventional military means, at a cost — in blood and treasure — that can be partially exported to the groups themselves and to the communities they operate in across the border.

The ISI manages its jihadist portfolio through a system of selective toleration and directed sponsorship that has proven extraordinarily difficult for Western partners to penetrate or disrupt. Groups are maintained on a spectrum from full operational partnership (Haqqani Network, Lashkar-e-Taiba) through tolerated presence (Afghan Taliban, Jaish-e-Mohammed) to actively suppressed (TTP, IS-K). The ISI's ability to modulate this spectrum — cooperating selectively against the groups that threaten Pakistan domestically or that the US is most urgently focused on in any given year — has allowed it to maintain the fiction of a counter-terrorism partnership while sustaining the strategic relationships that matter.

Pakistan's civilian government is, in the most meaningful operational sense, not in charge of the jihadist portfolio — the military and ISI are. This has created a structural disconnect that has repeatedly frustrated Western diplomacy: Pakistani prime ministers may sincerely pledge to dismantle jihadist infrastructure and be unable to deliver, because the ISI conducts its proxy relationships as a sovereign military prerogative that civilian governments cannot override without triggering a coup or a destabilisation campaign. The ISI's demonstrated willingness to remove civilian governments it dislikes — as with Imran Khan in 2022 — reinforces this structural reality. Pakistani democracy operates within limits set by GHQ Rawalpindi.

The nuclear shield is the final and most consequential element of Pakistan's enabling architecture. Pakistan tested nuclear weapons in 1998 and has since built the world's fastest-growing arsenal, with an estimated 170 warheads and delivery systems targeting India at multiple ranges. The implicit calculus — that pressing Pakistan too hard risks state instability in a nuclear-armed country with documented jihadist networks — has been internalised by every US administration, every Indian government, and every international body that has confronted Pakistan's enabling activities. It is, in the most literal sense, a get-out-of-designation-free card that no other state in the IFC library possesses.

The ISI maintains documented sponsorship, sanctuary, or operational freedom relationships with a range of jihadist groups whose activities span Afghanistan, India, and the broader regional theatre.

Pakistan's enabling activities span four decades and multiple theatres — from the creation of the Afghan mujahideen infrastructure in the 1980s to the sustained Taliban sanctuary that enabled their return to power in 2021, to ongoing ISI support for anti-India jihadist groups despite repeated international pressure.

Pakistan's jihadist sponsorship has produced catastrophic harm across South and Central Asia — to Afghan civilians subjected to Taliban governance, to Indian civilians targeted in ISI-backed attacks, to Pakistani civilians caught in jihadist blowback, and to the families of thousands of US, NATO, and Afghan forces killed by groups Pakistan simultaneously sheltered.