INSURGENCIES militarise society and spawn a conflict economy that empowers splinter insurgent groups with their own set of interests and objectives. These militant groups thrive in a governance vacuum as well as the ideological confusion in post-conflict societies. The TTP is amongst the classic examples of insurgency-begotten militancy and terrorism. Afghanistan is a quintessential case study of an insurgency-wracked nation that has given rise to other insurgencies and waves of terrorism.

Afghanistan’s 10-year anti-Soviet insurgency achieved success but spawned another decade of internecine conflict that gave space to terrorist entities and subsequent international intervention against Al Qaeda terrorists operating from that country. Pakistan’s action against terrorist entities elicited an irate response from these violent groups in the former Federally Administered Tribal Areas (now merged districts of KP), leading to a series of military operations from 2004 to 2017, driving the terrorists towards Afghanistan.

After the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, the Taliban regime occupied Kabul and reneged on all its pledges made in the Doha Agreement and introduced a brutal, oppressive regime where there was no place........

© Dawn