Every collapsing regime needs an external villain. Pakistan’s establishment has turned this into a reflex. Kabul did it. New Delhi did it. Foreign agencies did it. Invisible hands did it. The only entity permanently exempt from suspicion is the one that has dominated Pakistan’s political life for most of its history: the military establishment itself.

Pakistan is not merely suffering from militancy. It is suffering from the consequences of a ruling elite that treated militancy as a strategic asset, governance as an inconvenience, and accountability as a foreign concept.

For decades, the generals cultivated violence as leverage. Militants were categorized, repurposed, differentiated — “good,” “bad,” manageable, useful. Proxy warfare was rationalized as strategic depth. Chaos was curated. Extremism was not confronted; it was administered. The assumption underlying this grotesque experiment was breathtaking in its arrogance: the state could manipulate instability indefinitely without being consumed by it.

That assumption has collapsed.

When bombs explode in Balochistan or suicide attacks strike Islamabad, the official narrative assembles with almost comic efficiency. Cross-border infiltration. Hostile neighbors. Foreign funding. The script is delivered before the debris cools. Responsibility is projected outward with theatrical confidence. Introspection remains forbidden.

Yet the truth is brutally simple: Pakistan’s insecurity is overwhelmingly self-authored. It is the residue of decades in which the state believed it........

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