On Monday morning, hundreds of people gathered for prayers inside a mosque in Peshawar’s Police Lines compound. The location should have been among the more secure places in the city. Police Lines contains police headquarters and government facilities, sits inside a heavily protected district and requires people entering to pass through security checkpoints.
A suicide bomber still reached the mosque.
The explosion destroyed much of the building and caused part of its roof to collapse onto worshippers. By Tuesday, authorities reported that 100 people had been killed and at least 225 wounded. Most of those killed were police officers. Pakistani investigators are now trying to understand not merely who carried out the bombing, but how an attacker penetrated a compound specifically designed to prevent exactly this kind of attack.
That second question may ultimately matter more.
Pakistan has experienced terrorism for decades, and Peshawar has suffered some of its worst consequences. In 2014, militants affiliated with the Pakistani Taliban attacked the Army Public School in the city and murdered more than 150 people, most of them children. Pakistan subsequently launched major counterterrorism operations that substantially reduced militant control over territory and contributed to a significant decline in terrorist violence.
For several years, it appeared that the state had largely contained the insurgency.
Monday’s bombing is another indication that containment was not the same thing as resolution.
Militant violence has been increasing again, particularly in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, usually called the TTP or Pakistani Taliban, formally ended its ceasefire with the government last November. The group has since intensified attacks, particularly against police and security forces.
Responsibility for Monday’s attack itself remains contested. A TTP commander initially claimed responsibility, but the organisation’s central spokesperson subsequently distanced the group from the bombing and said attacking mosques violated TTP policy. Pakistani officials have nevertheless blamed the TTP more broadly for the deterioration in security and argue that militants are operating from sanctuaries inside neighbouring Afghanistan.
That distinction matters because terrorism encourages governments and commentators to simplify. An atrocity occurs, a group is named and the explanation appears complete.
But identifying the attacker is only the first layer of analysis.
The more important question is why the organisation possesses the capacity to attack at all.
That requires looking backwards.
The TTP emerged in the 2000s as an umbrella organisation connecting several Pakistani militant groups. It shares ideological and historical relationships with the Afghan Taliban but is organisationally separate from it. The Afghan Taliban’s principal objective was control of Afghanistan. The Pakistani Taliban has fought the Pakistani state itself, seeking its own interpretation of Islamic governance and opposing Pakistan’s security presence in areas along the Afghan frontier.
The distinction sounds straightforward.
Pakistan’s historical policy towards the two movements was not.
For decades, Pakistani security strategy viewed Afghanistan primarily through competition with India and the desire to prevent an unfriendly government from emerging on Pakistan’s western border. Elements of Pakistan’s security establishment therefore maintained relationships with the Afghan Taliban even while the Pakistani military fought the TTP domestically.
This produced one of the central contradictions in Pakistan’s regional security policy.
The state attempted to distinguish between militant organisations according to whether their immediate objectives threatened Pakistan.
A Taliban movement focused on Afghanistan could be strategically useful.
A Taliban movement attacking Pakistan was an enemy.
From the perspective of short-term geopolitical calculation, the distinction had logic.
From the perspective of militant ecosystems, it was much harder to maintain.
Ideologies cross borders.
Weapons cross borders.
Families cross borders.
Fighters cross borders.
Training networks cross borders.
Pakistan’s frontier with Afghanistan cannot be treated like a laboratory wall separating one insurgency from another.
This is the danger of trying to manage extremism selectively.
A state can attempt to distinguish between useful and hostile armed actors.
The actors themselves continue operating inside a wider political and ideological environment the state cannot fully control.
This is not unique to Pakistan. Great powers have repeatedly supported armed groups for short-term strategic purposes and discovered that those groups later develop independent interests. Proxies are attractive because they provide influence at lower immediate cost than direct military intervention.
The principal-agent problem appears almost immediately.
The sponsor provides resources because the proxy shares some objectives.
The proxy accepts resources because the sponsor helps it pursue its own objectives.
Their interests overlap.
They are never identical.
Once the proxy develops enough independent organisational capacity, the sponsor’s leverage declines.
Pakistan’s relationship with Islamist militancy demonstrates the extreme danger of that mechanism.
This does not mean Pakistan “created” every militant group now attacking it, a claim that would erase the independent agency of the organisations involved and oversimplify decades of conflict involving Afghanistan, the Soviet invasion, American policy, Gulf financing, Pakistani politics and local grievances.
It means strategic tolerance towards some militant networks can create externalities that become extremely difficult to contain later.
The Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan in August 2021 therefore changed Pakistan’s security environment in ways that appear increasingly important.
Some Pakistani policymakers initially viewed the American withdrawal and Taliban victory as increasing Islamabad’s influence in Afghanistan. Yet the Afghan Taliban’s ideological relationship with the TTP created an obvious complication.
Pakistan expected the new authorities in Kabul to help constrain Pakistani militants.
That expectation appears increasingly uncertain.
The Afghan Taliban possesses its own incentives. Moving aggressively against the TTP could create internal ideological and organisational tensions. Some militants share histories of fighting together. Kabul also wants to demonstrate that it is not simply implementing Pakistani demands.
Pakistan therefore faces a frustrating strategic outcome: a government in Afghanistan it spent years believing would be preferable to a Western-aligned administration does not necessarily behave as a Pakistani client.
This is another lesson about strategic autonomy.
Small or dependent actors still possess their own objectives.
Influence is not control.
Pakistan now argues that militant sanctuaries inside Afghanistan contribute to attacks on Pakistani territory. The Afghan Taliban denies allowing its territory to be used against other states.
The dispute will become increasingly important because Islamabad cannot solve a cross-border insurgency through domestic policing alone if fighters can retreat into another jurisdiction.
But blaming Afghanistan exclusively would repeat the same analytical mistake.
A sanctuary explains where militants can operate.
It does not completely explain why Pakistani militants can recruit, organise and maintain support.
Domestic governance still matters.
The former tribal areas along the Afghan border experienced decades of conflict, displacement, military operations and weak state capacity. Pakistan merged the Federally Administered Tribal Areas into Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in 2018, formally extending ordinary provincial institutions into regions previously governed through a distinctive colonial-era administrative structure.
That integration was necessary.
Institutional integration on paper does not instantly create effective government.
Courts, policing, infrastructure, education, employment and local political representation need to become tangible.
Otherwise the state arrives primarily through soldiers.
That creates a security dilemma at the domestic level.
Government sees an area with militant activity and increases military presence.
Citizens experience checkpoints, operations and disruption.
Militants exploit resentment against the state.
Government sees continuing militancy and increases security further.
Breaking the cycle requires civilian institutions strong enough that the state is experienced as something more than coercion.
This is why counterterrorism cannot ultimately be only military policy.
Military operations can destroy camps, kill commanders and recover territory.
They cannot themselves produce legitimate local government.
The distinction resembles what I wrote about Peru’s protests in December. The state can restore order through coercion without necessarily restoring legitimacy.
Pakistan’s counterterrorism challenge is much more severe because the opposition includes organised armed groups deliberately targeting state institutions.
But the underlying principle remains.
Security creates space for politics.
It cannot replace politics permanently.
Monday’s target makes that particularly visible.
Most of the victims were police officers.
Police are supposed to be the ordinary civilian institution through which the state provides internal security. An attack that kills scores of police officers inside their own headquarters does more than produce casualties.
It attacks confidence in the state’s capacity to protect the people responsible for protecting everyone else.
This is why the security breach itself matters so much.
Investigators are examining how the bomber passed through multiple security layers. Officials have acknowledged a serious failure, while questions remain about whether the attacker received assistance from someone with access to the compound.
State capacity is partly about preventing predictable threats from exploiting institutional gaps.
Pakistan knows it faces suicide bombers.
The relevant question is whether security institutions learn faster than the organisations trying to penetrate them.
That is an adaptive competition.
Every checkpoint produces a new evasion strategy.
Every intelligence network produces counter-surveillance.
Every militant tactic generates another security protocol.
The side that stops updating loses.
This requires information-sharing between police, intelligence agencies, provincial governments and the military.
Pakistan’s fragmented civil-military structure can complicate that coordination.
The military has historically exercised extraordinary influence over national security and foreign policy, while civilian governments possess formal democratic authority but frequently weaker institutional control over those areas.
That imbalance creates accountability problems.
When security policy succeeds, the military can claim competence.
When it fails, civilian politicians can blame decisions they did not fully control.
The military can blame civilian governance.
Responsibility becomes difficult to locate.
This resembles Iraq’s accountability-dilution problem in a different institutional form.
Effective government requires enough clarity that citizens know which institution is responsible for which decisions.
Pakistan’s political polarisation makes this harder still.
Former prime minister Imran Khan continues demanding early elections after his removal through a parliamentary no-confidence vote last April. The coalition government led by Shehbaz Sharif faces intense opposition while simultaneously confronting terrorism, inflation and a severe balance-of-payments crisis.
The political class therefore has strong incentives to interpret security failures through partisan competition.
Opposition can blame the government.
Government can blame previous policy.
Provincial administrations can blame Islamabad.
Everyone may possess some evidence.
The militants benefit from fragmentation.
Prime Minister Sharif has called for political unity against terrorism. That is understandable, but unity should not mean suspending scrutiny.
National-security crises often produce pressure for opposition parties to stop criticising government because criticism is portrayed as weakening the national response.
The better model is cooperation without immunity.
Political parties can agree that militant attacks must be defeated while continuing to investigate why security institutions failed.
Accountability is not a distraction from security.
It improves security when it identifies mistakes.
The economic crisis makes all of this more difficult.
Pakistan’s foreign-exchange reserves have fallen to extremely low levels, and the government is negotiating with the International Monetary Fund over the resumption of bailout financing. Prime Minister Sharif warned this week that meeting IMF conditions would be difficult, while reserves had fallen to around $3 billion, leaving the country with very limited capacity to finance imports.
Pakistan is therefore confronting several crises simultaneously.
Security deteriorates.
Foreign currency becomes scarce.
Inflation reduces real incomes.
Flood reconstruction continues.
Political polarisation remains intense.
Each problem consumes fiscal and administrative capacity needed for the others.
This is where the concept of state capacity as a scarce resource becomes useful.
Governments possess limited money, competent officials, political attention and public trust.
A state handling one crisis can redirect resources towards it.
A state handling five simultaneously begins making trade-offs.
Money spent increasing security is unavailable for flood reconstruction.
Energy subsidies reduce fiscal space.
Political attention devoted to negotiations with the IMF is attention not devoted to administrative reform.
None of these choices means the government does not care about the alternative.
Scarcity operates inside government too.
The interaction can become multiplicative rather than additive. Terrorism reduces investment and business confidence, worsening the economy. Economic deterioration creates unemployment and frustration that militant organisations can exploit. Political polarisation reduces the government’s ability to construct long-term counterterrorism policy. Weak security makes international investors more cautious.
One crisis feeds another.
This is how states become fragile even when no individual problem is sufficient to cause collapse.
Pakistan is nowhere close to state collapse. It retains a large bureaucracy, powerful military, functioning provincial governments, substantial economic resources and a political system capable of national administration.
But resilience should not become complacency.
States rarely become fragile overnight.
Capacity erodes when institutions repeatedly postpone structural problems because immediate crises always appear more urgent.
Pakistan has been managing some version of its militant problem for decades.
Monday suggests management is not enough.
There is also a difficult question about negotiation. Pakistan previously pursued talks with the TTP, contributing to the ceasefire that collapsed in November.
Negotiating with armed groups is politically controversial because governments fear legitimising violence.
But refusing every negotiation can prolong wars that military force alone cannot resolve.
The correct question is not whether negotiation is inherently weak.
It is what the negotiation changes.
Does a ceasefire allow militants to disarm and enter ordinary political life?
Or does it allow them to reorganise, recruit and strengthen positions before returning to violence?
A temporary reduction in attacks can look like peace while merely postponing conflict.
This is another difference between negative peace and positive peace.
Negative peace means violence temporarily stops.
Positive peace means institutions change enough that actors no longer possess the same incentives or capacity to restart it.
Pakistan appears to have achieved periods of the first.
The second remains elusive.
This is why militant reintegration needs conditions, verification and credible enforcement. An armed organisation cannot simultaneously retain coercive capacity and receive all the political benefits of peaceful participation.
Otherwise violence becomes an effective bargaining strategy.
Attack the state.
Negotiate concessions.
Rearm.
Repeat.
Governments need to make peaceful politics more rewarding than militancy without making militancy itself the route through which political rewards are obtained.
That balance is extraordinarily difficult.
Afghanistan makes it harder because the TTP can interpret the Afghan Taliban’s victory as evidence that insurgency works.
The United States and NATO fought in Afghanistan for twenty years.
The Taliban survived.
Eventually foreign troops left and the Taliban returned to Kabul.
Whatever the differences between the Afghan Taliban and TTP, the symbolic lesson for militant organisations across the region is obvious.
Persistence can defeat a much stronger opponent politically even when it cannot defeat them conventionally.
That creates what economists might describe as a demonstration effect.
One insurgency’s success changes another insurgency’s expectations about the payoff to continuing violence.
Pakistan therefore confronts not merely fighters but a narrative of victory.
Countering that requires demonstrating that the Pakistani state is durable enough that violence cannot produce equivalent political returns.
That means military capability.
It also means political legitimacy.
The TTP needs citizens to believe the state is weak, corrupt or incapable of protecting them.
Every spectacular security failure strengthens that narrative.
Every functioning school, court, police station and local government weakens it.
Counterterrorism is therefore partly competition over state credibility.
This is why Monday’s attack should not lead only to another security operation.
Pakistan will understandably hunt those responsible.
It should.
But the longer-term response has to ask uncomfortable questions about how the country’s security doctrine produced the environment it now faces.
Why did the ceasefire fail?
What relationship exists between Afghan sanctuaries and Pakistani militancy?
How effectively are the former tribal areas integrated into civilian governance?
Are police receiving enough resources relative to the military?
How are intelligence failures investigated?
What incentives do local communities possess to cooperate with the state?
And perhaps most difficult: did Pakistan’s historical distinction between strategically useful and strategically hostile militant organisations create risks that are now returning home?
Those questions are politically sensitive.
That is precisely why they matter.
National-security establishments everywhere prefer examining tactical failures rather than strategic assumptions.
A tactical failure asks why the bomber crossed the checkpoint.
A strategic failure asks why there is still an organisation capable of sending the bomber.
Pakistan needs answers to both.
Monday’s attack killed people who had gathered to pray inside a police compound they reasonably believed was secure.
The immediate tragedy belongs to the victims and their families.
The political responsibility belongs to institutions that now have to demonstrate they can learn.
Pakistan defeated or displaced much of the insurgency once before.
The mistake would be assuming that military success permanently removed the political and regional ecosystem from which the insurgency emerged.
Security problems can become quiet without becoming solved.
Peshawar has just made the difference impossible to ignore.
