Less than 48 hours before the newly appointed COAS General Asim Munir assumed charge, TTP announced the end of an indefinite ceasefire agreed with the federal government in June 2022. The hardliner militant group urged its fighters to relaunch attacks nationwide. The announcement also came a day before a visit of a Pakistani delegation, led by foreign affairs state minister Hina Rabbani Khan, to Kabul.
The TTP, also known as Pakistani Taliban, is a separate unit from the Afghan Taliban but both share a similar hardline ideology. Since its emergence in 2007, the TTP has carried out the deadliest attacks inside Pakistan and is responsible for thousands of deaths. After coming to power in Afghanistan, the Afghan Taliban facilitated the dialogue between the Pakistani government and the TTP until talks ended without conclusive results.
The TTP’s announcement at this time adds challenges for the unstable Pakistani state on many fronts. The TTP leadership probably is well aware of the situation and knows that the Pakistani military is messed up in domestic politics and is struggling to detach itself from it. The outgoing COAS admitted in his last address that the army meddled in politics but decided in 2021 to distance itself and since then been correcting its course. He emphasized that the military will no longer interfere in political matters. This is probably easier said than done. The new COAS assumed charge when the PTI was stubbornly pressurizing the government for early polls and observed Youme-e-Nijat (freedom day) on the retirement day of General Bajwa. Party chief Imran Khan is persistently pressing the military to intervene in the political stalemate since he knows where the power lies. It will be the biggest challenge for the new COAS to stay neutral as was avowed by his predecessor. Realizing the gravity of the matter, the TTP will try to make use of this situation to the extent it could.
Wars are costly, especially wars that are fought on multiple fronts and for a long time. Pakistani military offensive against hideouts of TTP in remote lawless districts bordering Afghanistan now spans over 15 years. Meanwhile, the country’s economic crisis is deepening and despite the government’s claims of not defaulting, the danger looms more than ever before. Pakistan’s credit default swap (CDS) spiked by 30 percent in a week to 92.53 percent ahead of debt repayment whereas Bloomberg also pitched the country’s default probability at 10 percent. In an apparent attempt to pave the way for an International Monetary Fund (IMF) deal, the military agreed to decrease defense allocations from 2.80 percent to 2.25 percent of the GDP during the fiscal year 2022-23. The government had increased the defense budget by 11 percent in May this year but the army voluntarily decreased budget allocations after factors such as inflation and rupee depreciation were accounted for. And quite recently, the federal government linked the payments for defence imports with permission of the finance ministry due to deterioration in the external sector amid a constant fall in exports and foreign exchange reserves. TTP’s resumption of attacks, therefore, puts pressure on the army’s financial brackets and makes it challenging for the army to relaunch its offensive under restrictive financial resources.
With the Taliban’s return to Afghanistan, it was expected that Pakistan would regain its lost ground. On its part, Pakistan tried to garner Taliban support by urging the international community to comprehensively engage with the Taliban to avert a humanitarian and security crisis. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif even raised the issue at the UN General Assembly asserting that ‘isolating the Afghan Interim Government could aggravate the suffering of the Afghan people. But these gestures have turned off little help with the Taliban taking altogether a different approach this time. Taliban refused to accept 2,640 kilometer long Durand Line as an official boundary between Pakistan and Afghanistan. In an interview, Taliban spokesman and Afghanistan’s acting information minister Zabihullah Mujahid said “The issue of the Durand Line is still an unresolved one, while the construction of fencing itself creates rifts between a nation spread across both sides of the border.” Additionally, after taking control of the Bagram airbase in the wake of the US withdrawal, the Taliban government released more than 2,000 TTP commanders jailed by the US and previous Afghan governments. Resultantly, after years of relative stability in Pakistan when terrorist attacks decreased each year, attacks increased in 2021 by 56 percent. Free fielding of TTP in Afghanistan provides the group with a great opportunity to carry out attacks in Pakistan and get safe sanctuaries in Afghanistan.
The Pakistani military is capable of pushing militancy to a dead-end—restoration of peace in Swat valley is one among many examples—and it can live up to the challenge again. But the times have changed, the situation has evolved and on top, it has lost some of its support base among the masses owing to political peddling. The TTP’s decision to resume attacks, therefore, multiplied already daunting challenges. The new COAS probably has not got the start he wanted but a careful examination of the events unfolding domestically and regionally could be a decent starter.