Pakistan’s “Strategic Depth” Is a Global Risk: How a Proxy Army Built — and Now Owns — a Proxy State

This piece originally appeared in EURASIAREVIEW on October 16, 2025

From the tribal lashkars of 1947 to the Taliban of today, the Pakistan Army has converted other people’s wars into its business model. The result isn’t just a devastated Afghanistan; it’s a standing threat to regional and global security.

By Najib Azad

A grim present, a long pattern

According to Afghan sources on the ground and international media outlets, Pakistani jets have again struck Afghan cities — Kabul, Kandahar, Nangarhar, Paktika, and Khost among them — with civilians reportedly among the victims, on October 15, 2025, the recent 7^th Pakistani airstrike killed and wounded more than 400 civilians in capital Kabul. Whether Islamabad frames these sorties as “hot pursuit,” “counterterrorism,” or “GHQ security,” the basic logic is familiar: project force across the Durand Line, impose costs inside Afghanistan, and keep Kabul weak and dependent. Coupled with highly publicized diplomatic overtures in Washington — repeated prime ministerial and army-chief visits, extravagant flattery and even performative nominations for international prizes — the military-led establishment seeks once more to monetize Afghanistan: more access, more funds, more political indulgence.

This moment is not an aberration; it is the culmination of a doctrine seven decades in the making. Pakistan’s most powerful institution — the army and its intelligence service — created, rented, redirected, and recycled proxy militias to fight its wars, advance its regional ambitions, and secure cash flows. Over time, the relationship inverted: the army no longer serves the state; rather, the state serves the army. It is not simply an army with a state — it is a proxy force that owns a proxy state.

The costs have been catastrophic for Afghans, corrosive for Pakistan’s own society and economy, and dangerous for the world.

From Kashmir to Kabul: the origin of a doctrine

Within months of being created in 1947, the new state of Pakistan reached for irregular warfare. Thousands of Pashtun tribesmen were organized and pushed into Kashmir, inaugurating the first India-Pakistan war and setting a pattern: deniable fighters, plausible deniability, maximal strategic leverage at minimal conventional cost. When China’s 1962 victory over India seemed to open an opportunity, Gen. Ayub Khan’s regime unleashed Operation Gibraltar (1965), infiltrating disguised guerrillas into Indian-administered Kashmir to spark an uprising. The gambit misread local sentiment, backfired, and precipitated a conventional war Pakistan could not win. But the lesson the general staff drew was not restraint; it was repetition with refinement.

In 1971, as Bengali nationalism surged in East Pakistan, the army incubated new paramilitaries — Razakars, Al-Badr, Al-Shams — who, alongside regular troops, committed mass atrocities against civilians. The result was strategic disaster and enduring institutional trauma: the loss of half the country. Rather than shrinking the appetite for proxies, humiliation hardened it. If conventional wars end badly, cultivate unconventional ones; if state capacity is weak, outsource repression; if legitimacy is brittle, wrap violence in the language of religion.

The internationalization of jihad — and the cash machine

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan turned Pakistan’s proxy habit into a global industry. As the CIA and a broad coalition of partners (Saudi Arabia, the UK, China, Egypt, among others) assembled “Operation Cyclone,” Islamabad positioned itself as indispensable. Money, arms, training, transit — everything would run through the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate (ISI). The arrangement served several overlapping purposes:

1. Strategic leverage: Only those Afghan factions aligned with Pakistan’s preferences received the lion’s share of sustenance. That meant sidelining independent nationalists, empowering Islamists, and weaving a network Islamabad could pull later in Kashmir or Kabul.

2. Institutional enrichment: When billions move through opaque channels, rents accumulate. As your chapter details, Stingers and other advanced weaponry were diverted or stockpiled; finances washed through offshore accounts; and a binding patronage economy grew up around the military.

3. Religious mobilization as policy: What began as solidarity with Afghan mujahidin metastasized into a transferable toolkit. Once a foreign volunteer pipeline was built — Arabs, Central Asians, and others — it could be re-tasked: first against Kabul, later against India, and eventually, by splinter and blowback, against Pakistanis themselves.

Pakistan’s rulers sold the world a story — that they were the rampart against Soviet expansion — and the world paid handsomely. But the true deliverable wasn’t victory; it was managed conflict that guaranteed continued flows.

Military Inc.: when the barracks become the boardroom

A military that thrives on conflict needs a peacetime business plan. It found one by converting rank into rent. Land grants, foundations (Fauji, Shaheen, Bahria), and sprawling holding companies entrenched a “Milbus” — military business — that touches cement, cereals, energy, banking, real estate, logistics, even entertainment. Promotions come with property; retirement comes with windfalls. The incentive structure is plain: security policy that sustains insecurity pays.

This helps explain why Pakistan’s army has fought many wars but won none, yet its senior officers retire as millionaires. A system so designed will prefer profitable stalemate to decisive peace, perpetual proxy to costly conventional operations. Afghanistan, tragically, became the ideal arena: close enough to dominate, poor enough to manipulate, fragmented enough to exploit.

After 9/11: the double game made explicit

The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan offered Islamabad a fresh tranche of leverage. On one hand, Pakistan opened airspace, ports, and roads to NATO, offered intelligence on al-Qaeda, and positioned itself as a frontline ally. On the other, Taliban leaders were sheltered, rotated, reorganized, and reinserted into the fight. As American funds scaled up for counterterrorism, Pakistani support for select insurgents (the Taliban and the Haqqani Network) scaled too — not to defeat the West outright, but to bleed it, shape the endgame, and ensure that any settlement in Kabul would be vulnerable to Rawalpindi’s veto.

The choreography included theater operations at home — Al-Mizan, Rah-e-Haq, Rah-e-Rast, Rah-e-Nijat, Koh-e-Sufaid, Zarb-e-Azb — Rah-e-Estehkam that displaced millions of Pashtuns and pulverized civilian life while somehow sparing the top leaderships of “good” militants. Media blackouts sealed the narrative. Drone strikes, often supplied by Pakistani coordinates, killed many innocents and no principals; outrage was outsourced to Washington when useful, muted when not. The grim arithmetic was perverse but predictable: the more the frontier burned, the more dollars flowed; the more dollars flowed, the deeper the patronage; the deeper the patronage, the harder the doctrine calcified.

“Strategic depth”: a euphemism for permanent instability

Within the army’s planning lore, “strategic depth” in Afghanistan means two things at once: a rear area to which Pakistani forces might theoretically fall back in a war with India, and a political condominium in Kabul that never has the power or will to contest Pakistani preferences. In practice, it has meant:

• A captured neighbor: Use coercion, cash, and clerics to ensure that any Afghan authority is penetrated by Pakistan-friendly networks.

• A pressure valve: Keep Afghan soil available for militants trained for Kashmir and Indian soft targets, once again with plausible deniability.

• A bargaining chip: Dangle cooperation against terror as a service to be purchased by outside powers — Washington above all.

The doctrine requires Afghanistan to be weak. A sovereign, unified, educated, and prosperous Afghanistan — one that insists on revisiting the Durand Line or neutralizes proxy sanctuaries — would end the business model. So, the strategy funds madrassas that outnumber schools, blocks girls from the classroom, and normalizes the worst forms of authoritarian social control. In such a landscape, militancy is cheap to recruit, governance is expensive to build, and the “solution” on offer (Pakistan’s mediation) seems forever indispensable.

The record in the mirror: confessions and consequences

It is not just Kabul, Delhi, or Washington that have called out these patterns. Pakistani insiders have too. Former chiefs and ministers have boasted that the mujahidin, the Taliban, even al-Qaeda figures were “our heroes,” “our assets,” “under our custodianship.” Hospitals in Pakistan treated Taliban families openly; safe houses operated near the capital; leadership shuras directed strategy from Pakistani soil; Osama bin Laden lived and died a short drive from the country’s premier military academy. Each revelation shocked the world briefly — then dissolved into a cycle of denial, deflection, and diplomatic amnesia.

Why does the cycle persist? Because the external world keeps re-subscribing to Pakistan’s service bundle: cooperate on X this year and we’ll overlook Y; help with evacuation A and we’ll go quiet on sanctuary B; host meeting M and we’ll suspend pressure P. Islamabad, adept at crisis choreography, engineers leverage and then rents it out. The product is not peace; the product is managed menace.

Afghanistan as “the cash cow”

This is the blunt truth; Afghanistan became the revenue engine for Pakistan’s security elite. During the anti-Soviet jihad, weapons and money sluiced through ISI pipelines; after 9/11, coalition support funds and reimbursements poured in; with each new “operation,” new contracts flowed to military-adjacent firms; with each displacement, reconstruction budgets could be steered; with each diplomatic thaw, debt rescheduling or arms packages arrived. At no point did the model require a stable Afghanistan. In fact, stability would have been a balance-sheet risk.

For Afghans, the cost has been generational: a wrecked school system, a war-shocked economy, mass displacement, and the steady consolidation of a theocratic autocracy that denies half the population an education and criminalizes dissent. For Pakistanis, the costs are boomeranging home: radicalization, lost investment, a hollowed civilian state, and an economy on serial lifelines. For the region and the world, the risk is a durable hub of transnational militancy that — given time — turns every local grievance into a global plot.

The present gambit: bombing, branding, and bargaining

If reports of recent Pakistani airstrikes in Afghan cities are borne out, they are not a departure; they are doctrine in motion. Airpower signals dominance while militants inject deniable insecurity — the pincer that keeps Kabul off balance. The parallel diplomatic courtship of Washington — frequent visits, effusive praise, theatrical nominations — is the other half of the move: pre-sell the “solution” (Pakistan’s facilitation) to a problem Pakistan helps perpetuate (Afghanistan’s vulnerability), then monetize the mediation.

This is why parsing Islamabad’s press statements about “terror sanctuaries” on Afghan soil is not enough. Of course there are militants, but where and who controls? there have been for decades, often with Pakistani fingerprints on their creation or survival. The question is not whether Pakistan faces threats — it does — but whether the army’s chosen instrument for addressing them is the same instrument that keeps the threats renewable.

What a responsible recalibration would require

1. Name the model, not just the incidents. International engagement with Pakistan should move beyond incident-by-incident management to an explicit recognition that the army’s institutional incentives reward perpetual, controllable conflict. Aid and access must be conditioned not on press releases or curated arrests, but on verifiable, sustained dismantling of proxy infrastructures.

2. Invert the leverage. Instead of paying for “cooperation” after crises, structure relationships so that any re-emergence of cross-border militancy or sanctuary networks triggers automatic penalties — financial, diplomatic, and military-to-military.

3. Back Afghan sovereignty in concrete ways. This includes supporting a rights-based, inclusive political process independent of Pakistani tutelage; investing in Afghan education (especially girls’ education) even when the de facto authorities resist; and building direct, transparent channels for humanitarian aid that bypass Pakistani or Taliban patronage webs.

4. Decouple regional stabilization from Pakistan’s gatekeeping. Engage India, Central Asian states, and Gulf partners in formats that do not make Islamabad the indispensable broker. The more Pakistan can corner the market on “Afghan access,” the more valuable insecurity becomes to it.

   
   

The conclusion the facts demand

The Pakistan Army is not merely an institution within a state; it is a proxy force that owns a proxy state. It has weaponized religion, privatized war, financialized insecurity, and internationalized jihad — and then packaged this architecture as a service to be purchased by outside powers. Afghanistan has been the principal victim and the principal revenue stream. The doctrine of “strategic depth” is a euphemism for permanent Afghan weakness, which in turn underwrites a permanent Pakistani bargaining chip.

This is not just an Afghan tragedy. It is a persistent danger to global security. A system designed to keep conflicts simmering inevitably leaks violence across borders: to India via Kashmir, to the Gulf via networks and financing, to the West via plots conceived in “deniable” sanctuaries. Every time the world pays Pakistan to turn down the flames, it confirms the profitability of keeping the fire alive.

If the recent bombings inside Afghanistan are any indication, the model is still in business. Ending it will require more than sharp words; it will require a policy break with decades of self-deception. The message to Rawalpindi should be clear: no more rents for renewable wars; no more indulgence for “assets” that are liabilities to humanity; no more treating Afghanistan as a pasture to be grazed for cash and leverage.

Until that reckoning arrives, the Pakistan Army will continue to do what it was built to do — manufacture proxies, monetize chaos, and move the state to wherever the business of war needs it to be. And the rest of us will pay for the product.

Sources:

• Najib Azad, Treason: The Engineered Collapse of the Republic of Afghanistan (Liberty Hill Publishing 2023).

• Hassan Abbas, Pakistan’s Drift into Extremism: Allah, the Army, and America’s War on Terror (M E Sharpe 2005).

• Vahid Brown and Don Rassler, Fountainhead of Jihad: The Haqqani Nexus, 1973–2012 (Columbia UP 2013).

• Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (Penguin Press 2004).

• George Crile, Charlie Wilson’s War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History (Grove Press 2003).

• Robert M Gates, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War (Simon & Schuster 1996).

• Lester W Grau and Michael A Gress (eds), The Soviet–Afghan War: How a Superpower Fought and Lost (University Press of Kansas 2002).

• Antonio Giustozzi, Koran, Kalashnikov, and Laptop: The Neo-Taliban Insurgency in Afghanistan (Columbia UP 2008).

• Husain Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military (Carnegie Endowment 2005).

• International Crisis Group, Pakistan: Countering Militancy in FATA (Asia Report No 178, 2009) and subsequent Pakistan/Afghanistan reports (2009–2016).

• International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic (Stanford Law School) and Global Justice Clinic (NYU School of Law), Living Under Drones: Death, Injury, and Trauma to Civilians from US Drone Practices in Pakistan (2012).

• Ayesha Jalal, The State of Martial Rule: The Origins of Pakistan’s Political Economy of Defence (Cambridge UP 1990).

• Seth G Jones, In the Graveyard of Empires: America’s War in Afghanistan (W W Norton 2009).

• Seth G Jones and C Christine Fair, Counterinsurgency in Pakistan (RAND Occasional Paper 2010).

• Anatol Lieven, Pakistan: A Hard Country (Allen Lane 2011).

• Iftikhar H Malik, Pakistan: Democracy, Terror and the Building of a Nation (Atlantic Books 2010).

• Shuja Nawaz, Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army, and the Wars Within (OUP 2008).

• OCCRP and others, Suisse Secrets (Credit Suisse leaked accounts) (February 2022).

• Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (Yale UP 2000).

• Bruce Riedel, What We Won: America’s Secret War in Afghanistan, 1979–1989 (Brookings Institution Press 2014).

• Olivier Roy, Islam and Resistance in Afghanistan (2nd edn, Cambridge UP 1990).

• Thomas Ruttig, How Tribal Are the Taleban? (Afghanistan Analysts Network Discussion Paper 2010).

• Victoria Schofield, Kashmir in Conflict: India, Pakistan and the Unending War (I B Tauris 2003).

• Ashley J Tellis, C Christine Fair and Jamison Jo Medby, Limited Conflicts Under the Nuclear Umbrella: Indian and Pakistani Lessons from the Kargil Crisis (RAND 2001).

• Peter Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan: Messianic Terrorism, Tribal Conflicts, and the Failures of Great Powers (PublicAffairs 2011).

• US Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS): Afghanistan–Pakistan (1977–1989).

• United Nations Security Council, Reports and Sanctions Listings concerning the Taliban and al-Qaeda (2001–2010).

• Marvin G Weinbaum, Pakistan and Afghanistan: Resistance and Reconstruction (Westview Press 1994).

• Mohammad Yousaf and Mark Adkin, The Bear Trap: Afghanistan’s Untold Story (Pen & Sword 2001).