Pakistan’s Unwanted Inheritance: From Afghan Jihad to Hindutva Nationalism

Pakistan is now caught in a sophisticated web of foreign ideological threats, on one hand, the long shadow of American-engineered jihad in Afghanistan, and on the other, a nascent wave of Hindutva-led nationalism in India. Both these forces, though disparate in appearance, have a commonality that is perilous: both have been fashioned by the calculated deployment of education as an instrument of indoctrination and long-term strategic impact. Pakistan, while it was being faulted in international arenas, did not generate these threats but inherited them as byproducts of greater geopolitical maneuvers.

The origins of contemporary jihadist violence in the region lie not in theological development, but in Cold War realpolitik. Declassified documents and independent inquiries have revealed that the United States, through USAID, unleashed tens of millions of dollars in ideological warfare throughout the 1980s. At the center of this process was the University of Nebraska’s Center for Afghanistan Studies, which contracted to prepare school textbooks for Afghan refugees and madrassas. Between 1984 and 1994, USAID spent more than $50 million creating educational materials glorifying armed struggle, portraying violence as holy obligation, and instructing children to count using pictures of guns, tanks, and landmines. An NPR inquiry referenced a first-grade Pashto alphabet book in which eight of the 41 letters alluded to weapons or martyrdom, including statements such as “doing jihad against infidels is our duty.” Far from being neutral literacy primers, the books were intended to incite hatred for the Soviet occupiers, a strategy freely admitted by U.S. officials at the time.

Even after the Soviet pullout, such militant primers continued to circulate, and the Bush administration in 2001 was racing to replace them as part of a hasty “scrubbing” effort. By then, nonetheless, the harm was done. The Taliban and Al-Qaeda used the same textbooks, with slight revisions, and later, its offshores like ISIS-K discovered fertile ideological ground already tilled. Pakistan was the unforeseen victim of this inheritance. Militants trained and radicalized during the U.S.-backed Afghan jihad spilled across the Durand Line, bringing violence to Pakistan’s tribal regions. In 2023, an ISIS-K suicide bombing in Bajaur killed over 50 people, prompting Pakistani officials to accuse Afghanistan’s new Taliban rulers of harboring and enabling terrorists. For Islamabad, this was another disastrous fallout of an ideological conflict cooked up in Washington and sent to the region on the pretenses of resistance.

During the Trump presidency, a significant change in U.S. policy came with the temporary respite Pakistan received. Trump moved to discontinue several disreputable aid programs, including those operated by USAID. In 2025, Reuters interviewed that Trump’s administration had canceled dozens of foreign aid programs, most of which had previously been associated with ideological or destabilizing effects. This comprised emergency relief to Afghanistan, which Trump insisted was useless and counterproductive. More significantly, Trump created headlines by calling for the return of American military equipment left in Afghanistan, claiming that billions of dollars’ worth of weaponry and vehicles had been seized by the Taliban. He publicly queried why such advanced equipment was abandoned, describing it as brand new and unused. Security experts cautioned that much of this equipment, such as M4 rifles, night-vision goggles, and armored vehicles, had already found their way into the hands of ISIS-K and Taliban groups. Pakistan had long complained that such arms could be channeled into its restive western provinces. Trump’s position, even if it was politically driven, was seen in Islamabad as overdue recognition of Washington’s strategic missteps.

While the western border remains to bear the brunt of Cold War-era policies, an equally perilous new challenge has erupted on Pakistan’s eastern frontier. India, with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the helm, is set to transform ideologically as secular nationalism gives way to an inflexible, exclusionary Hindutva narrative. This is most evident within India’s education system. In 2018, Reuters uncovered how the Modi government had begun a campaign to re-write Indian history, promoting scholars who were sympathetic to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) to re-frame India as an essentially Hindu nation. Secular icons such as Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore are being pushed to the side, while myths from ancient Hindu epics are taught as historical facts. Schoolbooks in Gujarat assert that Indians built airplanes and intercontinental missiles many millennia ago. Certain versions invite children to redraw the borders of India to encompass Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan, fostering an expansionist and revisionist mindset.

At the same time, the RSS has stepped up its recruitment through shakhas—daily ideological camps where boys are instructed in Hindu prayers, physical exercises, and a script of Hindu dominance. The camps, previously on the fringe, are now mainstream, with millions of participants all over India. An AP News report characterized Modi as “100 percent an ideological product of the RSS,” highlighting how pervasively the Hindutva ideology pervades India’s present political leadership. For Pakistan, the stakes are serious. This is not just a case of aggressive rhetoric or military bluster. It is the institutionalization of anti-Muslim prejudice and the long-term radicalization of a generation of Indian youth.

What makes Pakistan’s stance so vulnerable is the intersection of these two outside pressures—militancy spawned by U.S. policy in Afghanistan and ideological extremism in India. Both movements have leaned extensively on using education systems to influence upcoming generations, employing classrooms as ideological battlefields. Pakistan is left to field the violence, soak up the instability, and deal with the consequences. It is accused of spreading terrorism, when much of the ideological framework used to spur that terrorism was constructed and financed by outside powers. It is accused of being at war with India, when confronting a more belligerent neighbor whose schools now graduate citizens educated to see Pakistan, not as an independent nation, but as an error in history to be righted.

The strategic challenge for Pakistan is thus not only military, but ideological. It has to defend its sovereignty against west-bound militant spillover and counter the narrative war being fought by India in the east. What tends to be lost in international debate is that Pakistan’s present predicament stems from actions taken by others. Historians in the future might well decide that so-called war on terror was less a struggle of civilizations and more a bloody proxy war driven by textbooks, aid policy, and revisionist mythologies.

What Pakistan requires today is not more blame, but acknowledgement of the outside forces that have defined its security paradigm. The world must come to terms with the long-term costs of ideologically motivated interventions, whatever their configuration in terms of “conquering” communism or establishing cultural supremacy. Until then, Pakistan will keep bearing the costs of wars it did not initiate, policies it did not create, and ideologies it never supported.