Pakistan is bleeding. From the mountains of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa to the deserts of Balochistan, Pakistani soldiers and civilians are dying in a relentless campaign of violence. The guns, suicide vests and coordinated logistics behind these attacks are increasingly pointing in one direction, east. While the world has focused on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border conflict that escalated dramatically in early 2026, the deeper and more dangerous story is about who is pulling the strings in Kabul and why India’s fingerprints are all over this war by proxy.
This is no conspiracy theory; it is a well-documented, official statement and strategic logic of the fact that the civilian and military leadership of Pakistan have brought up on every platform available to them. The data collected from January to May 2026 itself presents a case study for a hybrid war being carried out by India through the use of Afghanistan and its Taliban regime against Pakistan.
January 2026: The Warning Signs Pakistan Could Not Ignore
It started with the Pakistan military issuing warnings about its situation right from the beginning. In a milestone press conference held on January 6, 2026, the Director-General of Inter Services Public Relations (DG ISPR), Lieutenant General Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry, gave an overview of the terrorism scenario in Pakistan. According to him, Afghan citizens were responsible for committing terrorist acts against Pakistan during the whole of 2025, when over 75,000 operations based on intelligence had taken place across the country.
Shehbaz Sharif, Prime Minister of Pakistan, while addressing a group of religious scholars on January 16, 2026, said that the country was wounded again by terrorism after years of struggle against it. Furthermore, he added that some enemy forces are helping the TTP from their new regime inside Afghanistan.
January 31, 2026: The Balochistan Massacre and India’s Fingerprints
On January 31, 2026, the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) orchestrated what came to be known as “Operation Heroof 2.0,” which was one of the most coordinated attacks on Pakistani soil. In an attack that was spread out to over a dozen regions including Quetta and Gwadar, BLA terrorists targeted police stations, prisons, banks, medical centers, markets, schools, and general civilian centers, leaving at least 31 dead civilians and 17 dead security forces personnel. There is no doubt that such an organized effort was backed by external resources and intelligence.
The Minister of Defence, Khawaja Asif, acted without delay. In an interview with journalists on February 1, 2026, he said that “all linkages lead back to India.” The BLA is described by him as a group which is trying to keep itself in the limelight “to raise foreign funds through India.” It was further found that the suicide wing of BLA called the Majeed Brigade had managed to forge connections with various other terrorist organizations operating against Pakistan from the Afghan soil. It has also been revealed that India-based social media accounts and Indian media houses were actively spreading propaganda in favor of the attackers in a parallel hostile information operation.
Sarfraz Bugti, the chief minister of Balochistan, was equally candid. He pointed out that the bodies of the slain terrorists belonged to Afghan nationals, and that top BLA commanders were active from the Afghan side. He pointed out that “under the 2020 Doha agreement, Afghanistan has agreed not to use its soil for attacks against any other country,” but “unfortunately, the Afghan soil is still being used against Pakistan.”
February 2026: A Mosque Blown Up and Open War Declared
A suicide bomber entered the Khadijatul Kubra Imambargah mosque in Tarlai, Islamabad, on February 6, 2026, and exploded, resulting in the death of at least 32 people and injuring more than 170 others. This was the most deadly attack in the capital city of Pakistan since the bomb explosion at the Marriott hotel in 2008.
The Defence Minister, Khawaja Asif, and the Prime Minister’s Office alluded to India and Afghanistan. “India and its proxies” were the culprits behind the attack. The Interior Minister, Mohsin Naqvi, said that the attack was committed “by elements backed by India and proxies in the shape of Taliban regime.” Even as India rejected these claims, the trend could not be ignored. The attacker had a track record of visiting Afghanistan. The TTP is based out of Afghan territory, and India was expanding its relationship with the same government that hosted the TTP.
Next, there was the military reaction. Pakistan conducted an air strike, based on intelligence, against the camps of the TTP and ISIS-K within Afghan territory, marking the start of a campaign known officially as Ghazab Lil-Haq. The Taliban regime in Afghanistan reacted with fire from its side. By February 26, Pakistan had declared “open war.”
It soon became clear just what kind of geo-strategic alliance Pakistan had been talking about all along. India lambasted Pakistan for the attack and expressed its full support for the “sovereignty and territorial integrity” of Afghanistan. India, which has never shown concern for Afghanistan’s sovereignty in light of its own interests, chose this particular time to support Kabul. This was certainly not an act of altruism.
March 2026: India Defends Kabul Again
Defence Minister Khawaja Asif continued to lay out Pakistan’s position in unambiguous terms. In a National Assembly session, he stated that Pakistan faced “one enemy” on both its eastern and western borders and saw no distinction between the governments in New Delhi and Kabul. He said Kabul was not giving Pakistan any written guarantee to stop terrorism, only verbal commitments that were consistently broken. Three rounds of negotiations had been held with Afghanistan through the support of Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia and all had failed to produce actionable results. Kabul was willing to agree verbally but never in writing, a pattern Asif described as deliberate obstruction at the behest of external handlers.
May 2026: Pakistan’s Military Connects All the Dots
By May 2026, Pakistan’s military leadership was drawing explicit and comprehensive links between India’s aggression and the ongoing terrorism being orchestrated from Afghan soil. On May 7, 2026, DG ISPR Lieutenant General Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry held a major press conference marking the first anniversary of the Marka-e-Haq conflict with India. He stated directly that “terrorism in Pakistan is being carried out by India, and Afghanistan is being used as a base of operations.” He noted a surge in terrorist incidents inside Pakistan following the Marka-e-Haq military confrontation, linking the post-conflict spike in terrorism to Indian retaliation through proxies.
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, speaking to The Sunday Times in May 2026, described the situation with painful clarity, “Our country is facing an onslaught of terrorism again despite our best efforts, whether it’s from Kabul, the TTP, the BLA and other externally sponsored proxies. With Afghanistan, we had no other choice but kinetic action against terrorist hideouts and support infrastructure. We have lost hundreds of police and soldiers.”
The Strategic Logic Is Undeniable
Critics who dismiss Pakistan’s case against India often do so without engaging with the strategic logic that makes Indian involvement not just plausible but rational. Consider the following facts. India has a long-established doctrine of “strategic depth” denial, preventing Pakistan from having a friendly western neighbor so that it must defend two fronts simultaneously. India reopened its embassy in Kabul and invited Taliban ministers to New Delhi at precisely the moment Pakistan-Afghanistan relations were at their lowest. India is funding and developing Chabahar Port as an explicit mechanism to circumvent Pakistan in regional trade, reducing Afghanistan’s economic dependence on Pakistani goodwill. India-linked social media accounts were documented as amplifying propaganda in real time during the January 31 Balochistan attacks, and a serving Indian intelligence officer was caught running a network facilitating attacks in Balochistan, confessing to his activities on camera.
India’s own Defense Minister Rajnath Singh declared in 2025 that “Funding Pakistan means funding the infrastructure of terrorism. Pakistan is a nursery of terrorism.” This rhetoric did not emerge in a vacuum. It is part of a deliberate information war designed to delegitimize Pakistan internationally and isolate it diplomatically. The same country that tells the world Pakistan sponsors terrorism is the country Pakistan’s own intelligence agencies have documented sponsoring terrorism on Pakistani soil.
What the World Must Understand
Pakistan is not externalizing its problems. Pakistan is naming them. The country has buried over 650 soldiers and police officers in 2025 alone, with nearly 280 more in the first four months of 2026, part of more than 4,000 total fatalities in terrorism-related violence that year, the deadliest toll in over a decade. According to the Global Terrorism Index 2026, terrorism claimed 1,139 lives in 2025 (the highest since 2013), with the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) alone responsible for 637 deaths across 595 attacks. It has had mosques bombed in its own capital during Friday prayers. It has watched coordinated attacks strike twelve districts in Balochistan simultaneously in the dead of night. It has intercepted Afghan nationals on Pakistani soil who crossed the border to commit suicide bombings. This is not an internal law and order failure. This is a foreign-sponsored war being fought on Pakistani soil.
India’s hybrid warfare doctrine, what Pakistani officials have called the “Hindutva war” being fought through Kabul, relies on three instruments working together. The TTP provides the foot soldiers from Afghan territory. The BLA provides the Balochistan front, and India provides the funding, intelligence coordination, diplomatic cover and information warfare that ties all of it together. Pakistan is not fighting one enemy. It is fighting a system designed to drain it from every direction.
History Will Record Who Stood Where
In May 2026, as this article is written, Operation Ghazab Lil-Haq continues. Pakistani soldiers are still dying. Balochistan is still under threat. The Islamabad mosque attack remains fresh in the memory of a nation that refuses to break. Pakistan has faced down every attempt at destabilization.
Defence Minister Khawaja Asif put it with the clarity that this moment demands, “In the past, Pakistan’s role has been positive. It has hosted five million Afghans for fifty years. Even today, millions of Afghans are earning their livelihood on our soil. Our cup of patience has overflowed.” Pakistan’s patience has not overflowed out of weakness. It has overflowed because a nation can only absorb so much before it must defend itself.
The world needs to open its eyes. Not because Pakistan says so, but because the evidence demands it.
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