In Accordance With International Law

When President Asif Ali Zardari told United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in Islamabad on 7 October that militant groups based in Afghanistan continued to target Pakistan, that Islamabad had shared evidence of foreign support for them, and that Pakistan would defend its people and territory in accordance with international law, the exchange had the look of routine diplomacy. Read more closely, alongside the Nishan-e-Imtiaz that Pakistan conferred on Guterres during the same visit, it is something more deliberate. Pakistan is not only lodging a complaint about the Taliban. It is assembling a legal case.

The phrase that carries the weight is the last one. To defend one’s territory in accordance with international law is the vocabulary of self-defence, and it is the formulation Pakistan has increasingly attached to the airstrikes it has conducted inside Afghanistan over recent weeks. A state does not reach for that language by accident. It reaches for it because self-defence is the one widely accepted basis on which a country may use force on the soil of another, and because the strikes Pakistan has already carried out require a justification that goes beyond anger.

The logic Islamabad is building is recognisable to anyone who has followed the law of force over the past two decades. It is the reasoning often summarised as the unwilling or unable doctrine, under which a state facing armed attacks by a non-state group operating from a neighbour’s territory may use force against that group when the host government is unwilling or unable to suppress it. The United States relied on that reasoning for its strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Syria. Pakistan is now constructing the same argument in the other direction, against the Taliban, and the pieces it needs are becoming visible.

Three elements have to be established for such a claim, and Pakistan has spent months assembling each. The first is a continuing armed attack, which the TTP’s cross-border campaign, with its suicide bombings and infiltration, is meant to supply. The second is the host state’s unwillingness or inability to stop it, which Islamabad has worked to document through formal demarches, through its demand for verifiable written assurances, and through the United Nations monitoring reports that describe Taliban support for the group. The third is a record placed before the international community, and that is what the appeal to Guterres provides. A self-defence claim is far stronger when the failure of the host state sits on the international register rather than resting on one government’s assertion.

This is why the forum matters as much as the message. Taking the case to the Secretary-General, and honouring him with Pakistan’s highest civilian award in the process, is an exercise in building legitimacy at the institution whose view of the lawfulness of force carries the most weight. Pakistan is cultivating the goodwill of the United Nations while, in the United Nations’ own setting, laying down the justification for action that the UN Charter does not straightforwardly permit.

That tension is real, and an honest account has to name it. The unwilling or unable doctrine is contested rather than settled law. Its critics argue that Article 51 of the Charter speaks of an armed attack, understood for most of the Charter’s history as an attack attributable to a state, and that extending self-defence to the territory of a neighbour who has not itself attacked stretches the provision past its text. States have tended to embrace the doctrine when it serves them and to resist it when it is turned against them. Pakistan itself objected, for years and with force, when the logic was applied to strikes on its own territory. Its adoption of the same reasoning now is a measure of how far the relationship with Kabul has deteriorated, and a reminder that doctrines of this kind travel with the interests of whoever is invoking them.

None of this resolves the underlying factual question, which is whether the evidence Pakistan says it has shared actually establishes the Taliban’s complicity to the standard the claim requires. That evidence remains, for the moment, Islamabad’s to substantiate, and a self-defence argument is only as sound as the proof of the attack and of the host state’s default that sits beneath it. The United Nations reporting lends the broad contention real support. The specific case for any given strike is harder to see from the outside.

What the meeting with Guterres makes clear, though, is the direction of Pakistan’s policy. A government that frames its position in the language of self-defence and carries that framing to the Secretary-General is a government preparing to keep using force and to defend having done so. The airstrikes already flown and the warnings issued since are being fitted, after the fact and in advance, with a legal architecture. Pakistan has moved past demanding that the Taliban act. It is now building the case to act itself, and telling the world, through the one institution whose endorsement it most wants, why it believes the law is on its side.