The Architecture of Pakistan’s Unfinished War on Terror

The explosions have barely stopped echoing. In the span of forty eight hours, five coordinated terrorist attacks have torn through Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, a province that has borne more than its share in the war against terrorism. Twenty three people are dead. Thirty more are injured. Markets have been bombed. Bridges have been demolished under cover of night. A police station in Bannu has been reduced to rubble, and yet, if history is any guide, outrage will be followed by grief, grief by forgetting, and forgetting by the next attack.

Pakistan cannot afford that cycle any longer.

It was never coincidental how the series of events unfolded from the evening of 10th May 2026. Everything had been planned in detail. On one side of the border, a suicide bomber crashed a bomb-laden vehicle into the police post at Fateh Khel, which was manned by just eighteen people. Fifteen of the policemen lost their lives in the attack. Only three survived the blast. According to reports, it was caused by the use of about 1,500 kilograms of explosives. The post was blown up, along with its armoured vehicle, while the blast waves shattered the houses of civilians in the neighbouring area. An emergency situation was declared in the hospitals of Bannu.

On Monday morning, a deadly blast occurred in the Sarai Naurang bazaar in Lakki Marwat, killing seven civilians, including two police officers named Adil Jan and Rahatullah, while leaving twenty-three others injured. Both a teenager and a lady sustained injuries in the explosion. The Bomb Disposal Squad is investigating to find out if there is a parked bomb-filled loader rickshaw or suicide bomber behind the explosion. In either case, the message from the perpetrators was the same that nowhere is safe, no one is protected, not the officers of the law, not the woman buying vegetables in a morning market.

Between these two headline attacks came the demolition of the Lora Bridge on Miran Shah Road near Fateh Khel, an act of deliberate strategic sabotage, carried out under darkness, severing the land connection between North Waziristan and Bannu. A bridge destroyed is not merely infrastructure lost. It is a community isolated and a supply line severed. Simultaneously, in Jand, the inter-provincial border area between Kohat and Attock, a suicide attack was narrowly averted through the bravery of a local citizen. A disaster was stopped, though barely.

In forty eight hours, the cumulative death toll reached approximately twenty three martyred and thirty injured.

Those who would dismiss this week’s carnage as isolated or unpredictable have not been paying attention. The data is unambiguous.

According to PICSS, 2025 marked the most deadly year for security personnel since 2011 with 664 such people getting martyred. It was the deadliest year for civilians since 2015 as 580 people lost their lives. Terrorist attacks also saw a sharp increase becoming the highest since 2014. Suicide attacks saw a staggering increase of 53% in numbers with 26 cases reported in 2025, up from 17 in 2024. Small drones in terror attacks which is an even more horrifying trend increased at least thirty three times with 33 such attacks carried out in 2025. The number of fatalities through combat also went up 73% in 2025 reaching a total of 3,387 deaths.

According to CRSS, however, the first eleven months of 2025 had been 25% more violent than the whole of 2024, causing 3,187 deaths, which is an average of fifteen victims each day. KP alone accounted for a death toll rising from 1,620 in 2024 to 2,331 in 2025.

The primary authors of this violence are not faceless. Fitna al Khawarij (FAK) is the driving force, and operating in Bannu and Lakki Marwat specifically is the Hafiz Gul Bahadur Group.

This faction has committed, by its own grim distinction, the highest number of suicide attacks since the Taliban regime takeover of Afghanistan in 2021. Their primary targets are security institutions in precisely the districts currently under fire like North Waziristan, Bannu, and Lakki Marwat.

Pakistan’s security has been explicit as the current wave of attacks is not simply a product of Afghan territory. It is, in significant part, a deliberate strategy of Indian proxy warfare, intensified in the aftermath of Operation Bunyan um Marsoos.

In May 2025, India launched Operation Sindoor, missile strikes targeting Pakistani civilian territory, including Muzaffarabad, Kotli, Sialkot, and Shakargarh. Pakistan responded with Operation Bunyan um Marsoos (Arabic: “a wall of solid lead”), with precision strikes on 26 Indian military targets, including 15 air bases and S-400 air defence systems at Adampur and Bhuj. A ceasefire was subsequently brokered through the intervention of the United States.

The ceasefire held, but the strategic contest did not end. New Delhi, humiliated by the strength of Pakistan’s response and under pressure to maintain its regional image, has resumed and intensified its use of proxies to destabilise Pakistan from within. The logic is straightforward that what cannot be achieved through conventional military confrontation will be pursued through the slow bleeding of Pakistan’s border communities, its police forces, and its civilian population’s sense of security.

Afghanistan, under the Taliban regime, is being used as a proxy.

In February 2026, a terrorist attack on an Imambargah in Islamabad became a decisive moment. Pakistan launched Operation Ghazab Lil Haq (“Wrath for Justice”) against terrorism.

Initially striking seven targets in Khost, Paktika, and Nangarhar, the operation expanded, Pakistan’s forces struck 51 locations across Afghanistan, reportedly killing 435 Terrorists, destroying 188 tanks and armoured vehicles, capturing 31 Taliban posts, and targeting terrorist infrastructure in Kandahar, Paktia, Nangarhar, Khost, and Paktika.

A temporary operational pause was announced on March 18, 2026, ahead of Eid ul Fitr, at the request of fraternal Islamic countries, but officials made clear the operation would resume at full intensity at any sign of renewed cross-border activity. The attacks of this week, martyring 23 more, suggest that the pause has been exploited.

The way forward is simple.

Pakistan’s response to this week’s attacks must be measured not by the number of press conferences held but by the durability of the changes implemented. Five Major imperatives stand above all others.

First, the diplomatic offensive against Kabul must be relentless, multilateral, and consequence-based. Taliban regime must understand, through every channel available to Islamabad and its allies, that continued tolerance of terrorist sanctuaries will have permanent costs to any path toward international recognition and economic integration.

Second, Operation Ghazab Lil Haq must resume with renewed intensity and precision, targeting not only terrorists but the infrastructure of command, supply, and financing that sustains cross-border operations against Pakistan.

Third, the KP Police must be transformed, better-paid, better-trained, better- equipped, into a genuine first line of defence against domestic terrorism.

Fourth, a decisive, intelligence-led financial interdiction campaign must dismantle the

funding networks of Fitna al Khawarij and make terrorism in KP financially unviable. A terrorist network can survive the loss of its fighters. It cannot survive the destruction of its finances. The funding pipelines that sustain Fitna al Khawarij, flowing from Indian intelligence through hawala networks must be systematically identified and dismantled.

Lastly, and most fundamentally, Pakistan must pursue a final, comprehensive operation against all nodes of Fitna al Khawarij, not as a time-limited military campaign, but as an enduring national commitment backed by law, governance, and sustained political will across all parties.