How Separatist Movements Have Created Pakistan's Two and a Half Front Dilemma
Rahul Bedi
Chandigarh: Ironically, Pakistan now finds itself entangled in its version of a two-and-a-half-front war – a strategic quagmire long associated with India which has historically contended with simultaneous threats from military and nuclear allies China and Pakistan, and domestic insurgencies in Jammu and Kashmir, the Northeast and Maoist-dominated belts.
For nearly eight decades, Pakistan’s sole military focus was on its eastern front with India, with whom it has fought four wars. But in recent years, a series of grave and complex strategic miscalculations by Islamabad’s military-dominated regime had transformed its former Taliban allies in Afghanistan into formidable adversaries along its western border, thereby adding a second ‘hot’ front to its proliferating security challenges.
These included troublesome demands by the Taliban government for Pashtunistan, a Pashtun homeland, comprising a wide swathe of Pakistani territory including its seven federally administered tribal areas, six smaller supplementary pockets, known as Frontier Regions, all abutting Afghanistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK) province, almost up to Islamabad’s city limits, and some contiguous portions of Balochistan.
The fiercely resurgent Pashtunistan movement
The simmering, but now fiercely resurgent Pashtunistan movement disregards the 2,670km long Durand Line, drawn arbitrarily in 1893 by a Colonial civil servant and named after him, as the border between British India and Afghanistan, to then fix the limits of their respective territories.
Successive rulers and governments in Kabul, and now the Taliban, have uncompromisingly backed a nationalistic reunification of the Pashtuns in southern Afghanistan and Pakistan along with the territories they inhabit. Islamabad’s insecurities over its western Afghan border has endured palpably for all its successive civilian and military dispensations, but conceded sotto voce.
However, recent recurring armed hostilities between the Taliban and the Pakistan Army had, much to Pakistan’s vexation once again resurrected the contentious and seemingly combative Pashtunistan issue.
To make matters worse, Pakistan’s relatively stable security and diplomatic relations with Iran had also experienced turbulence early last year following tit-for-tat cross-border military actions. In January 2024, Pakistan conducted air strikes inside Iran, killing nine people, including three children and four women, in response to Tehran executing missile attacks against Jaish-al Adl (Army of Justice), a Sunni militant group, based in Pakistan’s Balochistan province, for raiding its territory days earlier and shooting dead 11 policemen.
Domestically – or on the arduous ‘half’ war-front – the situation for Pakistan was dire, gripped as it is by enduring Islamist insurgencies, most of them far more lethal in firepower and operational capability compared with those presently threatening India.
These insurrections, in which over 13,500 civilians, security personnel and militants had died between 2014-25, span three of Pakistan’s four provinces and its two federally administered territories.
The most forbidding of these was led by the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). Ideologically aligned with the Afghan Taliban, the TTP has for years been waging war against the Pakistani state to instal a hard-line Sunni Deobandi regime in Islamabad. It had reinforced its attacks, 2023 onwards, after Pakistan forcibly expelled over 910,000 Afghans, many of whom had been living as refugees in Pakistan for decades.
According to recent news reports, another 80,000 Afghans had been sent home since March to bleak futures and nothingness in their war-ravaged country. Multiple accounts of their maltreatment by zealous Pakistan security forces overseeing their deportation, including appropriating their properties, money and belongings, had only further energised TTP cadres to further conduct armed strikes across the country.
Other separatist movements in Pakistan
Other concurrent and equally fierce separatist movements that persist in Pakistan include the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) and associated fellow tribal groups, engaged in a decades-long insurgency for independence, and militant Sindhi nationalists, seeking autonomy to preserve their economic rights, linguistic identity, and cultural heritage.
All these insurgent groups and their spinoffs were far deadlier than any operating across India, equipped as they are with sophisticated weaponry and advanced military equipment, abandoned by the US and NATO forces following their chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021.
Much of this forsaken materiel was appropriated by Kabul’s Taliban regime, but a significant residue had percolated to the TTP, BLA, and other smaller Pakistani insurgent groups.
This hoard included M4 carbines, M16 and AK-47 assault rifles, sniper rifles, belt-fed M240 and M249 SAW machine guns and Glock 19 and Beretta M9 pistols. Additionally, mortars, rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) and improvised explosive devices (IED) components had bolstered insurgent arsenals with capabilities normally exclusive to formal militaries. Night vision devices, thermal scopes, and laser targeting systems to conduct night-time operations with greater precision and safety, too were part of this stash, as were ballistic helmets and body armour.
Meanwhile, on a lesser but equally disruptive scale, regions like Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK)/Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir (POK) and the contiguous Gilgit-Baltistan (GB) areas – both federally administered and home to significant Shia populations – had grown increasingly resentful of Islamabad’s centralised control.
Local Shias further accused Islamabad’s military-controlled government of Sinicising the entire region, by settling Punjabis and Pathans here in a move to fortify Beijing’s growing influence by way of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, or CPEC.
Further deepening Pakistan’s religious fault lines was the institutional persecution of the 4-5 million strong Ahmadiyya community, widely regarded as highly educated, professionally accomplished, and socially disciplined.
Officially declared non-Muslim via a 1974 constitutional amendment, Ahmadis remain barred from practicing their faith, prohibited from using Islamic terminology, and excluded from public office in ostracisation, unparalleled across most of the Muslim world and locally resented and resisted.
The Sunni-Shia sectarian divide
Compounding such widespread instability, was the continuing Sunni-Shia sectarian divide and the security unrest it spawned. Sunni extremist groups like Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP) and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ), for instance, had relentlessly targeted Shia scholars, professionals, and community leaders, fomenting a climate of fear and alienation and perpetuated widespread lawlessness in Sindh, Balochistan, KPK, and to a lesser extent in Punjab.
Sunni’s comprise some 85% of Pakistan’s population of over 240 million, while Shia’s account for the remaining 15%-odd, making it home to the world’s second-largest Shia population after Iran. Paradoxically, this split corresponds to India’s Hindu-Muslim demographic break-up, where around 85% comprised the majority community.
At the heart of these multiple crises lies an even deeper, festering resentment against Pakistan’s Punjabi-dominated state apparatus, which has haughtily monopolised military, political, bureaucratic and economic power over the country since Independence. Burgeoning Punjabi control over all organs of state had triggered widespread bitterness amongst Pathans, Balochis, Sindhis and other smaller ethnic groups, commonly fuelling strife and secessionist demands for independence and autonomy or both, to undermine its supremacy.
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Complicating this miasma, if the myriad aforementioned obstacles were not enough, were prevalent linguistic tensions, rooted in the policy of imposing Urdu as Pakistan’s national language soon after Independence.
This emotive, albeit subterranean, emotion continues to be viewed by multiple Pakistani ethnic groups as an affront to their individual cultural identities. Oddly, while Punjabi is Pakistan’s most widely spoken language, it holds no official status in education or governance and similar linguistic grievances continue to be echoed across Sindh, Balochistan, KPK, AJK/POK and GB.
Yet, despite these existential pressures and seemingly near- apocalyptic scenarios, why has Pakistan so far defied predictions of fragmentation and balkanisation?
Deep State and Pakistan's Nuclear stockpile
One primary tactical explanation is that all the said separatist movements remain fragmented along their respective ethnic, ideological and tactical lines, undermining their ability to mount a unified secessionist challenge to the state. Many Pakistani analysts at home and abroad agreed that this disunity had hugely benefited Islamabad’s forbidding security apparatus, allowing it to successfully manage the numerous rebellions, piecemeal.
But above all else, Islamabad’s resilience and durability stems primarily from the throttlehold of its military/army and attendant Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISID) via a brutal combination of coercion, surveillance, Islamist indoctrination and strategic co-optation of diverse inimical elements.
Better known as Pakistan’s “deep state” this military-ISID combine also shaped the country’s foreign, economic and cultural policies, operating broadly as a parallel fundamentalist administration answerable only to itself. This, in turn, has prompted the hackneyed, albeit accurate adage that most countries have an army, but in Pakistan, the army has a country.
Consequently, its military’s sprawling economic empire spanning real estate, transport networks, agribusinesses, retail ventures like cornflakes and sugar production, banking and highway construction, amongst others, too blurred domestic lines between governance, commerce and profiteering.
In essence, Pakistan’s deep state acts both as protector and jailer, preserving territorial integrity while stifling democratic evolution and related institutions, like the judiciary and the civil service
Pakistan’s nuclear capability too essentially provided its military with global strategic leverage, not only against external threats from rival India, but also as a tool to dominate domestic politics. Possessing nuclear weapons – developed under the military’s direct oversight – has provided Pakistan’s armed forces, particularly its army further justification for its dominance.
Furthermore, by projecting itself as the ultimate guardian of national security, the army has doubly exploited its proliferating nuclear arsenal as a shield against foreign threats and a justification for internal supremacy.
According to the Federation of American Scientists and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Pakistan's nuclear arsenal is estimated at 165–170 warheads and is believed to include short-range, low-yield tactical nuclear weapons, primarily for battlefield use against Indian conventional forces.
It is also widely reported that despite its financial crunch, Pakistan continues to expand this stockpile, potentially aiming shortly for 200+ warheads, thereby rendering it the world’s fifth-largest nuclear power in warhead terms. This increase would put Pakistan ahead of India, Israel and North Korea – with whom the Pakistani military had covert nuclear cooperation in the late 1990 and early 2000s – but behind the strategic weapon stockpiles of US, Russia, China and France.
Internationally, Pakistan’s nuclear status ensures its relevance in strategic dialogues and secures tacit support from global nuclear powers, many of whom view a strong militarily-led Islamabad preferable to the internal fragmentation of a nuclear weapon state. Thus, the country’s nuclear capability, while deterring external aggression – exclusively from India – has also served as a powerful tool of political consolidation for Pakistan’s military establishment, reinforcing its role as both guardian and gatekeeper of the state.
In conclusion, it is instructive to recall that ‘Pakistan’ remains an acronym, coined in 1933 by Choudhary Rahmat Ali at Cambridge University, that stood for Punjab, Afghania (then North West Frontier Province, now KPK), Kashmir, Sindh, and tan, for Balochistan.
But all these regions, except Punjab, were wracked by armed rebellion, insoluble religious, ethnic, ideological, territorial and institutional challenges in a region where geographical boundaries have been determined over centuries with disastrous consequences.
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