8 Simmering Threats You Shouldn’t Ignore in 2024
These are the international disputes that are currently flying under the radar but could emerge as major flash points in the coming year.
Jan 2, 2024 (Foreign Policy)— Earlier this week, Foreign Policy featured 10 conflicts to watch in 2024. Here, we are focusing on those international disputes that have been flying under the radar but could emerge as full-blown conflicts in the next year.
This list is not intended to be predictive; rather, it is a warning from FP’s columnists and contributors that there are a number of flash points—from Abkhazia to Essequibo—that deserve more attention than they have received from observers of international conflict and geopolitical risk.—Sasha Polakow-Suransky, deputy editor
The Taliban Threat to Pakistan
By Lynne O’Donnell, columnist at Foreign Policy
Pakistan is fighting for its life. Politically unstable, economically spent, militarily stretched, morally bankrupt, the Pakistani state is now at war with the terror group it once sought to control for its own nefarious ambitions. After supporting the Taliban for 20 years against the U.S.-backed government of Afghanistan, seeing the group as a tool of its “strategic depth” policy of containing India, Pakistan’s establishment has realized, too late, that it has been had. The Taliban’s Pakistani franchise, the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) is now engaged in an escalating war against the Pakistani state.
Since the Taliban could beat the mighty United States, the TTP, like extremist groups worldwide, is calculating the odds are in its favor. Protestations from the Taliban that they are neither harboring nor helping the TTP are not borne out by the evidence. Pakistan has already bombed TTP positions inside Afghanistan, and U.S.-made military equipment delivered to Afghan defense forces during the republic’s war with the insurgency has been found in Pakistan.
Anwaar ul Haq Kakar, Pakistan’s caretaker prime minister ahead of elections scheduled for February, has ruled out talks with the TTP, spurning offers to intercede from the Taliban’s de facto Interior Minister Sirajuddin Haqqani (who leads the Haqqani network, a blacklisted terror group that, like the TTP, is affiliated with al Qaeda).
Many thousands of people in Pakistan’s northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province have marched against the resurgence of Islamist extremism and called on the government to see off the TTP. They know what they’re in for if the TTP prevails, having lived under the group’s veil of terror for a decade before the state finally took action in 2014 and pushed the TTP over the border into Afghanistan.
The weakness of the Pakistani state, however, does not inspire much hope that the same will happen again before the TTP becomes re-entrenched. As Pakistan’s politicians and military officers squabble and plot for power and wealth, the TTP is preparing to march in 2024.
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