The Taliban Want a Piece of Pakistan
Afghanistan’s government doesn’t recognize a 130-year-old border—and its local affiliates are causing havoc in the Pakistani borderlands.
MIRAN SHAH, Pakistan, February 21, 2024 (Foreign Policy)—Mohsin Dawar’s campaign for re-election to Pakistan’s parliament was almost cut short before it began in early January when his convoy was ambushed in a village just a few minutes’ drive from his home in Miran Shah in Pakistan’s North Waziristan district, near the lawless borderlands with Afghanistan. As his car came under attack from militants armed with automatic weapons, sniper rifles, and rocket-propelled grenades, he and his team were lured into a compound by residents who promised them safety.
It was a trap. Once the gates closed behind Dawar, the attack intensified. For almost an hour, he said, they were pinned down. Police and Pakistan Army backup finally arrived but not before two of Dawar’s team had been shot and injured. The vehicle took more than 80 bullets, and the windows show just how accurate the attackers’ aim was: Either one of the shots to the windshield or passenger window would have struck and likely killed him if he hadn’t been protected by bulletproof glass.
The Jan. 3 attack on a popular, outspoken, liberal leader in one of the most vulnerable regions of a country fighting a growing insurgency by extremist militants hardly registered in Pakistan, where most believe the military attempted—and failed—to manipulate the Feb. 8 election in an effort to install Nawaz Sharif as prime minister for a fourth time and where media operate under tight government control.
DAWAR’S HOMETOWN IS, once again, the battleground of what he calls “Project Taliban”—a war against the Pakistani state. The Taliban’s transnational ambitions are threatening security beyond the borders of Afghanistan, and nowhere is this more evident than in Pakistan’s northwest, where the militant presence has been growing since the terrorist-led group came back to power in August 2021. Attacks on civilians, soldiers, and police have soared. The region bristles with checkpoints and hilltop outposts and is heavily patrolled on the ground and in the air by the Pakistan Army and armed border police. That’s during daylight hours, Dawar told Foreign Policy. Once night falls, it’s a different story.
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