Pakistan’s Compellence Trap
Abstract
Pakistan now sits first on the Global Terrorism Index while global terrorism falls. That divergence is the work of two provinces rather than stronger militants: Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan account for three quarters of the country’s attacks, and the frontier they share with Afghanistan has become the decisive variable in the war. Islamabad has responded by striking Afghanistan, mistaking a compellence problem for a deterrence one: it is demanding that the Taliban act against a movement they may lack the capacity to suppress, and the result is escalation without compliance. The consequences: a declared state of war, suspended trade, and the transfer of Pakistan’s frontier diplomacy to Beijing.
In March 2026 the Institute for Economics and Peace ranked Pakistan first on the Global Terrorism Index for the first time in the index’s history. The ranking rested on 1,139 terrorism deaths across 1,045 incidents during 2025, Pakistan’s deadliest year since 2013 and the sixth consecutive year in which fatalities rose.
The number that should trouble Islamabad, though, is not Pakistan’s. It is everyone else’s. Global terrorism deaths fell 28 per cent in 2025 to their lowest level since 2007, and incidents fell 22 per cent. Pakistan’s deaths rose by nearly six per cent, and the country alone accounted for a fifth of all terrorism fatalities on earth. A country can be dragged upward by a global tide. Pakistan swam against one.
That divergence disposes of the standard explanations. Global jihadist resurgence, regional contagion, the long tail of the war on terror: none accounts for a country deteriorating while the world improves; something in Pakistan’s own operating environment is generating the violence. The data suggests where to look. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan between them accounted for more than 74 per cent of all attacks in Pakistan and 67 per cent of all deaths. Three quarters of Pakistan’s terrorism is now happening along one frontier.
Two claims follow and organize this article. First, the frontier has become Pakistan’s decisive battlespace: the causal variable is terrain and jurisdiction, not the strength of any particular militant organization. Second, Islamabad has misdiagnosed the problem, treating a compellence problem as a deterrence one, and therefore escalates continuously without obtaining compliance. That error has already carried Pakistan into open war with Afghanistan.
The Frontier as Battlespace
Two border provinces account for seventy-four per cent of attacks. That concentration locates Pakistan’s problem in terrain and jurisdiction rather than in the capability of the groups doing the fighting.
It fits a global pattern that the 2026 index makes explicit: 41 per cent of terrorist attacks worldwide now occur within 50 kilometers of an international border, a share that has risen sharply since 2011. Borderlands, in IEP’s phrase, are authority gaps: seams where the writ of two states thins at once, and where neither can pursue an adversary across the line.
Pakistan’s western border is the textbook case. The Durand Line runs 2,600 kilometers through some of the most vertical terrain in Asia. The fence reads as border control on a map and works as a toll on the ground, raising the price of a crossing without closing one. Pashtun kinship networks run through both sides of the line, so a fighter moving across it is moving among relatives rather than evading strangers. And the passes outnumber the posts that watch them, which means that along most of its length the border is not held at all. The geography offers militants something more useful than concealment. It offers operational depth: the ability to disperse under pressure, reconstitute beyond the reach of Pakistani ground forces, and return when conditions suit. Every tactical success is thereby temporary. In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s border districts, the army wins its engagements and gains nothing by winning them. In 2025 security forces conducted 482 operations and killed more than 2,100 militants, yet attacks still rose to their highest total since 2014, because the adversary’s center of gravity lies outside the engagement area.
Balochistan arrives at the same place by a different road, substituting distance for altitude and emptiness for density. Separatists exploit a province covering nearly 44 per cent of Pakistan’s landmass with the country’s smallest population and least infrastructure. The two theater differ in everything ideology can differ in, and are identical in the one respect that determines outcomes: in both, the battlespace decides, and the organization does not.
Many Groups, One Battlespace
Pakistan’s violence is usually described as two conflicts: Islamist militancy in the northwest, ethno-nationalist insurgency in the southwest. It is more useful to describe it as one frontier war, fought by a mixed cast against a single state apparatus.
The Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan drives most of it. Of the world’s four deadliest terrorist organizations, the TTP was the only one to kill more people in 2025 than in the year before, and it now ranks third globally behind Islamic State and JNIM. Its attacks rose 24 per cent, and the 637 deaths it caused, 56 per cent of Pakistan’s total, were its highest toll since 2011. The composition matters as much as the volume: two-thirds of the dead were security personnel, assassinations rose more than fivefold, and civilian deaths actually fell while the group began using drones.
A falling civilian toll looks like restraint until you notice what replaced it, which is a doctrine of attrition. The TTP holds no territory in either country and needs none to make the state’s presence in the frontier districts unaffordable, forcing troop density, surveillance and fiscal commitment upward until Islamabad’s patience gives out. Operation Azm-e-Istehkam, the latest counterterrorism initiative, has not arrested the trend.
In Balochistan, the Baloch Liberation Army has crossed a threshold. In March 2025 its Majeed Brigade hijacked the Jaffar Express in the Bolan Pass, an operation that IEP credits with single-handedly erasing what would otherwise have been a 30 per cent global decline in hostage-taking. Islamabad had been resourcing the province as a policing problem, with the Balochistan Levies and the Frontier Corps carrying a load its force allocation never matched. A brigade-scale operation on a mainline railway is not a policing problem, and continuing to fund it as one has passed from defensible judgement into intelligence failure.
These actors are not bound by ideology. The collapse of the Afghan republic released weapons into a grey market that does not enquire about the buyer’s beliefs, so all benefit from the same enabling environment, and all draw on the same finite pool of Pakistani formations, surveillance and air support: when violence rises in both theaters at once, Islamabad faces one allocation problem with two claimants. And Kabul’s posture, with Pakistan’s coercive response to it, bears on both fronts. Several tactical campaigns have fused into a single strategic problem, and Pakistan’s own institutional architecture fused them.
Compellence, Not Deterrence
This brings us to the error at the center of Pakistan’s response.
Since 2023 Islamabad has been exporting its counterinsurgency, pairing intelligence-driven operations at home with strikes on militant positions inside Afghanistan. The stated rationale is denial: close the sanctuary and the insurgency cannot regenerate. The unstated one is deterrence: raise the price of hosting anti-Pakistan militants until Kabul no longer wishes to pay. Neither survives contact with what Pakistan is actually asking for.
The distinction is Thomas Schelling’s, and it earns its keep. Deterrence, as he set it out in Arms and Influence, asks an adversary to refrain, and refraining is cheap. Compellence asks the adversary to act, on a deadline, with capitulation visible enough that the coercer can call the punishment off. Islamabad asks the Taliban for the opposite of restraint: to hunt, arrest, disarm and expel a movement that shares their ideological lineage, sheltered them during their own insurgency, is woven into the same tribal geography, and whose suppression would split their coalition.
Alexander George’s work on coercive diplomacy supplies the condition Pakistani strategy has never tested: the demand must be one the target can actually meet. Daniel Byman makes the same point for the specific case, separating states that sponsor an armed group from those that tolerate one, and both from those that lack the reach to suppress it. Islamabad’s entire escalation assumes the first. Kabul may be closer to the third. The Taliban do not exercise the centralized control over the eastern provinces that a serious counter-TTP campaign would require, and even if they did, moving against the TTP would risk defections to Islamic State-Khorasan, the one actor with anything to gain from an intra-jihadist rupture. The Taliban’s denials are self-serving; they may also be partly accurate, and no quantity of airpower converts a state that cannot comply into one that will.
Hence the observable pattern: a strike lands, outrage follows, mediators arrive, a pause is arranged, and nothing changes, because the sanctuary was never a policy Kabul chose; it is a condition Kabul cannot easily undo. Pakistan has spent three years bombing a state to punish a network, and the network is not the state’s to hand over.
The Interstate War That Already Happened
For three years analysts warned that Pakistan’s cross-border strikes risked interstate escalation. That warning is now obsolete.
In October 2025, after a week of fighting, the two defense ministers signed a ceasefire in Doha under Qatari and Turkish mediation. Follow-up talks in Istanbul stalled while clashes continued, and Islamabad warned of open war if the process broke down.
It broke down. In late February 2026 Pakistan declared a state of war and launched airstrikes on Kabul and Kandahar, setting off weeks of fighting that closed Torkham and Chaman and suspended trade. UN experts recorded at least 289 civilian casualties and more than 115,000 people displaced in the first weeks, and assessed that one strike on a drug rehabilitation facility likely killed and injured hundreds. IEP’s reading is unambiguous: cross-border militant activity drove the escalation to open interstate conflict.
With Qatari and Turkish mediation exhausted, China convened both delegations in Urumqi. The March ceasefire was breached within weeks; by late April both sides were again reporting cross-border attacks.
Two things follow, both uncomfortable for Islamabad.
Pakistan’s counterterrorism strategy is now producing interstate war rather than merely risking it, and producing it on a cycle of roughly six months: strike, escalation, mediation, breakdown, repeat. The Durand Line is no longer a border that a counterinsurgency campaign operates near; it is a live interstate front on which two conventional militaries exchange artillery fire and seize one another’s positions.
Pakistan has also lost control of the diplomacy occurring on its own frontier. Beijing, not Islamabad, now convenes the negotiating table, and this is not a favour. Chinese nationals are dying, CPEC assets are being destroyed, and Beijing’s stake in a functioning corridor has outgrown Islamabad’s capacity to deliver one. A state that needs third parties to manage its own periphery has conceded a great deal about the limits of its strategy.
Strategy Under Constraint
Writing on Pakistani security tends to finish with a list of virtues. Integrate the instruments of national power, strengthen local governance, improve interagency coordination. Every item is correct, has been recommended continuously since about 2014, and goes unadopted because it is unavailable. Any serious strategy has to begin with the things that actually bind.
The Eastern Front Owns the Force
Pakistan’s doctrine, order of battle, procurement and promotion structure are all organized around India, which makes the western frontier the residual claimant on manpower, surveillance and aviation. In May 2025, at the height of the TTP’s worst year since 2011, the Indian Air Force struck targets across Pakistan and the Pakistani military retaliated along the eastern border. Until the army is prepared to treat the west as a primary theater rather than an economy-of-force one, proposals for a sustained frontier presence are decorative.
There Is No Civil Administration to Strengthen
The 2018 merger of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas dissolved the old colonial apparatus without funding what was supposed to replace it. To recommend effective local governance in the merged districts is to recommend an institution that does not exist. Meanwhile the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa police and the Balochistan Levies, who absorb a disproportionate share of the casualties, remain outgunned by the organizations they are expected to face.
The Coercive Tools Wound Pakistan
Border closures punish Pakistani traders and hand the transit business to Iran. Mass deportation of Afghan refugees generates exactly the Pashtun alienation on which the TTP recruits. Airstrikes on civilian infrastructure convert a bilateral security dispute into a legitimacy problem at the United Nations. These instruments impose costs on Kabul, but they impose costs on Pakistan’s own frontier constituencies too, and the insurgency collects the difference. Each of these three constraints marks the outer boundary of what Pakistani strategy can actually do. Any recommendation that steps past them is a wish, and the recommendation literature has been making wishes since 2014.
What Remains
What does survive, though narrower than the usual prescription, is still real. Pakistan must accept that force will not close the sanctuary, and justify its strikes by the targets they destroy rather than by a strategic effect they demonstrably do not produce. It must trade the goal of denying sanctuary for three that lie within reach: transit, financing and the arms market. It must resource the police as well as the army, because the frontier districts are lost in the towns rather than in the mountains. It must shape the Chinese mediation rather than merely attend it, since Beijing holds the only leverage that binds both parties. And it must stop treating Balochistan as a policing matter, because an organization capable of seizing a passenger train is capable of considerably more.
Conclusion
Pakistan’s arrival at the top of the Global Terrorism Index records a transformed operating environment rather than stronger militants, and the environment is what Pakistani strategy has failed to change.
The frontier has become Pakistan’s decisive battlespace: a single operational system in which insurgency, sanctuary and interstate rivalry can no longer be pulled apart. Trying to close the seam between two states’ authority, Islamabad reached for the tools of interstate coercion and found itself attempting to compel a government that may be incapable of complying. The bill so far includes a declared state of war, suspended trade, censure at the United Nations, and the handover of its own frontier diplomacy to Beijing. The strategic task is no longer to defeat the TTP or the BLA. It is to abandon a strategy whose central assumption, that enough pressure will eventually produce a decisive result, has been falsified for six years running. In practice that means one unwelcome reallocation: treating the western frontier as a primary theater, and resourcing the civil administration and the police who will actually have to hold it.
Pakistan is simply the borderland case in which the coercive response has escalated furthest. IEP identifies four persistent hotspots of the same kind, from the Colombia-Venezuela frontier to the Central Sahel and the Lake Chad Basin, all combining porous borders, under-governed territory and communities that span the line. The portable lesson concerns the demand rather than the instrument. Coercing a neighbor into suppressing an insurgency embedded in its own social base is a demand that no amount of force can make deliverable. Where the sanctuary state cannot comply, the problem becomes managing a contested border system rather than destroying an organization, and states that mistake the one for the other will keep buying interstate crises with counterterrorism budgets. Pakistan’s frontier will not be won. It can only be endured, and endured better than it is being endured now.
