Afghanistan is not only unstable at present. It has since turned out to be a very dangerous overcrowded land with terrorist groups, foreign fighters, hard line ideology, weaker governance and criminals’ economies all superimposing each other. It is in any actual sense a pressure chamber. Pakistan on the other hand has been playing the role of the lid, maintaining that pressure on it and containing an eruption of the region far wider. That is a very costly, misunderstood and mishandled stand abroad. Yet the reality is plain. Pakistan would already be facing a far greater failure of security, had it not been to receive, relieve and encircle the shock spilling out of Afghanistan.

This needs to be said clearly. Sources of danger are ordinary Afghans. Their sufferings are war, hunger, collapse and abandonment. The very danger is the political order established since 2021, the combination of armed absolutism, and ideological control and offers breathing space to transnational terrorist actors. The Afghanistan ruled by Taliban has been turned into a free haven of terror. The United Nations monitoring has repeatedly reported that there are more than 20 international terror groups other than thousands of foreign fighters. Broad estimates put the number of terrorists at the range between 20,000 and 23,000 of which more than 50 have been regarded to be foreign........

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