Global Watch | Operation Gazab Lil Haq: Pakistan's War Of Optics Amid A Crisis At Home

While 'Operation Gazab Lil Haq' may project strength, its very existence underscores a failure of foresight, policy and governance

When Pakistan announced the launch of ‘Operation Gazab Lil Haq’ on February 26 against Afghanistan, the name itself seemed designed for effect.

This peculiar phrase, which roughly translates as “Fury for truth", suggested moral clarity and even inevitability. But behind this grandiose terminology lies a far more prosaic reality: Pakistan is a troubled state struggling to contain mounting violence at home and hence turning, once again, across the contested Durand Line as both battleground and diversion.

Sanju Samson Scripts History, Rewrites 10-Year-Old Record Of Highest Score In T20 World Cup Final

Opinion | From Mahadevi Verma To Shivani: Women Who Challenged Patriarchy With Their Pen

24 In 5 Matches! Sanju Samson Breaks Record Of Hitting Most Sixes In One Edition Of T20 World Cup

Aamir Khan And Sunny Deol's Lahore 1947 Renamed As Batwara 1947?

The latest escalation began when Pakistan carried out airstrikes deep inside Afghan territory on February 22 and claimed to have killed nearly 80 fighters from the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP. The group has emerged as the security nightmare for the Pakistani authorities by conducting attacks against government and military installations with unprecedented success.

But Kabul swiftly rejected Islamabad’s account and accused Pakistan of targeting civilian homes and killing at least 18 people, including women and children, holding that it reserved the right to retaliate against this breach of sovereignty. And it did retaliate on the intervening night of February 26, when Afghan Taliban government forces launched large-scale cross-border strikes on Pakistani military positions all along the border and claimed to have inflicted heavy Pakistani casualties and captured border outposts. Even as fighting flared along the border, Pakistan’s military expanded its operations across a broad swathe of Afghanistan by launching airstrikes from Kabul to Kandahar, Paktika to Nangarhar, among others.

Pakistan’s Defence Minister Khawaja Asif even went to the extent of declaring that the country was in “open war" with the Afghan Taliban. However, such rhetorical escalation cannot obscure the fact that despite repeated assertions of inflicting heavy losses on TTP militant hideouts inside Afghanistan, Pakistan has not claimed to have killed any senior TTP leader yet. Such a divergence between official “triumphalism" and operational ambiguity raises an uncomfortable question: whether this is a decisive counterterrorism campaign or just an act of strategic theatre.

Nevertheless, understanding the present Afghanistan-Pakistan confrontation necessitates going beyond Pakistan’s rhetoric and examining how its internal security has unravelled in recent years. The country has experienced a sharp uptick in violence over the past five years, with TTP and allied groups, besides Baloch nationalist insurgent factions like the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA), having emerged stronger despite Pakistan’s successive nationwide military campaigns like Zarb-e-Azb, Raddul Fassaad and Azm-i-Istehkam. These groups have carried out coordinated attacks across KP and Balochistan respectively.

According to reports by the Islamabad-based Pakistan Institute for Conflict and Security Studies (PICSS), in just the first two months of 2026, the country witnessed nearly 180 militant and insurgent attacks which resulted in over 212 military and civilian casualties. For instance, the BLA executed a multi-day military assault, called Operation Herof-2, starting January 31 this year, targeting as many as 48 military and government sites across 14 cities of Balochistan, killing dozens of soldiers. The scale and audacity of the operation underscored the fragility of the state’s writ in its largest province.

For Pakistan’s military-dominated establishment, such figures are more than statistics and represent a crisis of credibility. Given that the Pakistani Army has long positioned itself as the ultimate guarantor of national security and territorial integrity, this resurgence of both Islamist and ethno-nationalist insurgencies suggests an erosion of that claim. It is in this context that the Afghan escalation appears less as a strategic necessity and more as a political manoeuvre. By attributing the TTP’s revival to sanctuary and support in Afghanistan, Islamabad externalises the problem. Kabul, in this framing, therefore becomes not merely a neighbour but the primary enabler of Pakistan’s insecurity.

There may be some basis for concern since TTP shares ideological and historical ties with the Afghan Taliban. But so did the Pakistani Army, which sheltered the Afghan Taliban during the two decades of the American War on Terror and even facilitated its return to power in Kabul in 2021. Though Pakistan had hoped that the Afghan Taliban’s takeover would yield what its strategists once described as “strategic depth", that is, a friendly regime in Kabul that would neutralise Indian influence and help contain anti-Pakistan militants, the policy has instead boomeranged.

The Afghan Taliban have consistently denied harbouring or supporting the TTP and have instead urged Islamabad to address what they call its “internal sources of instability". The group has shown little inclination to accede to Pakistani demands of cracking down “decisively" on the TTP, as it risks alienating ideological allies and internal constituencies; a reluctance interpreted in Islamabad as complicity.

The February airstrikes, then, can be read as an expression of frustration and desperation. But they also serve another purpose. In moments of domestic strain, external confrontation has often provided Pakistan’s establishment with a means of redirecting public attention. Historically, tensions with India have played that role. In the current geopolitical climate, Afghanistan has become the more accessible target. But such a deflection carries risks, as escalation along the Durand Line is not a cost-free exercise. Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers are not the fractured insurgency they once were, as they now command a state apparatus, however rudimentary that may be.

In that sense, the current crisis is not merely a diplomatic spat. It is the culmination of a long strategic experiment. For years, Pakistan’s security doctrine relied on cultivating militant proxies to advance its regional interests. The expectation was that these groups could be managed, redirected or dismantled as circumstances required. The resurgence of the TTP and the intensification of insurgency suggest that the control mechanisms have frayed.

Therefore, while “Operation Gazab Lil Haq" may project strength, its very existence underscores a failure of foresight, policy and governance. By expanding the theatre of conflict into Afghanistan, Pakistan’s leadership risks deepening regional instability while leaving its domestic vulnerabilities unresolved. In the end, the question is not whether Islamabad can strike across the border. It is whether it can restore security and public confidence at home without relying on the language and the optics of perpetual external confrontation. A strategy built on deflection may buy time. It cannot, however, substitute for reckoning.

(The writer is an author and columnist. His X handle is @ArunAnandLive. Views expressed are personal and solely those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect News18’s views)

© News18