THERE is a particular cruelty in fighting a war that your neighbours are permitted to sustain indefinitely. Pakistan has lived with that reality for about three decades, confronting militant groups that repeatedly regroup across a border it cannot fully control. More than 80,000 Pakistanis have lost their lives to terrorism since 2001. Soldiers, police officers, teachers, labourers, worshippers and schoolchildren have paid the price of a conflict whose origins increasingly lie beyond Pakistan’s frontiers. The casualties continue, while the sanctuaries that sustain the violence remain largely untouched.

The scale of the current threat should command far greater international attention than it does. According to the Global Terrorism Index, terrorism-related deaths in Pakistan rose by 66% in 2024, making it the country’s deadliest year in a decade. Terrorist attacks more than doubled, increasing from 517 in 2023 to 1,099 in 2024, the first time Pakistan has crossed the one-thousand-attack threshold in a single year. Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) alone accounted for more than half of all terrorism-related deaths, carrying out 482 attacks that killed 558 people, its deadliest operational year since 2011. Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) also intensified its campaign, with fatalities linked to its attacks increasing from 88 to 388 within a year. More than 96% of all attacks and deaths occurred in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan, the two provinces bordering Afghanistan. Pakistan now ranks second globally on the Global Terrorism Index, behind only Burkina Faso. For a nuclear-armed........

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