The death of a man like Qari Amjid, the military chief of the Fitna Al Khawarij Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and a U.S.-designated global terrorist, is often framed as a decisive victory. In a sterile intelligence report, the successful operation in Pakistan’s Bajaur district — eliminating a figure with a $5 million bounty — is a clear win. Yet, on the unforgiving ground of regional geopolitics, his demise is less a conclusion and more a troubling symptom of a deeper malady: the persistent and duplicitous role of the Afghan Taliban in sheltering the very terrorists who wage war on Pakistan.
Islamabad’s patience has worn thin, but it is not anger that defines its tone — it is exhaustion. Years of pleading for cooperation have yielded little more than condolences after every new attack. Field Marshal Asim Munir’s declaration that Pakistan will no longer tolerate terrorism from Afghan soil carries the fatigue of a nation that has buried too many of its own. The Afghan Taliban’s quiet tolerance of the TTP — a group born from the same ideological roots but turned violently against Pakistan — has turned a fraternal bond into a geopolitical betrayal. In that space of denial and duplicity, the TTP has found room to rearm, reorganize, and kill again.
The Taliban’s familiar defense — that they are victims of circumstance and unfairly blamed by Pakistan — collapses under the sheer weight of evidence. The lineage of terrorism in the region is not a mystery; it is a matter of record. From the Afghan sanctuaries once offered to the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) emerged the core leadership of the Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP). Its first emir, Hafiz Sayed Khan, and its spokesman, Shahidullah Shahid, were not foreign infiltrators but veterans of the TTP — products of the same *Fitna al-Khawarij* network that now flourishes under the Taliban’s watch. For Kabul to distance itself from the TTP while denying the ideological and logistical continuity that links these groups is less an argument than an act of political theater.
The chain of loyalties binding terrorists to power runs deeper than official denials suggest. Akhtar Muhammad Khalil, once an ISKP commander from North Waziristan, has returned to the fold of TTP-aligned groups under Hafiz Gul Bahadur’s command. Yet instead of being condemned, he is embraced. He counts Afghanistan’s interior minister, Sirajuddin Haqqani, as a friend — appearing beside him in photographs from Kabul. These are not the gestures of a government turning the page on terrorism; they are glimpses of a state still negotiating its identity between governance and guerrilla loyalty, unable — or unwilling — to sever the bonds that once fueled its own wars.
The death of a single terrorist leader like Amjid, while tactically significant, will not sever the deep roots of this problem. For Pakistan, the challenge is no longer just about hunting individual terrorists. It is about confronting a state-level policy of complicity from a neighbor it once saw as a strategic partner. As long as Kabul allows its soil to be a staging ground for terror, no number of intelligence-based operations can bring lasting peace. The real victory will not come from a single targeted strike, but from the dawning of moral clarity in Kabul — an acknowledgment that true sovereignty comes not from harboring violent proxies, but from fulfilling the fundamental duty of ensuring one’s territory cannot be used to threaten another. Until then, the cycle of violence will tragically continue.
