Pakistan’s ongoing airstrikes in Kabul and Kandahar on Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and Taliban targets has marked a significant escalation in Islamabad’s post-2021 Afghanistan policy. Since the Taliban’s return to power, Pakistan largely relied on border controls and diplomatic pressure to stop cross-border attacks. These recent direct strikes on the Taliban reflected frustration with the Taliban’s unwillingness, or failure, to stop Afghan territory from being used against Pakistan. However, despite Pakistan’s repeated military strikes on TTP targets, terrorist incidents increased by 24 percent in 2025, underscoring the hard truth that military action alone will not solve Pakistan’s TTP problem.
Going forward, Pakistan’s military operations against the TTP and the Taliban may cause temporary network disruptions and impose costs on the Afghan Taliban, but they are unlikely to produce a long-term solution so long as the TTP retains sanctuary in Afghanistan. That the organization is entrenched in a broader socio-political and territorial ecosystem that allows it to quickly recover from leadership losses makes it even more difficult for Pakistan to achieve strategic results rather than small tactical victories. Their sanctuary in Afghanistan has also allowed the TTP to institutionalize long‑term succession planning and develop strong recruitment networks beyond Pakistan’s reach. As long as the TTP can leverage this safety net, Pakistan’s tactical gains will remain only temporary.
Leadership Decapitation Results in Temporary Disruption
In October 2025, following months of TTP attacks targeting Pakistani security forces, Islamabad reportedly launched an intelligence-led effort to target TTP chief Noor Wali Mehsud in Kabul. Even though Mehsud survived, the operation appears to have eliminated at least two senior members and demonstrated that Pakistan could penetrate and strike militant leadership. But, in the end, this brief operational disruption did not produce organizational collapse. In fact, the TTP adapted, replaced losses quickly, and continued its campaign of violence.
This quick recovery is not surprising given similar military actions against mature militant groups. For example, the United States and its NATO allies spent years targeting Taliban commanders while the movement had sanctuary in Pakistan, yet the Taliban ultimately returned to power in Kabul. Likewise, the Islamic State has also repeatedly lost senior leaders while preserving the ability to renew its leadership cadre. This is not to argue that decapitation is completely useless—it can degrade command and control—but against mature militant organizations like the TTP, that may only hold temporarily.
The TTP fits the model of a mature militant outfit because it has survived the loss of every leader it has had from Baitullah Mehsud’s death in 2009 to the killing of Hakimullah Mehsud in 2013. Indeed, in December 2014, exactly one year after the killing of Hakimullah, his successor, Fazlullah, presided over the organization’s deadliest attack involving the massacre of 150 school children in Peshawar. Under its new leader, Noor Wali Mehsud, the TTP has become more disciplined and strategically lethal, invoking sharia to justify a shift toward targeted attacks on security forces and civil institutions rather than indiscriminate violence. This selective approach is meant to limit public backlash and sustain support in the tribal areas, enabling the TTP to frame its campaign as a focused war against the Pakistani state and its perceived collaborators, though whether it can sustain this framing remains uncertain.
This record underscores the limits of leadership targeting: It can be a useful tool to inflict short-term pressure, but it is not a substitute for long-term strategy.
“[Leadership targeting] can be a useful tool to inflict short-term pressure, but it is not a substitute for long-term strategy.”
Why the TTP Can Absorb Leadership Losses
The TTP’s ability to withstand successive leadership decapitations rests on three key elements.
First, the group is socially embedded in cross-border Pashtun communities connected by kinship, religious networks, and long-standing movement across the Afghan-Pakistan border. It draws strength from areas where governance is weak, the justice system is either distrusted or inaccessible, and the state is often viewed as an antagonist. In such environments, militant groups do not need to depend solely on charismatic leaders to sustain themselves, and removing individual commanders does little to alter those foundations.
Second, the TTP has developed mechanisms of succession that enable it to sustain losses in its leadership ranks. Instead of being merely a personality-driven network, it has created internal structures, ideological alignments, and organizational depth to replace leadership losses quickly and remain operational. This is one reason decapitation often fails against older insurgent movements where authority is spread across a broader militant ecosystem, not concentrated in a single irreplaceable figure.
Third, and most critically, the TTP benefits from sanctuary provided by the Afghan Taliban. This refuge shields its leadership, sustains communications and logistics, and enables the group to recover quickly from Pakistani strikes. In practice, the TTP can move operatives as needed, maintain tactical-level connections with ISIL-K, and operate beyond Pakistan’s effective reach. As long as this sanctuary endures, Pakistan’s targeting of individual leaders can produce only short-term disruption, rather than a decisive blow to the organization.
Afghan-Taliban Sanctuary is the Real Center of Gravity
Ironically, Pakistan allegedly gave the Afghan Taliban safe haven on its soil for years. With the Taliban’s return to power now giving the TTP space to operate from across the border, the situation has flipped. The reality facing Pakistan is that the TTP draws strength from this refuge outside its borders, which it cannot completely dismantle through occasional strikes. The real challenge thus becomes not killing individual leaders but severely degrading the sanctuary that keeps the group alive.
That starts with acknowledging the limits of strongarm tactics. Pakistan can raise costs for the Taliban through airstrikes, border closures, trade restrictions, deportations, and diplomatic isolation, as it has sought to do over the last few years and especially the last several months, but these tools are unlikely to end sanctuary on their own. The Taliban and the TTP are linked by ideology, history, and religious zeal. Many Taliban leaders regard the TTP as a kindred movement pursuing a parallel Islamist agenda across the border. Therefore, as long as the costs of sheltering the TTP for the Taliban remain lower than the costs of confrontation, Pakistani pressure will produce only partial and temporary results.
Pakistan Needs a Broader Sanctuary-Denial Strategy
Pakistan needs a more comprehensive strategy that goes beyond force, addresses its domestic problems, and improves intelligence analysis across civilian and military organizations.
A sanctuary‑denial strategy requires sustained pressure that steadily weakens the Taliban’s ability to provide refuge to the TTP. The goal should not be periodic bombing, but a long‑term effort to raise the costs of Taliban tolerance for the TTP and force the regime to divert resources inward. Within this framework, leadership targeting remains a useful tool, but only as a means rather than as an end. Carefully calibrated support for Afghan opposition elements, reportedly already underway, including disaffected Pashtun groups and the Northern Alliance, combined with sustained pressure from China and Qatar, would raise the political, economic, and security costs facing the Taliban. Beijing’s economic interests in Afghanistan’s critical minerals and Doha’s longstanding diplomatic engagement give both states meaningful leverage over the regime.
Pakistan also needs to accept that even without sanctuary in Afghanistan, the TTP could still recruit and rebuild by feeding on unresolved grievances at home. Seven years after the FATA–Khyber Pakhtunkhwa merger, basic governance in the former tribal districts remains weak. Courts do not function effectively, policing is limited, infrastructure is poor, public services are scarce, and economic opportunities are limited. This is both a development failure and a security problem. Groups like the TTP grow stronger where the state is absent or mistrusted and where people lack justice, protection, and a meaningful political voice. Military operations alone cannot address these basic governance challenges. Pakistan needs to invest in functioning courts, reliable local policing, trusted ways to resolve disputes, and political engagement that treats tribal communities as citizens rather than permanent security concerns. Reducing militant influence ultimately depends as much on restoring state legitimacy and authority as it does on force.
At the same time, although Pakistan’s intelligence agencies have shown they can effectively carry out operations inside Afghanistan, they still need to improve how they analyze information. This means improving how intelligence is assessed, connected, and shared by combining traditional methods with better data analytical tools, improved ISR monitoring, better cross-border tracking, and stronger coordination between civilian and military agencies. Without this stronger analytical foundation, even successful military strikes will remain isolated actions that impose temporary costs on militants but fail to produce lasting results.
“[Pakistan] can keep responding with airstrikes and measure progress by the number of commanders killed or camps destroyed, or it can accept the slower, harder work of dealing with the Afghan sanctuary, along with addressing grievances at home that keep the TTP alive.”
Tactical Success is Not Strategic Success
The reality is that there are no quick resolutions to the TTP problem. The group has shown patience, resilience, and an ability to survive repeated setbacks. Because the TTP’s strength rests within a much wider network, military actions against it will have limitations and should not be mistaken for a long‑term solution.
Any Pakistani effort to make Taliban support for the TTP more costly must recognize that the international community has little desire to reengage in Afghanistan. Indeed, much of the world, especially the United States, sees the TTP as a regional threat aimed mainly at Pakistan. In these circumstances, Pakistan will likely have to manage the challenge largely on its own, and carefully balance the pressure it applies to Afghanistan against the risks of escalation and wider regional instability.
As long as the Taliban continues to shelter the TTP in Afghanistan, Pakistan will remain caught in a cycle of strikes, short‑term disruption, and militant recovery. Breaking that pattern requires Pakistan to make a choice: It can keep responding with airstrikes and measure progress by the number of commanders killed or camps destroyed, or it can accept the slower, harder work of dealing with the Afghan sanctuary, along with addressing grievances at home that keep the TTP alive. That choice is not easy, but it is unavoidable.
Views expressed are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the positions of South Asian Voices, the Stimson Center, or our supporters.
Also Read: Pakistan-Afghanistan Tensions: An Open War in a Regional Crisis
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Image 1: Samuel Morse via Wikimedia Commons
Image 2: R9 Studios FL via Wikimedia Commons
