People & Histories
2001–present

The War on Terror and the Years of Bombings

As a US ally after 9/11, Pakistan is drawn into the Afghan war and suffers a wave of militant violence at home that kills tens of thousands of its own people.

Well established wartraumafaithsecurity

A reluctant ally

On 11 September 2001 Pakistan was one of only three countries that recognised the Taliban government in Afghanistan. Under heavy American pressure, General Musharraf abandoned the Taliban and joined the US-led campaign, providing bases, supply routes and the arrest of hundreds of al-Qaeda suspects. In return Pakistan received billions of dollars in aid.

  • Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia — Ahmed Rashid, Viking (2008)
  • Pakistan: A New History — Ian Talbot, Hurst (2012)

But Taliban fighters and al-Qaeda members fled across the mountains into Pakistan’s tribal areas along the border, home to Pashtun tribes with deep ties to Afghanistan. The army’s operations there, and from 2004 American drone strikes, turned local militants against the state. In 2007 they formed the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), the Pakistani Taliban.

  • Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia — Ahmed Rashid, Viking (2008)
  • Pakistan: A Hard Country — Anatol Lieven, Allen Lane (2011)

The years of bombings

From 2007 Pakistan suffered one of the world’s worst campaigns of terrorism. Suicide bombers struck markets, police stations, Sufi shrines, Shia processions, churches and Ahmadi worship halls. The Marriott Hotel in Islamabad was destroyed in 2008, the Sri Lankan cricket team was attacked in Lahore in 2009, and international cricket all but stopped visiting for a decade.

  • Pakistan: A Hard Country — Anatol Lieven, Allen Lane (2011)
  • Pakistan: A New History — Ian Talbot, Hurst (2012)
In 2009 the army retook the Swat Valley from Taliban who had shut girls’ schools; in October 2012 they shot the schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai.

Brown University’s Costs of War project estimated that by mid-2016 the war had killed almost 62,000 people in Pakistan, including about 22,000 civilians and 8,000 members of the security forces, the rest militants. Estimates of civilians killed by US drone strikes ranged from about 160 to over 2,600.

Abbottabad and Peshawar

On 2 May 2011 US special forces killed Osama bin Laden in a compound in Abbottabad, a short distance from Pakistan’s military academy. Abroad it raised the question of who had known; at home many felt humiliated by the unannounced raid on their soil.

  • Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia — Ahmed Rashid, Viking (2008)
  • Pakistan: A New History — Ian Talbot, Hurst (2012)

On 16 December 2014 TTP gunmen attacked the Army Public School in Peshawar and killed around 150 people, most of them children. The massacre united the country. The army had already launched a major offensive, Zarb-e-Azb, in North Waziristan that June, and the government adopted a National Action Plan against terrorism; violence fell sharply over the following years.

  • Pakistan: A New History — Ian Talbot, Hurst (2012)
  • Pakistan: A Hard Country — Anatol Lieven, Allen Lane (2011)

Back again

Since the Afghan Taliban regained Kabul in 2021, the TTP has revived and attacks in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa have risen again, while a separate Baloch insurgency targets security forces and Chinese projects in Balochistan. Relations with the Taliban government Pakistan once backed have turned hostile, with border clashes.

The cost to ordinary life

The war left its mark on everyday life: blast walls, checkpoints, cancelled weddings and festivals, and a generation of Pashtuns from the tribal areas displaced from their homes. The Pashtun Tahafuz Movement, founded in 2018, has protested against both militants and alleged abuses by the security forces. Many Pakistanis bristle when their country is seen only as a source of terrorism, when they have been its most numerous victims.

How it's seen
Common Pakistani view

Pakistan was dragged into America's war, suffered tens of thousands of deaths and huge economic losses, and was repaid with suspicion and drone strikes that killed civilians and violated its sovereignty. Many blame outside powers, including India, for fuelling terrorism inside Pakistan.

US and Western view

Pakistan took billions of dollars in aid while its intelligence service kept ties to the Afghan Taliban and groups attacking India; Osama bin Laden was found living in a garrison town, Abbottabad, in 2011.

  • Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia — Ahmed Rashid, Viking (2008)
  • Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military — Husain Haqqani, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (2005)

Many analysts

The state drew a line between "bad" militants who attacked Pakistan and "good" ones who served its aims in Afghanistan and Kashmir, a distinction that collapsed as groups overlapped and turned on their former patrons.

  • Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia — Ahmed Rashid, Viking (2008)
  • The Army and Democracy: Military Politics in Pakistan — Aqil Shah, Harvard University Press (2014)
  • Pakistan: A Hard Country — Anatol Lieven, Allen Lane (2011)

Why it matters today

Pakistan

Almost every Pakistani lived through the years when markets, mosques, shrines and schools were bombed. Many feel their country paid the highest price of the war on terror, in lives and money, yet is blamed abroad for harbouring militants. The 2014 Peshawar school massacre is a national trauma, and militant violence has risen again since the Taliban returned to power in Kabul in 2021.