The Colonial Recipe for Perpetual External and Internal Instability
Can a nation designed primarily to serve imperial strategic interests ever achieve lasting peace?
Nearly eight decades after Partition, Pakistan continues to fight on multiple fronts—against terrorism it once nurtured, against separatist movements within its borders, against economic collapse, and against strategic realities it can no longer control.
This article examines why these crises are not isolated events but manifestations of structural flaws embedded at Pakistan’s very creation. An examination of how hurried colonial partition, military dominance, proxy warfare and geopolitical patronage created a state whose internal contradictions continue to shape regional security and impact global strategy.
Introduction
Seventy-nine years after Partition, Pakistan remains trapped in a cycle of geopolitical confrontation, domestic instability and economic dependence. While headlines focus on Taliban attacks, unrest in Pakistan-occupied Jammu & Kashmir, Baloch insurgency or repeated IMF bailouts, these are symptoms rather than causes.
This article argues that Pakistan’s enduring instability originates in the hurried colonial partition of 1947, compounded by decades of military dominance, proxy warfare and great-power patronage. It analyses the evolution of Pakistan’s security doctrine, its changing relationship with the Taliban, internal fault lines, Cold War legacies and the country’s strategic relevance in an emerging multipolar world.
Rather than viewing these crises separately, this article presents them as interconnected outcomes of a state whose foundational contradictions remain unresolved.
The entire analysis is reproduced below:-
PAKISTAN: AN IMPERFECT PARTITION
The Colonial Recipe for Perpetual External and Internal Instability
Major General (Dr) S.B. Asthana, SM, VSM (Veteran)
International Strategic & Defence Analyst | Former DG Infantry, Indian Army | Former Director, USI | PhD International Affairs | 600+ Publications | Global Media Commentator | 5000+ TV Appearances | website
asthanawrites.org | Youtube @GenAsthanaAnalyses
Backdrop
Every day the mainstream media is focussed on Pakistan with news like protests in POJK, BLA & TTP attacking security persons of Pakistan, Air Attack on Afghanistan, terrorist action in Kashmir linked to terror group sponsored by Pakistan, visuals of internal administration collapsing, Yet it’s mediating peace between U.S. and Iran and trying to get various factions in Libya to get together and continues to be only Islamic country with nuclear bomb with full support of USA and China. Seventy-nine years after the midnight of 14–15 August 1947, Pakistan remains a state permanently at war — with its neighbours, with its own periphery, and with itself.
This is not an accident of history but the logical outcome of its founding architecture. Pakistan was not built; it was drawn — hurriedly, cynically, and in the service of a departing empire’s exit strategy rather than the aspirations of the people it claimed to represent. What follows is an attempt to examine, region by region and fault-line by fault-line, why a state conceived as a colonial expedient has never been able to escape the instability written into its birth certificate, and yet it remains relevant for USA, China and Islamic world?
I. The Colonial Womb: Partition as Strategic Design, Not Nation-Building
The 1947 partition was executed with a haste that borders on the reckless. The Indian Independence Act received royal assent on 18 July 1947, and the transfer of power followed within twenty-eight days — barely enough time to dismantle a police station, let alone the world’s largest empire. Sir Cyril Radcliffe, a barrister who had never set foot in India before his appointment, was given five weeks to draw the boundary that would separate Hindu-majority and Muslim-majority districts. The result was not a nation but a wound: an estimated fourteen to fifteen million people uprooted, and up to two million dead in the communal violence that the haste itself precipitated.
The untold truth which Western country hesitate in reciting to rest of the world is that UK and USA wanted to checkmate USSR and knew that united India may not follow their diktat; hence, it was better to create Pakistan with strategic piece of land adjacent to USSR area of influence, include it in CENTO and SEATO and give it patronage and military help to be of help in checkmating USSR. The Indian British officer surrendering Gilgit Garrison to Pakistan and instead of being punished, was awarded highest gallantry award of Pakistan and UK is a case in point.
Pakistan’s founding geography compounded the error. A state stitched together from two wings separated by over a thousand miles of Indian territory could not survive as designed, and did not — the 1971 war and the birth of Bangladesh were the inevitable correction of an unnatural cartography. What was sold as nation-building was, in reality, imperial risk-transfer: London handed over a set of unresolved disputes — Kashmir foremost among them, which it forcibly tried to occupy (prevented greatly by Indian Military) and landed up creating a set of open wounds, which it has been trying to manage through militarisation and proxy war and terrorism ever since.
II. Pakistan and the Taliban: From Strategic Asset to Existential Threat
No relationship illustrates Pakistan’s strategic myopia better than its decades-long entanglement with the Taliban. Through the 1990s and again after 2001, the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate provided sanctuary, funding, and operational guidance to the Afghan Taliban, viewing the group as Pakistan’s instrument of “strategic depth” against India and its lever of influence over Kabul. A NATO study drawing on some 27,000 interrogations concluded that ISI backing was central to the Taliban’s survival and eventual return to power. This was never altruism; it was a calculated subtraction-and-addition strategy — subtracting Indian influence from Afghan soil while adding a compliant buffer state to Pakistan’s western flank.
That calculation has now catastrophically inverted. The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, ideologically kin to the Afghan Taliban but organisationally distinct being part of Pakistan and hostile to the Pakistani state, has turned Pakistan’s own creation against it. The TTP mounted over a thousand attacks inside Pakistan through 2025 alone, making it the most violent year since the Taliban’s 2021 return to Kabul. Islamabad’s response has been escalatory rather than corrective: air and ground strikes beginning in October 2025, culminating in the full-scale cross-border war of February 2026, when Pakistan’s Defence Minister Khawaja Asif declared “open war” after Taliban forces struck Pakistani posts along the Durand Line. Operation Ghazab Lil Haq saw the Pakistan Air Force hit Kabul, Kandahar, Paktia, and Nangarhar in the most significant direct assault on the Taliban state since 2021 — including a controversial strike on a Kabul drug-rehabilitation facility that Afghan officials say killed over four hundred people.
“When you nurture terror as an instrument of policy, you cannot indefinitely quarantine yourself from its consequences — Pakistan’s own frontier is now paying the price of its “good Taliban, bad Taliban” doctrine”.
Why did Pakistan protect the Taliban against the Americans for two decades, only to bomb Kabul in 2026? The answer lies in four overlapping motives: strategic depth against India, leverage over both Washington and Kabul, an ideological convergence within sections of the military-clerical establishment, and the deniability that non-state proxies afford a nuclear-armed state. The TTP’s resurgence broke this calculus by turning Pakistan from patron into prey. Qatar-brokered ceasefires have repeatedly collapsed; Chinese mediation at Urumqi has made little headway because Islamabad and the Taliban value Beijing’s patronage unequally. The likely trajectory is neither reconciliation nor decisive victory but a protracted, cyclical border war, punctuated by ceasefires that buy time rather than peace — because the root cause, Pakistan’s own reliance on militant proxies and the unresolved Durand Line, remains untouched.
III. The Durand Line and the Kashmir Encroachment: Britain’s Long Shadow
Pakistan’s western and eastern disputes share a common colonial parent. The Durand Line of 1893 — negotiated by British diplomat Sir Henry Mortimer Durand with Emir Abdur Rahman Khan — sliced through Pashtun tribal territory to demarcate spheres of influence, not nations. Neither Kabul nor, in practice, the Pashtun population it divided has ever fully accepted it, which is precisely why it remains a live conflict zone today. No Government in Afghanistan has ever accepted Durand Line and is unlikely to accept it in future.
In Kashmir, the pattern repeats. The princely state’s Hindu ruler, Maharaja Hari Singh, sought independence before acceding to India in October 1947 in response to a tribal invasion launched from Pakistani soil — an invasion in which British officers such as General Sir Douglas Gracey played a documented, if reluctantly acknowledged, enabling role by delaying and diluting the Pakistani Army’s own chain-of-command accountability. Britain’s rushed withdrawal left Kashmir’s accession legally ambiguous by design, and Pakistan’s subsequent Cold War alignment through SEATO and CENTO ensured that Western capitals looked past its Kashmir aggression in exchange for frontline-state loyalty and Non-NATO ally status against the Soviet Union. This is the encirclement — what I have elsewhere described as Pakistan’s abiding fear of a two-front “concirclement” by India and a hostile Afghanistan — that still drives Rawalpindi’s strategic thinking today.
IV. PoJK in Revolt: The Unravelling of Pakistan’s Kashmir Narrative
If Islamabad’s international narrative on Kashmir (A misinterpreted story, carried for a purpose in UN, Western capitals and OIC) rests on the claim that it speaks for an aggrieved Kashmiri population, the events of 2024–2026 in Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir (PoJK) — comprising the misnamed “Azad” Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) and Gilgit-Baltistan — have unravelled that narrative in full public view. Protests led by the Jammu Kashmir Joint Awami Action Committee (JAAC), a civil-society coalition of traders, lawyers and students, have recurred in 2023, 2024, 2025 and again with lethal intensity in June 2026.
The immediate trigger this year was legal and economic: a 7 June 2026 ruling by the Supreme Court of Azad Kashmir upholding the constitutionally protected status of twelve legislative seats reserved for refugees resident in Pakistan proper — seats the JAAC says dilute local representation. But the deeper grievance is older and simpler: residents of a region whose rivers power a significant share of Pakistan’s national hydroelectric grid pay electricity tariffs several multiples higher than consumers in Punjab or Sindh. When Islamabad banned the JAAC under anti-terrorism legislation on 5 June and met the resulting demonstrations in Rawalakot and Muzaffarabad with live fire, at least eleven people were killed and dozens injured within days — on top of the ten killed in the 2025 round of protests and the five killed in 2024. Internet and mobile shutdowns, a now-familiar Pakistani governance reflex, followed immediately, making independent verification of the toll difficult and fuelling unverified claims of far higher casualties.
PoJK’s protesters are not chanting for accession to India; they are exposing, more effectively than any diplomatic note, that Pakistan’s Kashmir is not “Azad” at all.
This is the central irony worth dwelling on: the protesters are not separatists seeking union with India. Their charter of thirty-eight demands is almost entirely about tariffs, subsidies, elite privilege, and constitutional representation. Yet in demanding ordinary economic justice from Islamabad, they have done more damage to Pakistan’s carefully rehearsed Kashmir narrative — built over decades at the United Nations, the OIC, and Western capitals — than any Indian diplomatic campaign could have achieved. India’s role has, appropriately, remained calibrated rather than interventionist: New Delhi has voiced “grave concern” over the killings and characterised the crackdown as another instance of Pakistan externalising its internal failures, but has stopped well short of operational involvement, and the optics of appearing to instrumentalise a humanitarian crisis. A posture of calibrated activism — sustained diplomatic and information advocacy for PoJK’s right to self-determination without direct intervention — is likely to remain New Delhi’s most effective and least escalatory option. Whether the unrest produces structural reform or is once again bought off with partial concessions, the deeper reality is now exposed: Pakistan’s hold on PoJK rests on coercion, not consent, and each cycle of protest further erodes its legitimacy, even if a change in territorial status remains improbable.
V. The Internal Fault Lines: Balochistan, KP, Sindh, and Gilgit-Baltistan
Pakistan topped the Global Terrorism Index for 2026, and the geography of that violence is instructive. Balochistan hosts the country’s longest-running insurgency: the Baloch Liberation Army and allied separatist groups executed twelve coordinated attacks across the province in a single month in January 2026 alone, and the Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies recorded 254 attacks and over a thousand casualties in 2025 — a rise of roughly a quarter over the previous year. UN human rights experts have separately flagged Pakistan’s counter-insurgency conduct in Baluchistan for its disproportionate civilian impact, even as Islamabad’s installation of governments seen locally as lacking genuine legitimacy continues to fuel, rather than dampen, the insurgency.
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa bears the brunt of the TTP’s resurgence and the fallout of the Afghan war, with cross-border strikes and internal counter-terror operations degrading the group’s capacity only marginally while imposing a heavy civilian toll. Sindh’s grievances are more ethnic and economic than insurgent — resentment over resource allocation, urban-rural divides, and Karachi’s fraught demographic politics — while Gilgit-Baltistan remains in constitutional limbo, denied full provincial status even as its glaciers and rivers are exploited for hydropower and, increasingly, for China-Pakistan Economic Corridor infrastructure. Individually problamatic, these four fronts are converging: Baloch separatists, the TTP, and Islamic State–Khorasan Province increasingly overlap in tactics and, in places, territory, confronting an already overstretched Pakistani military with a genuine multi-front insurgency. Without addressing the underlying political exclusion and economic marginalisation — rather than simply reaching for the next counter-insurgency operation — this trajectory points toward escalation, not containment.
VI. The India Threat Theory: The Military’s Oxygen Supply
No institution has a greater stake in the permanence of Indo-Pakistani hostility than the Pakistan Army. The “India threat” is not merely a security assessment; it is the load-bearing pillar of the military’s claim on roughly forty percent of the national budget, its dominance of foreign and nuclear policy, and its extensive commercial empire spanning real estate, manufacturing, and agriculture. Remove the external threat and the rationale for that privileged position collapses along with it.
Pakistan has always feared strategic encirclement… unable to achieve parity with Indian conventional strength, its security establishment views militant proxies as a means of keeping India occupied on multiple fronts.
The theory performs four functions simultaneously: it justifies defence spending that would otherwise be indefensible against competing social needs; it positions the military as the sole guarantor of national survival, above civilian oversight; it manufactures cohesion among Punjabi, Sindhi, Baloch, and Pashtun constituencies that might otherwise have little in common; and it sustains the narrative of a two-front “pincer” — India to the east, a hostile or unpredictable Afghanistan to the west — that rationalises continued reliance on non-state proxies as an equaliser against India’s conventional edge. As long as this doctrine remains the military’s institutional oxygen supply, no civilian government will be permitted to normalise relations with India in any durable way, however much economic logic might argue for it.
Interestingly some politicians in India recently, advocated talks with Pakistan. They must know that it means dealing with a radicalised military in bed with terrorists, surviving on India as a threat & enemy agenda. Talks with any politicians there, even if sensible, will ensure his removal in no time.
VII. The IMF Lifeline: Why Bailouts Never End
Pakistan has approached the International Monetary Fund on roughly two dozen occasions since 1958 — a record of chronic dependency unmatched by any economy of comparable size. The current $7 billion Extended Fund Facility, approved in September 2024, has accumulated seventy-five separate conditions across three reviews, the latest eleven added in April 2026 alone, touching everything from electricity and gas tariffs to tax audits and a sovereign wealth fund whose governance the Fund itself has had to narrow before allowing it to proceed. Disbursements continue in tranches of roughly a billion dollars at a time even as Pakistan’s own central bank leans on parallel Gulf financing to plug reserve gaps.
- Systemic risk: a nuclear-armed state of over two hundred million people is treated by international lenders as too dangerous to be allowed to fail outright.
- Great-power triangulation: both Washington and Beijing have independent incentives to keep Pakistan afloat, for counter-terrorism cooperation in one case and CPEC protection in the other. The U.S. and China want to keep Pakistan economically afloat, just above the sinking level, to enable Asif Munir and his team deliver their strategic needs in time.
- Reform theatre: successive governments perform IMF-mandated adjustment without altering the underlying structure — a defence-heavy budget, a narrow tax base, and an economy whose commanding heights remain under military-linked control.
India’s objections at the IMF board — citing Pakistan’s poor record of programme compliance and the risk of fungible resources subsidising cross-border terrorism — have been consistently overridden, because the Fund’s mandate is macroeconomic stabilisation, not counter-terrorism policy. The result is a moral hazard baked into the system: Pakistan’s military establishment can continue to divert scarce resources toward security and strategic programmes precisely because it has learned, over two dozen bailouts, that the international financial architecture will not let the state collapse.
VIII. The Terror–Rights Paradox: Chairing What It Violates
Pakistan is home to more UN-designated terrorist individuals and entities than any other state, including the leadership of Lashkar-e-Tayyiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed. That this same state has repeatedly secured seats on UN human-rights bodies is not a bureaucratic oversight; it is a case study in the limits of multilateral accountability. Four mechanisms explain the paradox: skilful diplomatic bloc-building through the OIC and the developing world; the tolerance great powers extend in exchange for continued counter-terrorism cooperation; a narrative strategy that frames Pakistan as terrorism’s victim rather than its incubator; and the institutional inertia of UN bodies that prioritise rotational representation over substantive vetting. UN human-rights experts have repeatedly flagged Pakistan’s conduct in Baluchistan and elsewhere, yet enforcement remains toothless. A state that shelters the perpetrators while chairing the committees meant to hold perpetrators to account is not an anomaly — it is an indictment of the multilateral human-rights architecture itself, questioning the credibility of United Nations itself.
IX. Walking the Tightrope: Pakistan in Cold War 2.0
Pakistan’s relevance to Washington has narrowed but not disappeared: it remains useful for counter-terrorism cooperation against transnational networks operating from Afghan soil, for monitoring a nuclear arsenal whose proliferation risk the world cannot ignore, and as a hedge against total regional collapse that would generate refugee flows and loose-nuclear anxieties alike. For Beijing, the calculus is more structural. Pakistan is the flagship of the Belt and Road Initiative, the CPEC corridor from Kashgar to Gwadar offers China a strategic bypass of the Malacca chokepoint, and a militarily aligned Islamabad provides Beijing a low-cost counterweight tying down Indian strategic attention on its western border even as the two Asian giants pursue an uneasy, transactional “competitive coexistence” of their own along the Line of Actual Control.
Islamabad’s declared policy of “strategic neutrality” between the two poles of Cold War 2.0 is growing harder to sustain by the year. Washington scrutinises Pakistan’s defence cooperation with Beijing — the JF-17 programme, naval projects, and technology transfers — through the lens of CAATSA-style sanctions risk; Beijing, for its part, expects Islamabad to prioritise CPEC security and to limit the depth of any renewed US defence relationship. The variable contours of US-India strategic partnership, speculated partly to balance China, only complicates Pakistan’s positioning further. My own assessment, set out at length elsewhere, is that Pakistan’s hedge will continue to tilt structurally toward Beijing given CPEC’s centrality to its economic survival (unprecedented Chinese debt, of which Washington has no answer), even as it resists complete alienation from Washington — a balancing act that grows more precarious, not less, as US-China competition sharpens.
X. Can Pakistan Ever Be Peaceful?
The honest answer is: not under its current structure of power. Genuine peace would require constitutional reform that subordinates the military to civilian authority; an economic transformation that redirects resources from defence to development; authentic regional reconciliation with both India and Afghanistan; abandonment of the “good Taliban, bad Taliban” distinction that has repeatedly boomeranged on Pakistan itself; and a federal settlement that addresses Baloch, Sindhi, Pashtun and Kashmiri grievances through genuine devolution rather than security-first management.
Each of these reforms threatens the very institution that would have to authorise them. As long as the military’s budgetary privileges, political primacy, and commercial interests depend on the perpetuation of the India threat theory and the strategic utility of militant proxies, the incentive structure for peace simply does not exist at the centre of Pakistani power. Pakistan’s founding flaw — a state drawn by a departing empire to solve its own exit problem rather than to serve a coherent nation — has metastasised over seventy-nine years into a self-perpetuating architecture of instability: external adventurism to manage internal contradictions, and internal repression to manage the blowback from external adventurism.
The question, then, is not whether Pakistan can be peaceful in the abstract, but whether its stakeholders — the military high command, the political elite it tolerates, and the external patrons in Washington and Beijing who keep it solvent — possess the will to dismantle a system that has served their respective interests for seven decades. History, and the events of the past two years alone, from the Durand Line to Muzaffarabad, suggest they do not. The fact that Washington and Beijing prefer dealing with Asif Munir in comparison to politicians, whose fate is uncertain, indicates no traction for any worthwhile change for democracy/people.
Major General (Dr) S B Asthana,SM,VSM,PhD (Veteran)
(The views expressed are personal views of the author, who retains the copy right. The author is a Globally acknowledged Strategic and Security Analyst, and former Director General of Infantry, Indian Army. A prolific strategic affairs commentator with over 600 published works, he writes on geopolitics, military doctrine and Indian defence policy at asthanawrites.org and many international journals. He can be reached at Facebook and LinkedIn as Shashi Asthana, @asthana_shashi on twitter, and personnel site https://asthanawrites.org/ email shashiasthana29@gmail.com LinkedIn Profile www.linkedin.com/in/shashi-asthana-4b3801a6. Youtube link https://www.youtube.com/@GenAsthanaAnalyses
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