The European Union Agency for Asylum is not known for geopolitical provocation. Yet its new report, The EUAA Country Guidance: Pakistan published on 1 October 2026, manages in a few bureaucratic lines to expose the fiction on which Pakistan’s counterterrorism policy has rested for decades. In its discussion of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan and its associated groups, the report includes factions of the so-called Punjabi Taliban, naming Jaish-e-Mohammed and Harakat-ul-Mujahideen alongside AQIS and other organisations connected through shifting alliances and operational relationships. The document does not claim that Jaish answers to the TTP, nor should it be read as evidence of a single jihadist command. What it does recognise is more important: Pakistan’s militant landscape is not divided into the neat institutional compartments advertised by the state. The walls between the organisations have always been porous. Men move, commanders defect, factions merge, seminaries supply recruits to more than one battlefield and ideological affinities survive changes of name or patronage. A group cultivated for Kashmir can contribute cadres to Afghanistan; veterans of the Afghan jihad can join an insurgency against Pakistan; networks once tolerated as foreign-policy instruments can lend expertise, shelter or legitimacy to those attacking the Pakistani state. This matters because Pakistan has spent years explaining the TTP as an Afghan problem. The militants, Islamabad insists, are based across the border, protected by the Taliban and dispatched into Pakistan to wage somebody else’s war. Afghanistan is therefore expected to arrest them, expel them or absorb Pakistani air strikes when it fails to do either. It is a convenient account of the conflict. It is also incomplete to the point of dishonesty. The TTP is not an alien organism implanted in Pakistan from Kabul. It grew from the same ecosystem described, perhaps more candidly than intended, in Country Guidance: Pakistan. Afghanistan matters, of course. The Afghan Taliban’s return to power gave the TTP greater confidence, strategic space and access to old relationships forged during the war against the United States. Some TTP leaders and fighters have operated from Afghan territory. Kabul has repeatedly failed to satisfy Pakistan’s demands for decisive action against them. But geography is not genealogy. The presence of militants in Afghanistan does not make Afghanistan the author of a movement created by Pakistani commanders, rooted in Pakistan’s former tribal areas and shaped by decades of Pakistani jihadist policy. Islamabad’s version requires the story to begin in August 2021, when the Taliban returned to Kabul and supposedly inherited a Pakistani security problem. The real story begins much earlier, when the Pakistani state decided that armed Islamist organisations could be separated according to strategic utility. Those fighting in Afghanistan were assets. Those attacking India were proxies. Those turning their weapons against Pakistan were terrorists. The categories described the state’s preferences, not the militants’ ideological universe. For years, Pakistan imagined it could manage that universe through selective patronage and selective violence. Jaish-e-Mohammed could maintain its infrastructure in Punjab because its principal enemy was India. The Afghan Taliban could be supported because it promised “strategic depth” and the exclusion of Indian influence from Afghanistan. The TTP, by contrast, would be bombed because it challenged the Pakistani state. The policy assumed that organisations sharing seminaries, clerics, veterans, financiers and a Deobandi-jihadist vocabulary would respect the filing system of the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate. They did not. The EU assessment is valuable precisely because it treats the TTP as part of a wider network rather than an isolated Afghan export. It notes the organisation’s links with Punjabi militant factions and its reported effort to revive dormant structures in Punjab and Karachi as part of a broader national strategy. That does not transform Jaish into a TTP subsidiary. Jaish has its own leadership, priorities and long relationship with the Pakistani security establishment. But it does expose the central weakness in Islamabad’s approach: tactical distinctions imposed by the state do not erase the movement of people, knowledge and ideology across organisational boundaries. This is why Pakistan’s conflict with Afghanistan has become so strategically revealing. Islamabad accuses Kabul of harbouring the TTP while refusing to confront the domestic architecture from which the TTP emerged. It bombs Afghan territory in pursuit of militants, yet organisations with overlapping histories and affinities continue to operate with remarkable visibility inside Pakistan. The state demands that the Taliban dismantle sanctuaries across the Durand Line while Jaish’s headquarters in Bahawalpur is repaired after being struck by India. Apparently, the principle that governments are responsible for militant infrastructure on their territory becomes geographically flexible somewhere near the border. India enters the story here, not as the explanation for the TTP but as the reason Pakistan built and protected part of the ecosystem in the first place. Jaish was designed for the Indian front. Its conventional model combined recruitment, ideological preparation, finance and military training in Pakistan with infiltration and attacks in Jammu and Kashmir. Pakistan supplied protection and deniability; Jaish supplied expendable men and strategic violence.

That model is now adapting. Operation Sindoor demonstrated that conspicuous compounds could be identified and struck. The answer has not been demobilisation but dispersal. Jaish is reportedly rebuilding Markaz Subhan Allah in Bahawalpur while expanding digital fundraising, rotating electronic wallets, cultivating younger commanders and developing a women’s wing capable of reaching households and social networks beyond the access of male recruiters. At the same time, suspected Jaish modules uncovered in West Bengal, Jharkhand, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh point towards vernacular propaganda, remote handlers and locally recruited cells far from the traditional Kashmir theatre. The evidence against individual suspects must be tested in court, and Indian counterterrorism agencies are not immune to inflated claims. Yet the organisational logic is clear. A recruit who never crosses a border is harder to trace to Pakistan. A cell translating Jaish material into Gujarati can appear indigenous even when its ideological content and handlers are not. Digital wallets, encrypted platforms and dispersed recruitment allow the sponsor to transfer operational risk while preserving influence. The old infrastructure remains useful; it is simply no longer sufficient. This evolution also makes the distinction between Pakistan’s external proxies and internal insurgents increasingly unstable. The TTP can draw on dormant Punjabi networks. Jaish can recruit beyond Kashmir and operate through digital relationships. AQIS can absorb factions and redistribute expertise. Alliances need not be permanent to be dangerous. Jihadist ecosystems thrive precisely because they can survive organisational splits, leadership deaths and government bans by moving functions rather than preserving logos. Pakistan nevertheless continues to perform counterterrorism as an exercise in nomenclature. Groups are banned, renamed, rediscovered and occasionally prosecuted when international scrutiny intensifies. Leaders become fugitives without becoming difficult to hear. Before reviews by the Financial Action Task Force, the machinery suddenly becomes theatrical: rewards are increased, lists updated and searches announced. Once the diplomatic pressure recedes, enforcement becomes less visible and the infrastructure proves mysteriously resilient. The argument is not that every Pakistani militant organisation is secretly one organisation, or that every act of violence can be directed from a single room in Rawalpindi. The reality is more complicated and therefore more damaging. Pakistan created an environment in which multiple armed movements could share ideological foundations and human networks while serving different objectives. It then mistook its ability to patronise some and attack others for permanent control. Afghanistan is now the stage on which the consequences are being projected. Kabul’s conduct deserves scrutiny, but blaming Afghanistan for the TTP allows Pakistan to treat blowback as foreign aggression. It avoids the more uncomfortable conclusion: the state’s “good Taliban, bad Taliban” doctrine did not fail because the categories were poorly enforced. It failed because the categories were never real to the militants themselves. Pakistan built a proxy system for wars beyond its borders and eventually discovered that borders were the one thing the system did not respect.