IT IS TIME TO call Imran Khan’s Afghan policy what it was: a catastrophic act of hubris dressed up as moral clarity, a theatre of sentiment that confused proximity with power and left Pakistan exposed before the very forces it once claimed to resist. What we are witnessing today is not a gentle policy refinement. It is a belated rescue effort from the wreckage of one man’s misjudgements about the Taliban and those who move in their shadow. Shehbaz and the Hafiz have realised this in tandem.
Khan did not simply misread Kabul. He romanticised it. He treated the Taliban’s return as an historic vindication of some imagined fraternity, as if shared vocabulary could overwrite geography, history and the ledger of Pakistani dead. Under that intoxicated lens, actors who should have remained behind a wall of suspicion were invited back into the conversational, political and in some cases physical space of the state. Those who once understood themselves as marginal began to sense invitation at the centre.
The unforgivable element of that period was not idealism alone, but the systematised erosion of caution. Hardcore prisoners walked out of Pakistani jails. Individuals with established militant linkages were recast as interlocutors. Figures shuttled from Afghanistan into Pakistan under the banner of reconciliation whose loyalties had never belonged to this republic. It was sold as strategic nuance. In practical terms, it hollowed out the state’s own defences.
Today’s Pakistan lives inside the consequences. Tehrik e Taliban Pakistan, Baloch insurgent cells and associated violent networks operate in an environment shaped in part by that indulgence. No serious analyst claims Imran Khan invented militancy. What he did, and what his defenders avoid confronting, is weaken the moral, legal and psychological barriers that made a return to relevance more difficult. He made it easier for enemies of the state to imagine space. He made it harder for the state to speak with one disciplined voice.
When funerals become frequent, theoretical alibis lose their dignity. The constable in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the soldier in Balochistan, the worshipper in a mosque or shopper in a bazaar, are not paying for abstract doctrines. They are paying for specific decisions taken by people who believed that Pakistan could manage those who never convincingly renounced violence as a tool of politics. To detach those decisions from the present is to patronise the living and the dead.
In this context, the current course deserves to be understood less as a power-hungry reflex and more as an overdue return to institutional seriousness. Under Field Marshal Asim Munir, our policy on Afghanistan has been pulled back from personal theatre into a more rules-based frame. Afghan nationals who violated Pakistani law are being processed and sent back home. They are not being elevated into symbols or recycled into photo opportunities. They are being treated as a legal problem with legal consequences. One can contest methods and safeguards, but the underlying logic is neither exotic nor sinister. It is the language of borders and liability that any state eventually reverts to when sentiment fails.
Predictably, some of those who once applauded symbolic gestures now decry deportations as cruelty. It is a selective outrage that forgets Pakistan’s decades of hospitality toward Afghans fleeing war. What has shifted is not the historical record of generosity, but the tolerance for its exploitation. A state that refuses to distinguish between the vulnerable and the weaponised, between those seeking refuge and those seeking cover, is not compassionate. It is careless with its own survival.
Pakistan is also no longer whispering abroad what it shouts at home. In Doha, Ankara, and other regional settings, officials are speaking more plainly about networks, safe spaces and the regional cost of permissiveness. This is less a publicity campaign than an attempt to align external narratives with internal reality: militant infrastructure, wherever indulged, does not remain a local inconvenience. It exports itself.
The contrast with the Khan era is, at its core, a contrast in moral stance. Then, the state toyed with the notion that flattery, proximity and narrative laundering might transform hardened actors into responsible stakeholders. Now there is at least a grudging recognition that some groups are not estranged cousins, but deliberate saboteurs, and that unending accommodation is not virtue. It is complicity. That recognition is not cruelty. It is the baseline of any coherent security policy.
None of this absolves the present from scrutiny. Firm lines can blur in practice. Heavy-handed operations can sweep in bystanders. Deportation regimes can be abused. These risks exist and require independent oversight. But acknowledging them does not rewrite the verdict on recent history. Imran Khan wagered Pakistan’s security architecture on charisma and sentiment where leverage, verification and distance were required. That wager failed. The task on the table now, for this government and this military command, is remedial, not romantic.
For the first time in years, civilian and military centres of power appear to agree on a sober proposition: Afghan policy cannot be a vanity platform or a talkshow script. It must function as an instrument of national interest, applied with a colder clarity than the populist moment permitted. That means fewer revolving doors, fewer performative hugs, more conditionality, more consequence. It means engaging Kabul and the region from a position that neither apologises for protecting Pakistani lives nor confuses that duty with theatrics.
To suggest that Pakistan ought to be ashamed of finally articulating this is unserious. A sovereign state is entitled, and obliged, to shut its gates to those who abuse its confusion and its kindness. The real scandal is not that firmer lines are being drawn now. It is that those lines were once dissolved in the glow of a fantasy that never saw Pakistan as anything beyond a convenient instrument. The country is living through the cost of that mistake. It should at least remember who insisted it was wisdom.
