ISLAMABAD – For decades, Pakistan’s state doctrine held two sacred, unshakeable truths. First: our military is the undisputed fortress of Islam, boasting over half a million active troops and nuclear deterrence to boot. Second: every single problem inside our borders, from cross-border ambushes to a ruptured municipal sewage pipe in Quetta, is secretly masterminded by “Afghan miscreants”.
So, imagine the patriotic pride swelling in my chest when news broke that our strategic masterminds have devised the ultimate counter-insurgency breakthrough for Balochistan and KPK.
We are hiring the Afghans.
Not as consultants or rug merchants, mind you. But as paid, front-line fighters – former soldiers and police officers of the collapsed Kabul republic, picked up from refugee settlements, handed firearms and reportedly offered a princely monthly salary of 40,000 Pakistani rupees (roughly $145, or about the price of a modest family grocery run in modern Islamabad).
You have to admire the absolute administrative genius at play. For the last two years, our federal government has spent hundreds of millions of rupees running around the country rounding up undocumented Afghans, loading them into open-bed trucks and shipping them across the Torkham border in the name of national sovereignty. Now, it appears someone in the planning bureau looked at the logistical invoice and thought: “Wait a minute. Why spend diesel deporting them when we can just pay them five hundred rupees a day to get shot at in Chaman?”
Uber revolutionized cab rides. Deliveroo solved food delivery. Rawalpindi has simply introduced the gig economy to regional warfare: Insta-Fighter.
The strategic setup is so tangled it gives our generals a migraine. In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the Pakistani Taliban (TTP) are reportedly slipping across the border from Afghanistan to hit our outposts. In Kabul, the Afghan Taliban regime insists they have no idea what anyone is talking about. In Balochistan, the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) is waging high-intensity guerrilla warfare against state security forces.
And right in the middle of this powder keg, who does Islamabad hire to restore law and order? Former Afghan Republic commandos – the exact same soldiers the Afghan Taliban chased out of Kabul in 2021 and the exact same men the Taliban would execute on sight.
Picture the morning briefing at a remote checkpost in the mountains:
“Gentlemen, today we fight the militants. To our left, we have the Taliban who hate our hired fighters. To our right, we have the separatists who hate both of us. And in the middle, we have Ahmad from Kandahar, who hasn’t received his forty thousand rupees yet and is mostly just trying to earn enough cash to pay his house rent in Rawalpindi.”
It is truly a foreign-policy masterpiece. If an Afghan crosses the border without papers, he is an illegal alien threatening the republic. But if that same Afghan picks up a Kalashnikov and agrees to stand in the Baloch desert heat for $145 a month, he is an honoured partner in our counter-terrorism architecture.
One can only wonder what the next cost-cutting measure will be. If forty grand a month proves too expensive for our depleted foreign exchange reserves, will the establishment start paying mercenaries in utility store ration cards? Or perhaps, staying true to our recent military traditions, we will simply pay them in high-definition ISPR patriotic music videos?
As a proud Pakistani, my heart swells. The military budget remains untouched, the generals stay comfortable in their gated cantt lawns and our borders are being defended by outsourced contractors who don’t even have a valid Pakistani identity card. Strategic depth has finally come full circle: we spent forty years trying to run Afghanistan and now we can’t even police our own backyard without hiring an Afghan to do it for us.
