Islamabad, Sep 22 — The latest militant attack in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, in which an explosives-laden vehicle crashed into a mosque inside Old Police Lines in Kohat district, killing dozens of police officers and civilians and injuring more than 100 others, was far from an isolated incident, a report has stated.
It noted that the incident was the foreseeable consequence of a Pakistani policy that for years treated jihadist infrastructure as a strategic asset instead of recognising it as a growing threat.
“For decades Pakistan’s security establishment distinguished between “good” and “bad” militants. Groups useful against India or in Afghanistan were sheltered, funded, or at least tolerated. The same networks that trained, recruited, and moved fighters across the Durand Line were never fully dismantled. After the Afghan Taliban’s 2021 takeover, those networks gained more room to operate. Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan and allied commanders such as Hafiz Gul Bahadur reconstituted themselves with sanctuary, weapons, and ideological cover on Afghan soil,” a report in Khalsa Vox detailed.
The report noted that Islamabad now decries sanctuary, while it continues to favour the very factions that it once cultivated.
“Kohat shows what selective counter-terrorism produces. The target was not an Indian consulate or a Western Embassy. It was Pakistani policemen at prayer, inside a police compound, in a city that is supposed to be under state control. The method—vehicle bomb plus follow-on assault—requires planning, explosives, reconnaissance, and local facilitation. Those capabilities do not appear overnight. They are the residue of an ecosystem Pakistan allowed to persist because it was useful against someone else,” it said.
According to the report, militant violence in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has surged since 2021, with attacks increasingly targeting police and military installations rather than being confined to remote checkpoints.
Responsibility is now being claimed by alliances bringing together former TTP commanders, Lashkar-e-Islam remnants, and other groups that once benefited from varying degrees of official tolerance. Yet official rhetoric continues to invoke “Fitna al-Khawarij” (term used by Pakistan to designate the TTP), rather than confronting the deeper reality: Pakistani authorities helped nurture a militant ecosystem that it can no longer fully control, Khlasa Vox mentioned.
“Blaming Kabul is convenient and only partly true. Cross-border movement and Afghan-origin attackers matter. They do not explain why a mosque inside a police line in Kohat could be reached by a car bomb in the first place. That is a failure of intelligence, perimeter security, and political will inside Pakistan. A state that spent years treating some jihadists as assets cannot suddenly demand that every jihadist treat it as off-limits,” it highlighted.