Pakistan's decades-long policy of supporting militant groups as instruments of strategic depth against India and Afghanistan has produced consequences that Pakistani military and civilian leadership have spent years trying to contain—confronting the reality that organizations armed, funded, and given sanctuary by the state eventually develop agendas that the state cannot control.

The Frankenstein metaphor has been applied so often to Pakistan's relationship with its militant proxies that it has become cliché, but it captures something real. The Pakistani military, and particularly the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, built relationships with militant organizations during the 1980s Afghan jihad that became the foundation for subsequent proxy networks in Kashmir and Afghanistan.

The assumption was that these relationships were manageable—that organizational affiliations and funding dependence would translate into strategic responsiveness. That assumption proved partially correct for some organizations and catastrophically wrong for others.

The Pakistani Taliban, which emerged in the tribal areas after 2001, directed its violence primarily toward the Pakistani state itself—targeting military installations, government offices, and civilian populations with attacks that killed thousands of Pakistanis over the following decade. The organization's leadership explicitly rejected the distinction between acceptable violence directed abroad and unacceptable violence directed at Pakistan.

Operation Zarb-e-Azb, launched in 2014 in North Waziristan, represented the military's belated reckoning with this reality—a large-scale offensive against militant networks that had been tolerated for years. Its success was partial and complicated by the continued protection afforded to organizations focused on Afghanistan and India.

The bill for decades of strategic ambiguity continues to be presented.