Proxy Nation: Pakistan and the New Great Game

by Junaid S Ahmad

As Pakistan reignites its border war with Afghanistan, history repeats itself — empire’s old script plays again, with new actors and the same blood-soaked stage.

The Pakistan–Afghanistan frontier burns once more. Over recent weeks, Pakistani airstrikes deep into Afghan territory and retaliatory Taliban assaults on border outposts have pushed the two erstwhile allies to the brink of open war. Civilians flee the bombardment; funerals follow every “precision strike.” Kabul accuses Islamabad of aggression. Pakistan claims self-defense against “terror sanctuaries.”

The irony is almost Shakespearean. The Taliban — once nurtured, funded, and shielded by Pakistan’s military establishment — now stand declared its “enemy number one.” The same generals who armed these militants to project power across the Durand Line now accuse their former protégés of harboring terrorists. The hunter has become the hunted; the pupil, the adversary.

Yet this is not a new story. What unfolds between Washington and Islamabad is a rerun of an old Cold War film — the same scriptwriters, the same machinery of patronage, and a new cast of casualties. In the 1980s, Washington, Islamabad, and Riyadh midwifed a militant ecosystem to bleed the Soviet Union. The infrastructure — training camps, smuggling routes, ideological pipelines — did not vanish with victory; it metastasized. Pakistan’s generals, drunk on “strategic depth,” mistook control for containment. Washington saw a subcontractor for empire. But ideologies, once weaponized, outlive and remake their patrons.

That old script resurfaced in April 2022, when a regime-change operation arrived dressed as parliamentary procedure. The choreography was Washington’s; the execution, Pakistan’s generals’. Imran Khan’s offense was not corruption or incompetence — it was defiance. He rejected U.S. basing rights, resisted embassy diktats, and spoke of sovereignty as substance, not slogan. For Washington, such independence required correction. For Rawalpindi, it demanded elimination. The result was a coup in constitutional costume — defections prearranged, votes pre-counted, and the old comprador class restored to office.

But the coup-makers misread the moment. Far from fading, Khan’s popularity swelled into a nationwide revolt. Two years of imprisonment, censorship, and show trials only sanctified him as a symbol of defiance. Across Pakistan, from Karachi’s alleys to Khyber’s hills, the sentiment is unmistakable: the state is occupied, its sovereignty auctioned, its rulers bought. The generals may have silenced Khan’s voice, but not his echo — it reverberates through a nation denied dignity, growing louder with every crackdown.

Cornered at home, Pakistan’s generals have reached for their oldest sedative: war. The clashes with Afghanistan are not accidents of geography but instruments of political survival. Conflict rallies the flag, distracts from repression, and cloaks tyranny in patriotism. Yet this gambit is suicidal. In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the tribal belt, “precision strikes” translate into funerals. Entire Pashtun neighborhoods are pulverized under the pretense of counterterrorism, each operation deepening alienation and indignation. The old distinction between “good” and “bad” Taliban — the linchpin of Pakistan’s security policy — has collapsed into farce. Every strike now feeds the cycle of revenge.

Meanwhile, the military establishment revives tired, racist tropes about Pashtuns and Afghan refugees as “closet terrorists.” It manufactures the illusion of unity while tightening its grip on power, mistaking fear for loyalty. In this chaos, Washington finds opportunity. Pakistan’s renewed dependency once again serves as leverage — a pawn to pressure both India and China in the great game’s latest season.

But even the empire’s allies are fracturing. India, Washington’s supposed “democratic pillar” in its Indo-Pacific strategy, is drifting from the script. Modi’s meeting with Xi Jinping at the SCO summit and his refusal to halt Russian oil imports exposed an uncomfortable truth: India may be a partner, but not a pawn. In response, Trump’s revived tariffs on Indian goods and the Pentagon’s renewed courtship of Pakistan’s generals are reminders that pliancy remains the true currency of alliance.

Washington’s contradictions deepen. While it re-embraces Pakistan’s praetorian elite, its Zionist establishment clings to Modi’s India. Netanyahu and Modi are ideological twins — ethno-nationalists who have normalized state terror into policy. The “Israel–India axis” thrives on fanatical Islamophobia and the mythology of civilizational supremacy. And as ever, Washington arms both sides and calls it balance: financing genocide in Palestine, condoning repression in Kashmir, and labeling the wreckage “stability.”

Amid this cynical choreography, Pakistan’s renewed intimacy with Washington exposes its anxiety toward Beijing. The China–Pakistan Economic Corridor, once hailed as salvation, has soured into suspicion. China’s fiscal discipline constrains the generals’ graft; U.S. patronage restores their comfort. Thus, Islamabad returns to its favorite game — auctioning sovereignty to the highest bidder. For Washington, it’s leverage; for Pakistan’s elite, it’s rent. The result is a hollowed republic of 240 million citizens, ruled by a military caste that confuses survival with subservience.

If Pakistan’s generals imagine they can wage war abroad and enjoy peace at home, they are deluding themselves. Every counterterror campaign breeds its counter-history. Each time the state paints Pashtuns as complicit in militancy, it forges another rebellion. The “graveyard of empires” next door may soon become a mirror. The establishment that once brokered imperial wars now risks becoming their collateral.

History’s verdict on those who mistake domination for durability is unsparing. Rulers who forge legitimacy through foreign conflict eventually perish by the fires they ignite. Islamabad’s generals, Washington’s strategists, Modi’s fascists, and Tel Aviv’s mass murderers all draw from the same manual — manufacture enemies, monetize fear, and call it governance. But the script is exhausted, the actors over-rehearsed, and the audience — bloodied, displaced, and wiser — no longer confuses spectacle for statecraft. The repetition of tragedy is not destiny but complicity. And if the same patrons keep bankrolling this performance, the curtain will rise once more — on a conflagration that consumes both the puppets and their patrons alike.

Prof. Junaid S. Ahmad teaches Law, Religion, and Global Politics and is the Director of the Center for the Study of Islam and Decolonization (CSID), Islamabad, Pakistan. He is a member of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST – https://just-international.org/), Movement for Liberation from Nakba (MLN – https://nakbaliberation.com/), and Saving Humanity and Planet Earth (SHAPE – https://www.theshapeproject.com/).