ABSTRACT
Strategy: making sense, or making too much sense, of Pakistan’s war? At first glance it may seem a misnomer to ascribe a strategic approach to Pakistan’s engagement of Islamist non-state armed groups. War was foisted upon a reluctant Pakistan by the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 (in contrast to the relative willingness of Pakistan’s then-military leadership to support the war against the Russians in Afghanistan in the 1980s). After 9/11, Pakistan was initially able to limit its involvement to guarding sections of its border with Afghanistan and engaging clusters of militants in its tribal territories. Matters, however, would gradually spiral out of control. By 2007 the war had escalated to hitherto unseen levels of violence, spreading out of the tribal areas and forcing the state to prioritize its responses to contain violent challenges from multiple armed groups. In other words, Pakistan appears to have been predominantly reactive to both the onset and the waging of this twenty-first century war inside its territory.
