By Irtija Ahmad
The Global Terrorism Index just confirmed what Pakistan has argued since 2021: the threat crossed the border, and so did the bill.
For the past four years, officials in Islamabad have made the same argument at nearly every regional and multilateral forum. The Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan did not resurge on its own; it rebuilt itself in the space the Afghan Taliban left open when Kabul fell in August 2021. For most of that time, the discourse surrounding this abroad was of a state looking for someone else to blame. This year, the data caught up with it.
The 2026 Global terrorism Index, put together impartially by the Institute of Economics and Peace, now ranks Pakistan as the country hit hardest by terrorism in the world. The Index recorded 1,139 terrorism related deaths in 2025, a 6 per cent increase from the year before and the highest annual toll since 2013. A total of 1,045 attacks were recorded. Hostage-taking spiked from 101 cases in 2024 to 655 in 2025, driven largely by the Jaffar Express hijacking, in which more than 440 passengers were held. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan, the two provinces that share Pakistan’s western frontier, accounted for 74 per cent of all attacks and 67 per cent of all deaths.
The biggest contributor to that toll was the TTP. The group carried out 595 attacks in 2025, up 24 per cent from 481 recorded the year before. It was also responsible for 56 per cent of all terrorism deaths recorded in the country, making it the world’s 3rd deadliest terrorist organisation. The index’s own analysis goes further than just the attack count. It states in plain terms that the Afghan Taliban’s return to power has “profoundly impacted” Pakistan’s security. For most of the previous decade, the TTP did not have this kind of room to operate and hide. Now it does.
This is no longer Pakistan making its own case. An independent global index, run by an organisation with nothing to gain from Islamabad’s diplomatic position, has now traced the deadliest single year of terrorism in over a decade to one specific cause: a hostile militant group operating out of sanctuary across an international border. That is a different order of evidence than a foreign ministry statement, and governments and commentators who have spent four years hedging on the sanctuary question should start treating it that way.
The timing gives Islamabad an opening it shouldn’t waste. On August 4 and 5, Pakistani and American officials held the fourth round of their counterterrorism dialogue in Washington, naming the TTP alongside ISIS-Khorasan, al-Qaeda and the Balochistan Liberation Army as threats that require deeper cooperation on border security and on the networks that finance them. A year earlier, in August 2025, the United States had already added the BLA and its Majeed Brigade to its foreign terrorist organisation list, a step Islamabad had been seeking for some time. Both moves matter. Neither, by itself, changes what the TTP can still do from inside Afghanistan.
The index should fulfill its purpose here. Designations and joint statements serve as diplomatic tools rather than operational measures. They don’t cut off funding or shut down training camps, nor have they prompted the Afghan Taliban to act against a group it shows little interest in restraining. Pakistan’s report on Anti-Terrorism Day, August 21, estimates the death toll at over 90,000 and economic losses exceeding $150 billion since the start of the war on terror, with 2025 being one of the deadliest years of this period. A country enduring such losses has the moral authority to request more than mere recognition from its partners; it has the right to seek enforcement.
None of this requires Pakistan to exaggerate its case, and it shouldn’t. The GTI data clearly indicates what it shows and omits. It identifies the TTP as the primary cause of the 2025 increase and links that resurgence to conditions across the border, but it doesn’t serve as a judgment on all sources of instability within Pakistan. Treating it as such would invite scrutiny that could weaken a strong argument. The key discipline here is to let the index do the work that Pakistani diplomacy alone cannot—demonstrating, through an external source neither Islamabad nor Kabul controls, that the sanctuary issue is real and worsening.
The dialogue with Washington should be judged a year from now by what changes on the ground in Afghanistan, not by the language in the joint statement. Pakistan spent four years making an argument that was true well before anyone outside the country was willing to say so. It should spend the next one making sure the people who finally agree with the diagnosis don’t stop agreeing and paying attention.