As Pakistan and Afghanistan move toward open conflict, the foundations for understanding this crisis were laid well before the current escalation in 2026. As events accelerate, I wanted to share a chronological guide to my research on Pakistan's evolving security landscape — for those looking for deeper context behind the headlines. This body of work spans nearly a decade, from the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan’s (TTP) early organizational shifts through the current open war. 

CTC Perspectives, Combating Terrorism Center at West Point (with Sara Mahmood), 2017

Discusses TTP’s early pivot toward women as a recruitment audience. As inter-group competition between TTP and Islamic State Khorasan  intensified, this piece identified a shift: TTP’s first deliberate attempts to court female supporters, driven by organizational pressure and rivalry dynamics. Published before TTP’s Sunnat-e-Khaula magazine even launched, this analysis flagged a trend that I traced through to its full evolution in my co-authored 2025 article on TTP’s gender-messaging strategies.

CTC Sentinel (with Sara Mahmood), December 2018

To understand the organizational shift that set the stage for everything that followed. After TTP leader Mullah Fazlullah’s death, the group’s shura council appointed Mufti Noor Wali Mehsud—returning the leadership to the Mehsud tribe after nearly half a decade. This piece analyzed why that mattered: the leadership transition signaled a deliberate strategy to repair internal fractures, consolidate splinter factions, and lay the groundwork for operational resurgence. At a time when many assumed TTP’s dissolution was imminent, this analysis argued otherwise.

USIP Special Report No. 494, May 2021

To understand where the TTP was headed, you had to understand where it came from. Drawing on datasets of militant violence and the TTP’s own statements, this report traced the group’s rise, decline under sustained counterterrorism pressure, and the warning signs of a potential resurgence—including mergers with splinter factions, increased propaganda, and the implications of the Afghan Taliban’s return to power. The report warned that thwarting the TTP’s revival required a multidimensional approach beyond kinetic operations.

South Asian Voices (Stimson Center), November 15, 2021

To understand the TTP’s strategic repositioning after the Taliban takeover. This piece analyzed the TTP’s concerted efforts to reconstitute, rebrand, and signal its commitment to its goals—including public disassociation from transnational groups, leadership consolidation under the Mehsud tribe, and the group’s emulation of the Afghan Taliban’s political playbook.

CTC Sentinel (with Abdul Sayed and Andrew Mines), January 2022

To understand how the Taliban’s takeover reshaped the ISKP threat. This analysis examined ISKP’s resurgence under Taliban rule, its evolving targeting patterns, and the broader implications for Afghanistan’s counterterrorism landscape—establishing that the post-withdrawal environment was producing a more complex, not simpler, militant ecosystem.

South Asian Voices (Stimson Center), June 24, 2022

To understand why the TTP-Pakistan talks were structurally doomed. I argued that the Taliban’s reluctance to pressure its former brothers-in-arms, combined with the TTP’s renewed assertiveness and Pakistan’s own economic and political fragility, made a negotiated settlement nearly impossible.

Program on Extremism, George Washington University (with Abdul Sayed), 2022

To understand why the TTP refused to compromise. This report examined the drivers of the TTP’s intransigent negotiating stance—the Afghan Taliban’s role as a reluctant facilitator, Pakistan’s eagerness to negotiate from weakness, and how anti-Pakistan sentiment among Afghan Taliban militants emboldened TTP demands.

Observer Research Foundation, Special Report No. 223: Afghanistan Under the Taliban, March 2024

To understand why Pakistan’s coercive diplomacy was failing. This chapter assessed Pakistan’s declining leverage over the Afghan Taliban—tracing how the Taliban’s recalibrated interests, growing self-reliance, and broader array of external partners had fundamentally shifted the bargaining equation. I argued that Pakistan’s strategies were grounded in outdated assumptions that overlooked substantial shifts in the regional landscape. The piece called for a departure from counterproductive coercive diplomacy toward a nuanced strategy combining positive inducements with targeted pressure—a precursor to the hybrid coercion framework I developed in full the following year.

War on the Rocks, March 7, 2025

This is where I introduce the hybrid coercion and bargaining framework—arguing that Pakistan’s airstrikes constituted a form of strategic signaling within a broader strategy combining military force with economic pressure and diplomatic maneuvering. Analyzing the strategic calculus of all three parties (Pakistan, Afghan Taliban, and TTP), the article identified the Taliban’s “calculated ambiguity,” and warned that the cycle of escalation risked miscalculation and protracted conflict. The deep irony at the heart of the crisis was noted: that Pakistan’s former strategic asset—the Afghan Taliban—now shelters its most lethal domestic threat.

South Asian Voices (Stimson Center / The Diplomat), October 17, 2025

To understand the convergence of three distinct threat streams. I framed Pakistan’s terrorism problem as the “deadly trifecta”—the TTP, the Baloch insurgency, and ISKP—arguing that each exploits Pakistan’s vulnerabilities with distinct ideologies and tactics. The piece details how the TTP has rebranded itself as a defender of the Pashtun nation while expanding into new territories like Chitral and southern Punjab; how the BLA has transformed from a tribal resistance into a sophisticated network deploying female suicide bombers and targeting Chinese investments; and how ISKP's decentralized model and transnational nodes continue to complicate Pakistan's counterterrorism efforts. The core argument: these threats demand tailored, not one-size-fits-all, responses — and the overlapping governance gaps, federal-provincial disputes, and suppression of civil society create conditions all three groups are adept at exploiting.

Hudson Institute (Current Trends in Islamist Ideology, Vol. 37), October 6, 2025

To understand why military operations alone cannot resolve Pakistan's security crisis. This piece proposes a legitimacy-centered framework arguing that Pakistan's counterterrorism approach requires a fundamental reframing. The analysis identifies three interconnected fronts: militant narrative warfare, where the TTP, BLA, and ISKP have developed sophisticated propaganda ecosystems that exploit governance gaps and transform local grievances into anti-state mobilization — including AI-generated content, multilingual media, and targeted outreach to women; domestic governance failures, where political polarization, federal-provincial disputes over military operations, suppression of civil society movements like PTM and BYC, and economic hardship in conflict zones create the very conditions militants exploit; and regional isolation, where deteriorating relationships with Afghanistan, India, and Iran provide militants with cross-border sanctuaries and validate their encirclement narratives.

The piece contrasts the current crisis with Pakistan's last major counterterrorism success — Operation Zarb-e-Azb (2014–16) — arguing that what made that operation effective was not just military tactics but the national consensus, political cover, and external support that gave the state legitimacy to act. None of those conditions exist today. The conclusion: until Pakistan can offer its citizens a more credible alternative to what militant groups provide, tactical victories will remain short-lived.

Terrorism and Political Violence (with Abdul Sayed), October 17, 2025

To understand how TTP adapts its propaganda to women across phases of organizational strength and weakness. Building on my 2017 identification of TTP’s pivot to female audiences, this peer-reviewed study analyzed nine TTP magazines (2017–2024) using qualitative thematic coding and computational sentiment analysis—revealing how gendered messaging evolved from reactive crisis recruitment to strategic legitimacy-building. This represents the full arc of a research thread we began tracking eight years earlier.

CTC Sentinel (with Saif Tahir), 2025

To understand TTP's organizational DNA through its own records. This study built an original dataset of 615 TTP militant profiles drawn from the group's own martyrdom commemorative publications spanning 2006–2025 — one of the largest primary source analyses of TTP's internal demographics. The findings reveal several critical patterns: the dominance of religious education among militants, particularly commanders and suicide attackers; the reemergence of Dera Ismail Khan — situated at the intersection of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Punjab, and Balochistan — as a primary operational hub, supplanting North Waziristan; and TTP's strategic geographic expansion beyond traditional strongholds into southern Punjab, urban Sindh, and parts of Balochistan. Most critically, the data demonstrates that commanders are disproportionately represented in cross-border movement between Afghanistan and Pakistan, underscoring that TTP's operational leadership relies on Afghan territory to coordinate its campaign. This finding directly supports the argument — central to the hybrid coercion framework — that without addressing the sanctuary dimension, Pakistan confronts an adversary that reconstitutes itself across the border faster than military operations can degrade it.

War on the Rocks, March 17, 2026

To understand the February 2026 escalation as the culmination of a years-long analytical trajectory. When Pakistan declared 'open war' in February 2026, the escalation followed the trajectory my research had mapped. Building on the hybrid coercion framework, I framed the conflict as a bargaining failure — driven by information asymmetries, commitment problems, and competing sovereignty claims. The piece directly challenges the Taliban's 'graveyard of empires' narrative, arguing that it rests on a selective reading of history that obscures Pakistan's own enabling role across every phase of Afghan resistance — from the anti-Soviet jihad to the 2021 takeover. The Taliban's playbook of absorbing punishment and waiting for withdrawal was built against distant powers. Pakistan is not distant. It is a nuclear-armed neighbor with permanent security equities along a 2,600-kilometer border. That structural asymmetry is what the Taliban's strategic confidence fails to account for." 

Amira Jadoon, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor at Clemson University, a Harry Frank Guggenheim Distinguished Scholar, and the founding editor of The Durand Dispatch.

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