25 years on: The long-term legacy of 9/11 and the War on Terror for Pakistan

In his first term in office, US President Donald Trump justified the suspension of security assistance to Pakistan by exclaiming on Twitter (now X): “The United States has foolishly given Pakistan more than $33 billion in aid over the last 15 years, and they have given us nothing but lies & deceit, thinking of our leaders as fools.”

In doing so he vocalised a popular narrative long echoing in the halls of Western capitals during the War on Terror (WoT): despite being a frontline state and US partner, Pakistan was ‘conniving and duplicitous’, seen as willing to betray its partners and strike its own deals. Trickster and con artist were common monikers used to describe Pakistan’s role. Ironically, whereas Westerners were labelling Pakistan a double agent, critics in the Global South saw an imperial stooge, ever eager to promote and cement US security and strategic interests. But these opposing verdicts mask a more complex reality of a country that was shoved into the war by the “with-us-or-against-us” logic, whereby the costs at each moment of participation greatly outweighed the benefits.

While reams of articles and books have been devoted to the centrality of Afghanistan and Iraq in the WoT, relatively little is known of the granular and long-term impacts on the Pakistani state, society, and economy. Most analysts and political actors were already convinced the state had been paid off, and so nobody bothered with the audit. What the audit shows is that the war reached far past the frontier where it was fought: it remade Pakistan’s public health standards, revenue base, monopoly over violence, systems of identity and border control, and the way money moves through the country. Those changes were never counted as costs of the war, but the country is still quietly paying them without much acknowledgement.

Perhaps the clearest evidence comes from the impact of military operations in the country. Scholarship and research on Pakistan’s western frontier with Afghanistan have documented and analysed the effects of the drone and military campaigns waged by the US with at least the implicit agreement of the Pakistani state and military. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism counts about 430 drone strikes between 2010 and 2020, killing between 2,515 and 4,026 people.

Of these, between 424 and 969 were civilians, including between 172 and 207 children. The military campaign and bombing in the region also displaced around 5 million people. In many ways, the Pakistani state was a co-author of this damage, continuing Islamabad’s strained relationship with the country’s peripheries while enshrining one of the Global War on Terror’s more confounding logics: states waging war on their own people according to terms not of their making.

Moreover, these drone attacks and military operations only tell a partial story of the costs of war. While it may reveal the direct effects of the war, it doesn’t touch upon the varied second- and third-degree effects that are often harder to perceive but just as damaging. For example, after the CIA used a fake vaccination campaign to obtain DNA from Osama bin Laden’s family members to verify his whereabouts in Abbottabad, public confidence in vaccination campaigns wavered and medical personnel were deported and killed, decreasing accessibility to medical services.

Government figures record 96 people killed in attacks on polio campaigns since 2012, most of them police officers and health workers. Pakistan and Afghanistan are today the last two countries on Earth where wild poliovirus remains endemic. In other words, the capture-and-kill mission of a single individual, one of the military staples of WoT, is still paralysing Pakistani children 15 years later.

The war’s largest costs to Pakistan were financial, and the state’s own accounting of them is the best place to see why they were never recognised. The standalone 2018 annual annexure of the Pakistan Economic Survey put the cost of the war at $127 billion. The largest contributor to this cost, according to the survey, is lost tax collection. And the impact of this goes beyond what we see in the numbers. Those familiar with the travails of Pakistan’s financial infrastructure will realise that such a shortfall in tax collection structurally undermines the economy by further weakening the already emaciated relationship between state and society. The low GDP-to-tax ratio remains one of the main failings of the country’s economy. The War on Terror only amplified this failure further.

US financial assistance to Pakistan during WoT did little to offset such an astronomical cost. It is commonly understood that Pakistan received $33.4 billion for its role in the war, but only around $19 billion of that was assistance in any ordinary sense, and less than $15 billion was ever disbursed. The remainder came through the Coalition Support Fund, which was not aid but direct payment for specific services rendered by the Pakistani state and military: the deployment of over 100,000 security personnel on the rugged border with Afghanistan, direct operations, overland logistics, and port and base use. Having spent over $8 trillion on the War on Terror, Pakistan received a mere 0.41% of the total spending from the United States.

A closer look at the US-Pakistan financial relationship during WoT reveals deep incongruities between reality and well-trodden narratives about Pakistan’s role as an unreliable ally and partner. Despite often being accused of seeking profits from war or rents on violence, Pakistan really never maximised its geographical position for greater financial leverage.

The clearest case is transit. Charging a fee on every truck crossing into Afghanistan could have been one of the country’s most significant sources of revenue, but for the first 11 years of the war there was no formal agreement governing the arrangement, and the Pakistani state did not directly charge anything at all. It was only after the tragedy of a friendly-fire incident, when in 2011 a US Apache helicopter accidentally killed 24 Pakistani soldiers, that Parliament pushed for levying a fee on every truck. Negotiations dragged on for months during which transit of NATO goods through Pakistan was halted. It was estimated that taking the alternate route was costing the Americans $100 million per month. Despite the heavy cost to US logistical and supply routes, no deal was ever reached. The US held off disbursing other payments to Pakistan and was thus able to arm-twist the country into returning to the original arrangement of not charging anything.

Allowing supply trucks to transit had considerable costs for Pakistan. Most of this came from leakages within these supply routes leading to local markets being flooded with untaxed and illicit goods. Anthropologist Adeem Suhail argues that the infamous gang wars in Karachi, fictionalised in the Bollywood movie Dhurandar, were a direct result of WoT. In keeping its routes safe and secure without increasing the costs, the US subtly encouraged the formation of these private managers of violence who could take on the job of protecting the routes at very little cost.

Transit and supply routes impacted urban violence in more direct ways as many of the US-made arms intended for Afghanistan found their way into Pakistani markets and urban spaces. For example, a recent investigative report tracked the serial numbers of 63 assault rifles confiscated from terrorist groups within Pakistan to discover they reached the country through NATO supply trucks. The hasty, ignominious US retreat from Afghanistan, which left large caches of arms and military goods in the hands of the Taliban government, has only made matters worse and enabled the recent upsurge in violent attacks by Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan.

By one estimate, at least 40% of the total arms supplied to US-aligned forces in Afghanistan made their way back across the border. In 2010, a NATO truck intended for Kabul was found dismantled and empty within Pakistan. During the investigation that ensued, it was discovered that just in that year alone an estimated 3,000 trucks declared for Afghanistan never left Karachi.

Smuggling networks used the NATO cover to sneak goods without proper checking or payment of any customs duties. In another estimate, it was suggested that between 2007 and 2010, at least 7,922 transit containers were pilfered within Pakistan. The example is rife with irony: the very route intended to create security within the larger region was being used to undermine it. It is yet another case of how the architecture and infrastructure of the War on Terror created unforeseen negative impacts on the country.

One of the daunting tasks in attempting to uncover and explain the long-term legacies and impacts of WoT is the wish to understand the event as a singular phenomenon or discrete historical era that can condense a wide-ranging and unwieldy war into easily digestible, explainable, and punchy narratives. But the War on Terror cannot be understood as such. It simply impacted the lives and livelihoods of too many around the globe in uneven and incongruous ways at the personal, local, national, and regional levels. This is no less true for Pakistan than it is for other countries. The state and society suffered and are still paying the price. In some cases, the war amplified long-standing problems endemic to the country; in other cases, it introduced new ones. But many of the legacies remain unknown and untold.