Pakistan’s use of nuclear blackmail against its adversaries has enabled a strategy of regional aggression—most recently seen in Afghanistan.

Pakistan’s bombing of Afghanistan over the past few weeks has again exposed something the world would prefer not to confront: it is fundamentally a rogue state that acts without regard for international law. From February 26 until March 18, according to the United Nations, Pakistan’s bombing of Afghanistan has killed at least 289 people, including women and children, and displaced around 115,000. This notoriously included the bombing of a drug rehabilitation center in Kabul on March 16, killing 143 civilians and wounding hundreds more. 

Pakistan has sold these attacks in international fora as “counterterrorism” missions. Islamabad has claimed that it is targeting Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), a Pakistani terrorist group with bases in Afghanistan—vaguely and euphemistically claiming that its targets have been “terrorist camps,” “hideouts,” and TTP’s “Afghanistan-based leadership and handlers.” However, in public reporting around the weeks of bombardment, there has been no clearly identified target whose killing would explain the scale of civilian harm—making the claim of “surgical” attacks collapse under the weight of dead and wounded civilians, damaged homes, and displaced families.

What makes the strikes all the more frightening is the fact that Pakistan has never articulated any doctrine with regard to threat escalation. Islamabad’s actions in Afghanistan so far have been reckless. In a conflict with a more powerful adversary, there is no reason that this recklessness might not extend to using nuclear weapons. If the Pakistan Army cannot presently show restraint with artillery, airstrikes, and cross-border escalation, what more might it be willing to do in the future?

One might argue that no state ought to possess nuclear weapons, and they should not exist at all. Yet even by the logic of the world that allows them to exist, they are supposed to remain in the hands of states that show discipline and a serious respect for escalation risks. Pakistan is showing the opposite: it is normalizing the use of force across borders, blurring the line between militants and civilians, and sweeping civilian deaths under the rug using broad counterterrorism language. It has also long faced accusations of using the protection of its nuclear umbrella as cover for cross-border terrorism carried out through Islamist militant proxies in its neighbors. A state that behaves in such a way has no business owning a nuclear arsenal in the first place.

The Origins of Pakistan’s Nuclear Program

Pakistan’s nuclear program was launched after its humiliating 1971 defeat by India in that year’s war, leading to the independence of East Pakistan as modern Bangladesh. Three years later, in 1974, India conducted its first nuclear test. Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto began to pursue a Pakistani nuclear program, fulfilling a prophecy he had made in 1965: “If India builds the bomb, Pakistan will eat grass or leaves, even go hungry, but we will get one of our own.”

In the decades that followed, Pakistan then developed its nuclear capability outside the Non-Proliferation Treaty, first testing its nuclear weapons in May 1998. It did not become a nuclear power with the consent of the NPT system, and its nuclear test was condemned by UN Security Council Resolution 1172 in June 1998. The program was also stained by the Abdul Qadeer Khan scandal, after it was revealed that the eminent Pakistan nuclear scientist—celebrated inside Pakistan as the father of the nuclear bomb—was at the center of a network that sold nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya, and North Korea, tying Pakistan’s nuclear mission not only to defiance of India but to illicit transfer of nuclear know-how to other states.

Pakistan is also no longer treating its nuclear status as something confined to its rivalry with India. In September 2025, it signed a Strategic Mutual Defense Agreement with Saudi Arabia, creating a NATO-like security pact between the two countries including a commitment to mutual defense. As Pakistani officials said, the pact says aggression against one will be treated as aggression against both, and what a senior Saudi official called a “comprehensive defensive agreement” covering all military means—explicitly including the use of nuclear weapons.

At first blush, this development might be seen as a positive one. Yet by extending nuclear deterrence into the Persian Gulf region, Pakistan is stirring up nuclear tensions as the world is attempting to calm them. If Saudi Arabia now has ironclad nuclear security guarantees, its rivals—certainly Iran, possibly Qatar or the United Arab Emirates—might be similarly motivated to pursue their own nuclear security guarantees, including through domestic ownership if necessary. This is to say nothing of the dubious morality of a nuclear state turning its atomic status into regional political currency.

Nuclear Weapons and State Sovereignty

Under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, only states that had manufactured and exploded a nuclear device before January 1, 1967 were recognized as nuclear-weapon states. Under this system, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, the Soviet Union (today Russia), and the People’s Republic of China were regarded as the sole “official” nuclear powers.

The states that entered the NPT immediately after it went into effect could be broadly divided into two groups: the “official” nations that already had nuclear weapons, and the nations that had no interest in developing nuclear weapons or no realistic capacity to do so. A third category of states—middle powers such as Turkey, Indonesia, and South Africa with the financial means, technical know-how, and political will to develop nuclear weapons—refused to join the NPT at its outset. India and Pakistan both belonged to this group.

Over time, and after steadily diplomatic pressure from the international community, many of the holdouts eventually joined the agreement. However, India and Pakistan never did, and both developed their nuclear programs independently, arguing that the development of nuclear weapons was a sovereign right. In principle, they are correct: there is no international law that says that unstable, irresponsible, or reckless states are barred from possessing nuclear weapons. The NPT system was designed to prevent further proliferation, not to create a moral fitness test.

In practice, the international community has tended to view any further nuclear proliferation as a grave security risk inherently destabilizing to the world order. States have accordingly gone to extreme lengths to prevent such proliferation; the United States even invaded Iraq in 2003 based on the (ultimately mistaken) belief that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was developing nuclear weapons. However, once a rogue state has nuclear weapons, the risk of their use against an invader forces restraint. It is notable that the United States has never attempted to pursue military action against North Korea since its first successful nuclear test in 2006—a lesson that can hardly be lost on Iran today.

Pakistani Nuclear Weapons Keep India from Retaliating Against Terrorism

For Pakistan, nuclear weapons function as a shield, allowing Islamabad to pursue destabilizing regional activity without fear of consequences from its neighbors. Pakistan allegedly prepared its warheads for possible deployment during the 1999 Kargil conflict, after Pakistani troops and Pakistan-backed militants infiltrated Indian-administered Kashmir and the fighting escalated into the first direct war between the two countries after both had openly become nuclear powers. It seemingly did so again in late 2001 after Pakistan-based terrorists attacked the Indian parliament, which triggered a massive military mobilization by both states along the border but ultimately did not lead to war.

Pakistan has refused to adopt a clear “no first use” policy, a declaration that it would not use nuclear weapons against India if India did not use them first. Instead, it has kept its first-use policy deliberately vague. Pakistani officials have declared that nuclear weapons would be used if the country’s existence were threatened—but what exactly counts as a threat to the country’s “existence” has never been clearly defined. In effect, the threat is to use tactical nuclear weapons against an Indian ground invasion.

New Delhi’s understandable reluctance to invade Pakistan under these conditions has led to a recurring pattern in which Pakistan-backed terrorists conduct attacks inside India, India retaliates in a token way, a ceasefire goes into effect before meaningful consequences can be imposed on Islamabad, and the pattern is repeated several years later. The terrorist attack in Pahalgam in April 2025, and the ensuing four-day air war between India and Pakistan, was the most recent example of this cycle. It is unlikely to be the last.

It is clear that Pakistan is not planning to use a nuclear weapon against Afghanistan in the current conflict. Yet a country with Pakistan’s record on nuclear issues, its escalatory strategic culture, and a profound disregard for civilian life is not a safe country to possess such weapons in the first place.

Nuclear weapons do not only pose danger when they are launched. They also create a shield behind which a state can behave more aggressively at lower levels of any conflict. Pakistan has made the calculation that it can pursue any aggressive action against its neighbors short of nuclear war, and others will hesitate to push back too hard because of the possibility of escalation into nuclear territory. The nuclear bomb is central to this strategy; it has emboldened Pakistan’s recklessness and has made the country far more dangerous in its behavior.

A nuclear-armed state that repeatedly kills civilians across the border, cannot persuasively distinguish combatants from noncombatants, and threatens nuclear warfare against any other state that challenges its practices is an international problem, not a problem just for Pakistan’s neighbors. Whether or not Pakistan’s nuclear weapons are physically secure, the international community must have faith in the judgment of the state controlling the weapons. Can the international community honestly say this of Islamabad?

What the World Can Still Do About Pakistan

No state that has made the nuclear bomb central to its national identity, military doctrine, and regional leverage is ever likely to disarm voluntarily. Put simply, it is not realistic to expect Pakistan to surrender its nuclear weapons. Nor is any outside power prepared to compel it to do so.

A slightly more realistic objective—albeit still a long shot—is to force a change in Pakistan’s nuclear posture. International pressure should begin with a simple principle that no state should be allowed to use nuclear deterrence as cover for proxy warfare and reckless escalation, as Pakistan has been doing for decades. If Pakistan insists—as it has—that its arsenal exists solely for defensive purposes, then the burden should be on Islamabad to prove it by publicly clarifying its nuclear thresholds, narrowing its cultivated ambiguity around first use, and formally committing not to use nuclear weapons against efforts to impose consequences on militant groups on Pakistani soil.

More broadly, the wider international community must stop treating Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal as a static fact to be managed quietly by experts behind closed doors. It is a political instrument, and Pakistan has used it for political ends. That reality demands political consequences. If Pakistan is intent on acting as a rogue state, the international community should treat it like one—and send a clear message that nuclear blackmail is unacceptable, will not succeed, and will come at great conventional cost.

About the Author: Natiq Malikzada

Natiq Malikzada is a journalist and human rights advocate. He holds an MA in International Relations and an LLM in International Human Rights Law from the University of Essex, which he attended as a Chevening Scholar. Since 2013, he has focused on countering religious extremism and promoting democracy and pluralism. In 2020, he co-founded Better Afghanistan, an organization dedicated to fighting extremism, supporting education, documenting human rights violations, and empowering civil society. The organization also provides a platform for Afghan women’s rights activists to mobilize, engage in dialogue, and advocate for freedom and justice under increasingly repressive conditions.

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