Asif Tareen
It’s a settled and universal principle of the cosmos that nothing destined to decline is absolute here, and no material power is so independent that it can challenge the laws laid down by nature. Human history and the revealed books bear witness to this truth: whenever a great hardship, disease or tyrannical power raises its head in the world, its undoing and its solution are already being nurtured somewhere in some corner of the universe.
Because of his limited vision, man takes material causes to be everything. But working in the background, as in the story of Hazrat Musa and Khidr (AS), there’s a providential system that eventually turns the tyrant’s own material schemes into a noose around his neck. If we look at this philosophy in the light of recent history and Pakistan’s tangled conspiracies against the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA), an astonishing tale of the intoxication of material power and divine arrangement emerges before us.
We find an interesting and almost mathematical example of this universal truth on the soil of Palestine. When Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar (rh) was arrested by Israeli forces in 1988 and began what would become his final lengthy imprisonment, there seemed to be no way out for him in the material world. He was serving four life sentences.
But look at Allah’s plan! Exactly two years before Sinwar’s (rh) arrest, in 1986, a child named Gilad Shalit had already been born in a remote corner of Israel. No one at that time could have imagined that this child would grow up to become a soldier, get captured by Hamas in 2006, and eventually become, in 2011, the means for the permanent release of Yahya Sinwar and more than a thousand other Palestinian prisoners. There’s a lesson in this: sometimes the solution to a problem is already in place long before the problem itself arises, and we simply don’t know it yet. Allah’s plan is wider than anything we could ever imagine.
When we look at the current bitter state of affairs, with the Pakistani military regime’s war rhetoric against the IEA, through this same lens, a huge imbalance in material power becomes clear. On one side is Pakistan, a recognized nuclear power equipped with advanced JF-17 and F-16 fighter jets, drones and guided missile technology.
On the other side is the IEA, which, even after decades of war, still lacks a proper air force and a modern air defense system. By the standards of the material world, Pakistan looks like an unbeatable power. But history bears witness that when the intoxication of material power overrides moral and brotherly principles, that same power ends up building the tools of its own destruction.
The roots of this bitterness go back to that historic turning point, 9/11, when Pakistan and Afghanistan had excellent diplomatic and trade relations. Under the rule of Amir al-Mu’minin Mullah Muhammad Omar Mujahid (rh), the two countries were close. But right after 9/11, Pakistan completely reversed its position to please America and serve its own strategic interests.
Pakistan gave America airspace and logistical support, and in doing so stabbed a brotherly Muslim neighbor in the back. Many critics at the time argued that “Pakistan’s military regime is really nothing but a colonial continuation of the British-era Royal Indian Army, protecting the interests of its global masters against the sentiments of its own people and of Islam.”
Recently, former senator Mushahid Hussain Sayed also acknowledged this, saying that “Pakistan made billions of dollars in the 1980s by selling out the Afghan jihad, then joined that same Afghan jihad at America’s bidding to get concessions from America and complete its nuclear program.”
This war economy rewarded Pakistan’s ruling elite and generals with huge mansions and VIP lifestyles, but all that came to the Afghan people was gunpowder, destruction and displacement. In the same way, when America withdrew from Afghanistan, the twenty-year war ended, and a stable, dignified and sovereign government was established in Afghanistan, the flow of American dollars into Pakistan suddenly dried up. Because it had never focused on a productive economy or stable regional trade, Pakistan’s economy started to stagger. Now, addicted to the war economy, the Pakistani system went looking for a new way to earn dollars.
Pakistan began repeatedly pushing this narrative at international forums such as the UN, the EU and the Moscow Format: “terrorist organizations exist in Afghanistan and they’re a threat to the region.”
The real aim of this whole campaign is to provoke the Western powers into intervening in the region once again, so Pakistan can once again become a “frontline state” and scrounge up aid. To reinforce this same narrative, Pakistan bombed Afghan territory in February 2026 under the so-called Operation Ghazab lil-Haq, and border skirmishes have continued even in recent days.
Even the IEA’s own intelligence reports show that Pakistan is sheltering former Afghan soldiers, as well as pawns like Daesh members, to create conditions for operations against the Kabul government. The arrests of Daesh media chief Sultan Aziz Azzam and other foreign members inside Pakistan, along with the recent militant attacks inside Pakistan itself, are cited as evidence.
In other words, the whole point of all these Pakistani activities is to spark a new war in Afghanistan and create a fresh way to earn dollars. But look at nature’s divine arrangement and its unseen craftsmanship: to protect Afghanistan from this potential great Fitna and aggression, the material laws of the universe have trapped Pakistan in its own net. For a year, Pakistan kept trade routes closed in an attempt to cripple Afghanistan economically, blocked Afghan trade with India through the Wagah border, and tightened its grip on trade through the ports of Karachi and Gwadar.
The goal was that once the economy collapsed, Afghanistan would bring itself to its knees. But the result turned out exactly the opposite. The Afghan government reduced its dependence on Pakistan and expanded its trade with the rest of the world through Iran’s Chabahar port, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and air corridors. The very restrictions intended to impose a blockade became a means of achieving Afghanistan’s economic independence.
On the other hand, Pakistan has shut down its trade routes not just with Afghanistan, but with India and now Iran too, and ended up trapping and crippling itself completely.
Fighting any major war or military campaign requires a strong and stable economy. But today Pakistan stands before the IMF with a begging bowl, pleading for every billion-dollar installment, its currency has collapsed, and it’s caught up in a severe internal political and security crisis.
Allah (SWT) has set in motion such an unseen chain of events that even though Pakistan harbors huge and dangerous ambitions against Afghanistan, its own economic ruin and internal weakness are tying its hands and feet. The economic trap Pakistan built for others has now turned against Pakistan itself, leaving it incapable of any major aggression against a brotherly nation.
Here it’s also important to understand that Allah’s power is limitless and doesn’t need any material cause at all. So Pakistan’s economic ruin is really just a possible human reading of events, while divine power is also defeating Pakistan’s shameful ambitions on several other fronts at once. Pakistan’s diplomatic defeats in the material world are clear proof of this.
Consider the rejection of Pakistan’s narrative at the Moscow Format, where the tradition of a joint statement couldn’t even be maintained, its unsuccessful claims of mediating between Iran and the United States, and its military ineffectiveness in matters involving Saudi Arabia’s defense and Houthi attacks.
All these factors show that Allah hasn’t just protected Afghanistan from Pakistan’s potential evil economically. He has set in motion a multilayered, unseen arrangement that has also eroded the Pakistani military’s prestige, diplomatic standing and material influence on the world stage, something Pakistan’s military regime simply cannot stop. This whole scenario bears witness to this truth: when people and states try to build their economies on the blood of the innocent and seek material gain by turning on their own brothers, nature turns their own schemes back against them.
Despite all the material losses it’s suffered, Afghanistan is freeing itself from foreign debt and standing on its own feet, while the system intoxicated by material technology and the atomic bomb has become hollow from within. This is the balance of the universe, where no conspiracy can withstand divine wisdom, and the protection of the oppressed is already arranged, in advance, within the tyrant’s own weaknesses.
