The ISPR chief provided an in-depth briefing on Pakistan’s security landscape, outlining ongoing challenges and the measures taken to address them
By ISPR
ISLAMABAD: Military spokesman, Lt Gen Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry, warned that the Taliban administration in Afghanistan had become a danger not only to Pakistan but to the wider region as well as the global threat, accusing it of sheltering militants, enabling cross-border infiltration and refusing to honor international commitments against terrorism.
Speaking to senior journalists on 25 November, the Director General of the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) gave a detailed briefing on the country’s security situation. He said Pakistan had carried out more than 67,000 intelligence-based operations across the country this year, most of them in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan. These operations, he said, had resulted in the killing of 1,873 militants, including 136 Afghan nationals.
According to him, since 4 November alone, security forces conducted 4,910 intelligence-led actions in which 206 militants were killed. He said the figures reflected the scale of the threat Pakistan continued to face from groups operating from Afghan soil. Gen Sharif said propaganda was being spread about Pakistan’s border management, even though the frontier with Afghanistan was among the world’s most difficult terrains.
The 1,229-kilometre border in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa alone, he said, contained 20 crossing points spread over rugged valleys and mountains where security posts were often 20 to 25 kilometers apart. Fencing, he added, could not be fully effective without surveillance and fire support, which required vast financial and logistical resources.
The DG ISPR said lawless pockets along the Afghan border hosted a powerful nexus of political actors, criminals and terror groups. Smuggling networks and the flow of non-custom-paid vehicles, he added, had fed a parallel economy and helped militants carry out attacks, including suicide bombings. “If hundreds of thousands of unregistered vehicles roam freely in a province, who is responsible for stopping them?” he asked.
“If a third party has to monitor this mechanism, Pakistan has no objection,” he said, adding that mediating countries were fully aware of Islamabad’s concerns. He dismissed the Taliban’s claim that militants in Pakistan were “migrants” or “guests”, calling the argument illogical. The DG ISPR also shared figures on the repatriation of Afghan nationals. He said 366,704 people returned to Afghanistan in 2024, while 971,604 had been sent back so far in 2025. In November alone, 239,574 individuals were repatriated.
