NEW YORK: 24 years after the September 11 attacks, the record for Pakistan is consistent. Pakistan has sat at, or near, the core of almost every major jihadist network that has killed or tried to kill Americans. Yet Washington keeps hitting reset, treating Islamabad as a “strategic necessity,” convening new dialogues as if the past were erased. On August 12, 2025, the United States and Pakistan held yet another Counterterrorism Dialogue in Islamabad, pledging cooperation against “evolving threats.” The optics echo a pattern, aid and engagement followed by bloodshed, that the U.S. has lived through before.
In January 1993, a Pakistani national, Mir Aimal Kansi, opened fire outside CIA headquarters in Virginia, killing two and wounding three, a terrorism case that ended with his execution in 2002. Six weeks later, on February 26, 1993, the World Trade Center was bombed; the mastermind, Ramzi Yousef, a Pakistani raised in Kuwait, was captured in Islamabad in 1995. These were not outliers; they were early markers of a pipeline that ran through Pakistan’s militant sanctuaries and diaspora.
The pattern deepened after 9/11. In 2002, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and murdered in Karachi, an atrocity linked in court filings to Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, with al‑Qaeda figure Khalid Sheikh Mohammed later claiming responsibility. In 1997, four American oil workers were gunned down in Karachi; the anti‑Shia Pakistani group Lashkar‑e‑Jhangvi claimed the attack, according to the United Nations sanctions listing. In 2008, Lashkar‑e‑Taiba’s three‑day assault on Mumbai killed 166, including six Americans, an attack planned by militants trained in Pakistan.
In 2010, Pakistani‑American Faisal Shahzad pleaded guilty to attempting to bomb Times Square after receiving training in Pakistan’s tribal belt, long described as a Taliban‑al‑Qaeda stronghold. In 2015, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, a Pakistani national, killed 14 people in San Bernardino in an ISIS‑inspired attack. These cases, alongside others underline a through‑line with operatives, training, facilitators, and ideologues repeatedly intersecting with Pakistani soil or networks. Osama bin Laden lived for years in Abbottabad, within sight of Pakistan’s premier military academy, until U.S. forces killed him in May 2011. Pakistan’s own Abbottabad Commission called his long sanctuary a “collective failure” of security institutions; Reuters reported the commission’s conclusion of negligence and incompetence that let him hide in plain view.
Parts of Pakistan’s security apparatus have been accused of active complicity with terrorist proxies. In 2011, America’s top military officer, Admiral Mike Mullen, told the U.S. Senate that the Haqqani Network, responsible for some of the most lethal attacks on Americans in Afghanistan, acted as a “veritable arm” of Pakistan’s ISI. Declassified records later suggested a Pakistani intelligence officer paid $200,000 to facilitate the 2009 suicide bombing at the CIA’s Camp Chapman in Khost, Afghanistan, which killed seven Agency personnel, Pakistan denied the allegation, but the document underscored why U.S. trust remains brittle.
Militants in Pakistan have innovated tactically, including the use of commercial quadcopter drones to drop explosives. Reuters reported at least eight such attacks in and around Bannu over 10 weeks in mid‑2025 and, crucially, tallied 335 militant attacks nationwide in 2024 that killed 520 people. The Global Terrorism Index 2025 likewise flags Tehrik‑e‑Taliban Pakistan (TTP) among the world’s deadliest groups. U.S. and Pakistani officials met in Washington in 2024 specifically to address the TTP and ISIS‑K menace across the region.
Washington’s response has oscillated between pressure and embrace. The United States has poured tens of billions of dollars in assistance and reimbursements into Pakistan since 2001, even as successive administrations cut or conditioned aid over Islamabad’s support for Afghan‑focused proxies like the Haqqanis. Pakistan was placed on the FATF “grey list” in 2018 for counter‑terrorist‑financing deficiencies and removed only in October 2022 after compliance improvements, a reminder that formal fixes do not automatically translate into the dismantling of militant ecosystems.
Supporters of renewed cooperation point to recent designations of Pakistan‑linked or Pakistan‑based actors as proof of movement. In July 2025, the United States designated The Resistance Front, considered a Lashkar‑e‑Taiba offshoot operating in Kashmir, as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. From Kansi’s ambush of CIA employees, to Yousef’s bomb plots and sanctuary in Islamabad, to Pearl’s murder, to bin Laden’s years in a garrison town, to the Times Square bomber trained in Pakistan, to the Mumbai carnage that killed Indians & Americans, and to a CIA base shattered allegedly with ISI help, the architecture of American pain has run through Pakistan’s militant infrastructure and, at times, its state‑protected proxies.
Despite decades of evidence linking Pakistan to major terrorist attacks against Americans, from the 1993 CIA headquarters shooting and World Trade Center bombing to Osama bin Laden’s sanctuary in Abbottabad, the United States continues to pursue the same cycle of engagement, aid, and dialogue with Islamabad. While Pakistan remains strategically important to Washington, the persistent pattern of militant networks operating from Pakistani soil, sometimes with apparent state support, raises fundamental questions about whether traditional diplomatic approaches can effectively address this enduring security challenge. Until Pakistan dismantles the militant infrastructure that has repeatedly facilitated attacks on American interests, the cycle of cooperation followed by bloodshed is likely to continue, making genuine counterterrorism progress difficult to achieve.
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