For decades, Pakistan cultivated terror networks as instruments of foreign policy. The Global Terrorism Index (GTI) 2026 documents, with clinical precision, what that calculus has produced. Pakistan ranks first on the GTI for the first time, becoming the world’s most terror-affected country in 2025, with 1,139 deaths, 1,045 attacks, 1,595 people injured, and 655 hostages.
Its score of 8.574 puts it ahead of every other country on the index. This is Pakistan’s deadliest year since 2013, and the sixth consecutive year in which terrorism deaths have risen. Across South Asia, it is the only country where the situation worsened in 2025; every other nation in the region recorded an improvement.
The two provinces doing most of the dying are Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan, with 74 per cent of attacks and 67 per cent of deaths.
The dominant group is the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan. In 2025, the TTP conducted 595 attacks and was responsible for 637 deaths, or 56 per cent of all terrorism fatalities in the country.
Targeted assassinations rose 450 per cent. Police fatalities climbed. The group has incorporated drones into its operational toolkit. Between 6,000 and 6,500 TTP militants are now operating from inside Afghanistan, using the territory as a staging ground for cross-border strikes, with 85 per cent of TTP attacks concentrated within 10 to 50 km of the Afghan border.
The GTI’s borderlands analysis traces the geography of Pakistan’s tribal belt, which was for decades a semi-governed sanctuary for the Taliban, the Haqqani Network, al-Qaeda, and eventually the TTP itself.
Ethnic Pashtun continuity across the Durand Line allowed terrorists to move freely. Pakistani madrassas inside Afghan refugee camps were the ideological incubators for many of the people who would become the Taliban, and later, the TTP.
The Afghan Taliban’s return to power in 2021 provided the TTP a friendly safe haven. Islamabad has demanded Kabul restrain the TTP. The Afghan Taliban has declined. This is the return leg of a transaction that began in the 1990s, when Pakistan’s security establishment distinguished between what it internally categorised as good Taliban, useful against India and Afghanistan, and bad Taliban, meaning groups that turned their guns inward. That distinction has now ceased to function.
In March 2025, the Balochistan Liberation Army seized a passenger train and took 442 hostages, in the largest single terrorist attack recorded globally in the GTI’s 2025 data. The BLA’s campaign has evolved from a separatist insurgency into something the report classifies as anti-state terrorism, with Chinese nationals and CPEC infrastructure now explicit targets alongside Pakistani security forces. The GTI records this as domestic blowback for decades of militarised governance in the province, without political accommodation, producing the conditions for sustained organised violence.
The GTI does not discuss Lashkar-e-Taiba or Jaish-e-Mohammed. It does not make accusations about Pakistan’s use of terror proxies against India. However, it mentioned sanctuary politics, permissive borderland space, and the trajectory from state-backed terror to self-sustaining terror ecosystem as factors that map directly onto a pattern India has been describing at international forums for two decades.
The report also notes the deterioration of Pakistan-India relations after the Pahalgam terror attack and India’s response in the form of Operation Sindoor. The structural conditions the GTI identifies as driving Pakistan’s crisis are not the product of geography or misfortune, but the accumulated outcome of policy choices made across multiple governments and military tenures.
Pakistan’s score on the GTI is 8.574. In 2013, when it last recorded comparable casualties, the score reflected a crisis that the state then responded to with military operations, eventually pushing violence down. Six years of consecutive increases suggest the operational logic of those campaigns has run its course.