Pakistan serves as a pre-eminent case study of a state creating a ‘Frankenstein’s monster’ by funding and facilitating proxies to destabilise a neighbour. Throughout the 1980s, acting at the behest of the United States and Saudi Arabia, the Pakistani state recruited, trained and armed various Islamist Afghan groups to combat Soviet forces occupying Afghanistan.
Once the Soviet forces withdrew in 1989, the victorious proxies failed to reach an amicable power-sharing agreement and began fighting amongst themselves. Desperate to maintain a stake in the region, Pakistan helped mould an even more extreme force, the Taliban, who won decisive battles against rival factions to install a stringent Islamist regime by 1996 in Afghanistan.
While the Pakistani state believed it had successfully installed a government beneficial to its strategic geopolitical interests, the internal fallout of this involvement had already commenced. A decade of establishing recruitment centres where young men were indoctrinated and trained in guerrilla warfare eventually backfired.
These proxy militants turned their guns against the Pakistani state, forming groups such as the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) to demand the enforcement of Sharia law and the creation of a ‘Greater Afghanistan’ that included Pakistan’s own Pakhtun-majority areas.
From Afghan militancy in the 1980s and 1990s to the Middle East’s sectarian militias and from Africa to Balochistan, modern history is filled with states that created violent proxies, only for them to become existential threats to themselves
For the next two decades, anti-state groups comprising former proxies and their Pakistani allies unleashed waves of brutal attacks across the country. By the time the state fully grasped the devastating consequences of the strategy it had initiated in the 1980s, over 80,000 Pakistani soldiers, police personnel, politicians and civilians had been killed.
This ongoing conflict underscores a devastating strategic reversal, where proxies, once cultivated as a shield for regional interests, became an existential threat, sustained by the very forces Pakistan helped bring to power.
This is but just one example of how proxies often become a problem for their own creators, a phenomenon frequently described as ‘blowback’. History is littered with instances where short-term tactical gains through third party actors led to long-term domestic catastrophes.
In 2009, the American journalist Andrew Higgins wrote that Israel’s early, indirect encouragement of Islamist elements in the Palestinian territories as a counterweight to Yasser Arafat’s secular Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), contributed to the rise of Hamas, which later became Israel’s most formidable local adversary.
These cases demonstrate a recurring geopolitical truth, that when a state breathes life into a proxy, it loses the ability to control the monster’s appetite once the original mission is over. This loss of control often transforms a strategic asset into a primary security threat, as Iraq experienced following the 2003 US invasion. The initial support provided by regional powers such as Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iran to sectarian militias in Iraq eventually resulted in the birth of the Islamic State (ISIS).
In his book ISIS: A History, Lebanese-American academic Fawaz Gerges writes that many of the fighters who formed the backbone of ISIS were seasoned by years of proxy warfare, eventually turning their sights not just on Western targets, but on the regional states that had once turned a blind eye to their radicalisation.
According to British academic Dr Alex Vines, Apartheid-era South Africa funded and trained rebels in Mozambique to destabilise that country. While the rebels successfully crippled Mozambique’s infrastructure, the resulting chaos created a massive refugee crisis and a thriving black market in small arms that flooded back across South African borders, fuelling a rise in violent crime and instability that persisted long after the official conflict ended.
In his book Proxy Warfare, the British political scientist Andrew Mumford writes that the danger of creating proxies lies in the inherent paradox of attempting to outsource national security to autonomous actors, whose interests only temporarily align with those of the sponsor.
According to the American political scientist Tyrone Groh, while states often view these groups as cost-effective tools for projectable power and plausible deniability, they frequently ignore the reality that a proxy is not a precision-guided weapon but a sentient political entity with its own evolving ambitions.
As a conflict progresses, the proxy inevitably seeks to shed its dependence on its creator, often utilising the training, funding and ideological fervour it was gifted by its facilitator to pursue an independent and frequently contradictory agenda. This transforms a strategic asset into a domestic liability, a phenomenon that forces the original sponsor to expend even greater resources to contain the radicalism or violence it once actively cultivated.
Despite the overwhelming historical evidence that proxies eventually turn on their creators, the allure of low-cost, deniable warfare remains irresistible to modern states. According to Mumford, this persistence suggests that, for many governments, the immediate tactical advantages — such as bleeding a rival — outweighs the potential for long-term domestic catastrophe.
Contemporary geopolitics has seen the rise of new sponsors who have adopted these risky strategies with varying degrees of success and instability. India has frequently been accused of utilising proxy groups to maintain leverage in its complex regional environment. More recently, scholarship has examined the manner in which India is leveraging Baloch separatist groups in Pakistan to destabilise its western frontier.
The Baloch separatist Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA), as well as the Islamist TTP, have increasingly been identified by Pakistani authorities and some regional analysts as instruments of Indian strategic interest. The discourse surrounding their Indian-proxy status has intensified following significant escalations in 2025 and 2026.
Perhaps more surprisingly, the UAE has emerged as a significant sponsor of third party actors to project power far beyond its small geographic footprint. According to the conflict analyst Emadeddin Badi, during the Libyan civil war, the UAE provided extensive military support, drone strikes, and funding to Gen Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan National Army (LNA).
According to the researcher Peter Salisbury, in Yemen, the UAE trained and equipped the Southern Transitional Council (STC), a separatist militia that eventually staged military takeovers of key governorates, often clashing with the interests of the UAE’s own coalition partner, Saudi Arabia. UAE has also faced international scrutiny for its alleged role in fuelling the civil war in Sudan by supplying the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) with weapons and logistics, a strategy that has contributed to a massive humanitarian crisis and a surge in regional instability.
According to Groh, the continued reliance on this strategy by states confirms a grim geopolitical truth: the “Frankenstein” lesson is often ignored in favour of immediate strategic depth.
Even as nations witness blowback around the world, the temptation to use proxies as a ‘surgical’ tool for regional dominance remains a primary feature of modern statecraft, despite the near-certainty of future complications.
Published in Dawn, EOS, February 8th, 2026
