Explosions shook central Kabul on the night of October 9, close to Abdul Haq Square and several government buildings. The next morning Afghanistan’s Defense Ministry publicly blamed Pakistan for strikes in Kabul and in Paktika, calling them “unprecedented” and warning of consequences.
Islamabad did not confirm an attack. Its army spokesman instead repeated a familiar line: militants staging assaults in Pakistan enjoy sanctuary on Afghan soil.
Taliban spokesmen first downplayed the Kabul blast, then officials framed it as a Pakistani strike. The fog has not cleared, but the outlines are plain: someone tried to reach into Kabul to hit the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP).
Further sharpening the politics involved, the blasts hit the Afghan capital on the very day India signaled it would reopen a full embassy in Kabul. The Taliban regime wants normal ties abroad; it also wants to avoid a rupture with like-minded militants. That straddle becomes harder when neighboring Pakistan believes Kabul shelters its foes and proceeds to act on that belief.
The claim racing around Pakistani and Afghan social media was that the target was Mufti Noor Wali Mehsud, the TTP’s emir since 2018. Taliban officials have rejected that, saying Mehsud was neither in Kabul nor elsewhere in Afghanistan. No evidence has been made public to prove his death. In the absence of confirmation, his fate remains uncertain.
Mehsud matters. Born on June 26, 1978, in South Waziristan’s Mehsud heartland, he is both cleric and commander: a madrassa-trained jurist, and veteran of 1990s Afghan Taliban campaigns who rose through the TTP as qazi (judge), Karachi chief, and deputy to Mehsud leaders. He is also a prolific writer. His 2017 history, “Inqilab-e-Mehsud,” mixes movement narrative with hard-line doctrine and includes an explicit claim that TTP operatives orchestrated the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in 2007.
After a U.S. drone strike killed Mullah Fazlullah in June 2018, the TTP’s central shura chose Mehsud as chief, returning the movement’s leadership to the Mehsud tribe. Under Mehsud the TTP pulled itself together after years of splits and defections. The group rebuilt cross-border lines of movement after 2021, focused its violence more squarely on security forces, and used steady propaganda to tap local grievances in the former tribal areas. A recent analysis by ACLED, a U.S. conflict monitoring organization, argued that the TTP has re-emerged as one of Pakistan’s most serious internal threats, exploiting weak local governance and uneven policing to carve space in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s borderlands. In short, the group is again contesting the state’s writ along the frontier with Afghanistan.
The immediate backdrop to the midnight Kabul blasts was a bloody morning inside Pakistan. Eleven soldiers were killed in an ambush in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, an attack the TTP claimed. Pakistan’s military responded with raids in Orakzai and elsewhere, saying 30 militants were killed. Pakistan’s defense minister told Parliament that cross-border “sanctuaries” would be struck if needed.
That is the logic of “decapitation.” The goal is to strike commanders believed to be directing or enabling attacks, raise the cost of sanctuary, and buy time for internal security measures. Whether the Kabul operation happened as alleged or not, it fits a pattern Pakistan has used before with the help of U.S. drones. Islamabad has trumpeted past killings of TTP chiefs – Baitullah Mehsud in 2009, Hakimullah Mehsud in 2013, and Fazlullah in 2018 – as tactical wins. Each did dent TTP capability and morale; none changed the conflict’s structure. The network adapted, found new leaders, and continued to operate from Afghan depth.
If Mehsud has been killed, the TTP will feel the loss. He brought three assets hard to replace: tribal legitimacy in South Waziristan; clerical authority that lent religious cover to violence; and a broker’s knack for corralling quarrelsome commanders and foreign allies. Without him, factional stress would grow, especially between the Mehsud core and non-tribal leaders. Islamic State Khorasan Province, an eager poacher of unhappy cadres, would try to harvest defectors.
If, on the other hand, he survived, expect tighter security around the leadership, deeper cover for lieutenants, and retaliatory attacks to restore deterrence. Either way, the attempted strike still matters: it exposes TTP logistics in Afghanistan and leaves Kabul to defend its claim that Afghan soil is not used against neighbours even as blasts hit the capital.
However, there is a wider lesson in this. Research on leadership targeting is mixed: it can hurt some groups, especially early in their life cycle, but it is rarely decisive for older, bureaucratized, religious movements with deep local support. Studies collated at the Harvard Belfer Center find the effect of decapitation diminishes with time; after about two decades, it may have no measurable impact on a group’s survival. Other works likewise stress that resilient organizations with bureaucracy, communal backing, and reliable resources, such as the TTP, tend to absorb the shock.
Drawing on a dataset of hundreds of cases, Audrey Kurth Cronin, an expert on militant groups, argued that terrorist groups end in several main ways: by joining politics, through policing and intelligence pressure, by losing popular support and sanctuary, by fracturing, or (less often) through leadership decapitation. Removing leaders can produce short-term gains, but it does not by itself solve the underlying enablers of a movement. Where groups rely on local protection, cross-border havens, criminal finance, and a narrative of grievance, killing the leader without changing those conditions tends to yield tactical wins and strategic stasis. That is a fair description of Pakistan’s past experience with the TTP.
So, the answer to the question at hand is twofold. Who is the militant said to have been killed? A Mehsud tribesman with a jurist’s pen and a commander’s record, elevated in 2018 to steady a battered movement. Would his death end the TTP? No. It would hurt the group, perhaps sharply, but the war that matters is not only a hunt for leaders. It is the slower work of shutting cross-border routes, fixing policing and courts in Pakistan’s periphery, and pressing Kabul to curb militants in practice, not just in statements. Until those pieces move together, decapitation will remain a tactic – useful at times, but not a strategy. The TTP will find space to operate, with or without Mufti Noor Wali Mehsud.