This month marks five years since Kabul plunged into a chaotic frenzy and Taliban fighters entered the Afghan capital virtually unopposed, two decades after their removal by US-led forces. They arrived carrying assault rifles and rocket launchers as well as a catalogue of promises: security would be restored, political opponents would be forgiven, women’s rights would be respected within their interpretation of Islamic law and Afghan territory would not be permitted to threaten other countries.

The less said about how dramatically they broke those promises, the better. The Taliban has, in essence, created a theocratic police state; driven women and girls from education and much of public life; crushed political dissent and failed to convince Afghanistan’s neighbours that armed groups are no longer operating from its territory.

A UN monitoring report recently described the TTP as one of the largest terrorist groups operating from Afghanistan, challenging Taliban claims that terrorist organisations have no meaningful footprint in the country.

Against all this, the sight of former Afghan army commander Lieutenant General Sami Sadat, in military uniform beneath Afghanistan’s republican tricolour, carries great significance. In announcing an armed campaign against the Taliban and appealing for international political and material support, he is attempting to demonstrate that the constitutional order overthrown in August 2021 has not entirely surrendered its claim to the country.

Afghanistan United Front has now announced Operation Muharib. Since Kandahar and Helmand belong to the political and military heartland from which the Taliban built its power, even limited resistance there challenges the regime’s preferred portrayal of opposition as an exiled enterprise.

The announcement also coincides with a discernible increase in anti-Taliban activity. The newly-formed Sepahian-e Mihan briefly overran the Yaftal-e Payeen district headquarters in Badakhshan last month, in what was reported as the first temporary loss of an Afghan district centre by the Taliban since its return to power.

General Sadat is therefore launching more than a military campaign. He is attempting to revive a political proposition that the Taliban may possess Kabul, its ministries and the weapons abandoned during the withdrawal, yet it does not possess an electoral mandate or the freely expressed consent of the Afghan people.

On Monday, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif congratulated the PML-N leadership in the light of unofficial results from the second phase of elections in Azad Jammu and Kashmir wherein the party had won 14 of 18 seats, adding to its nine victories in Mirpur a week earlier. The remaining phase, covering Poonch constituencies, is scheduled for August 10.

Amid the fog of an extraordinarily difficult campaign, one political fact is becoming harder to evade: Azad Kashmir’s future cannot be negotiated exclusively at the barricade.

The past few months have seen the Joint Awami Action Committee build its appeal upon grievances that are neither invented nor trivial. Electricity tariffs, wheat prices, uneven development, elite privilege and the alienation of ordinary Kashmiris from decision-making have supplied it with a constituency. The old political class should not flatter itself that the turnout in any single phase has settled those grievances. It has not.

Yet anger at a system does not confer a licence to suspend every democratic avenue within it.

The JAAC did not place an electoral alternative before the public. Instead of fielding candidates or publicly endorsing a parliamentary vehicle for its programme, it called for a boycott–consequently surrendering the one platform where laws are actually made.

The contradiction is especially stark over the 12 refugee seats. These seats account for more than a quarter of the 45 directly-elected Assembly positions, and there is plainly a legitimate political argument over representation in a territory where their existence can shape who governs. Such a question deserves far more than official evasions and tired assurances. But it is also a constitutional question. The Supreme Court has ruled that abolition requires an amendment and the executive cannot simply tear up the arrangement at the demand of a march.

This is where JAAC’s politics has become dangerously self-defeating. It seeks a constitutional outcome while treating the Assembly as illegitimate, uses a boycott to weaken the very forum needed to change the law, and has allowed shutdowns to become its principal language. In a news conference held on Friday, ISPR Director General Lt Gen Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry said that “Kashmiris hold a special place in Pakistan’s heart” and accused vested interests in India of attempting to create unrest.

Roads closed in Rawalakot or Muzaffarabad do not merely inconvenience politicians. They trap patients, choke the earnings of transporters and shopkeepers, empty hotels, disrupt supplies and turn daily life into a hostage of political brinkmanship.

The government says it accepted 36 of JAAC’s 38 demands. It should publish a clear implementation record for those commitments, explain what remains pending and place the refugee-seat question before the incoming Assembly through a serious all-party constitutional process. Nevertheless, the JAAC must decide whether it seeks reform or merely leverage. A rights movement earns authority by enlarging democratic space, not by asking citizens to abandon the vote and accept the blockade as politics.