Why and how do terrorism-sponsoring states weaponise their complicity through controlled confession? The case of Pakistan

The Pashtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM), a grassroots civil rights collective, accuses the Pakistan Army of instrumentalizing Islamist militancy in the Pak-Afghan borderlands to extract lucrative “counterterrorism rents” at the catastrophic expense of local populations. To support its claims, PTM mobilises a series of confessions issued by top-ranking military and civilian officials, which acknowledge the state’s longstanding patronage of terrorist outfits. While the confessing state remains unaccountable, PTM faces intensified repression. To unpack this paradox, the paper employs Michel Foucault’s theorisation of confession as a technology of statecraft while engaging PTM’s counter-discourse as an empirical entry point. Analysing seven state confessions gathered during two years of fieldwork, the essay challenges the liberal assumption that confession constitutes a gesture of moral reckoning that leads to accountability and justice. Instead, it demonstrates how confessions are deployed to perpetuate the state’s geopolitical utility and rent-seeking diplomacy abroad, while pre-empting and neutralising dissent at home. Yet these confessions also create unintended discursive openings that PTM seizes to rearticulate counterterrorism apparatus as a profitable political economy. By attending to insurgent discourses from a militarised periphery, the article deepens our understanding of how truth-telling, rather than undermining state violence and impunity, can be co-opted to reproduce it.