Pakistan’s Three Front War: ‘Correlation Crisis’ Is Reshaping South Asian Risks?

Operation Epic Fury was designed to neutralise Iran. It is also, inadvertently, destabilising the world’s only nuclear-armed Muslim-majority state.

In the lexicon of financial economics, a “correlation crisis” describes the moment when assets that were supposed to move independently suddenly collapse together. Portfolio diversification fails precisely when you need it most. Pakistan is now living through the geopolitical equivalent. Three supposedly distinct security challenges — open war with Afghanistan, the fallout from the US-Israeli strikes on Iran, and a domestic sectarian eruption — have converged simultaneously, creating a compounding risk that no amount of diplomatic hedging can diversify away. For Israel, understanding this chain reaction is not optional. It is essential.

Start with the war that nobody is watching. On 26 February — one day before Epic Fury commenced — Pakistan declared “open war” on Afghanistan, launching Operation Ghazab Lil-Haq (“Righteous Fury”). According to Pakistan’s Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), Pakistani jets struck 46 locations across Afghanistan, including Bagram Airfield and army headquarters in Kandahar. Islamabad claims 130 Taliban border posts destroyed and 171 armoured vehicles eliminated. The Taliban counterclaims captured Pakistani military bases. Pakistan’s own Telecommunication Authority has warned of AI-generated fabrications polluting the information space, including unverified claims of drone strikes on Islamabad and attacks on nuclear facilities.

The irony is bitter. For decades, Pakistan cultivated the Afghan Taliban as an instrument of “strategic depth” against India. That paradigm is now dead. The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) found sanctuary in Afghanistan after the 2021 US withdrawal and has escalated attacks with devastating effect. A suicide bombing at a Shia mosque in Islamabad on 6 February killed 32 and wounded over 170, collapsing a fragile Saudi-Turkish-brokered ceasefire. The TTP has allegedly become a vector of strategic depth for India against Pakistan — a reversal that Islamabad’s security establishment is only now absorbing.

It is on Pakistan’s western border with Iran, however, where Epic Fury’s implications are most acute — and most directly relevant to Israeli strategic interests. Balochistan province, Pakistan’s largest and most restive, straddles the Iran-Pakistan border. The IRGC has historically contained the Jaish al-Adl insurgency on the Iranian side. Any sustained degradation of IRGC capacity — which Epic Fury is explicitly designed to achieve — creates a security vacuum that Baloch armed groups will rush to fill.

This is not speculation. Following the Twelve Day War between Israel and Iran in June 2025, Hyrbyair Marri, the London-based head of the Free Balochistan Movement and a figure Pakistan accuses of links to the Baloch Liberation Army, presented a charter envisioning an independent “Greater Balochistan” encompassing territory from both Pakistan and Iran. The current conflict will amplify these centrifugal forces dramatically. As The Diplomat reported this week, if Iran’s grip on Sistan-Balochistan weakens, the province becomes a staging ground for intensified attacks into Pakistani Balochistan — further destabilising an already deteriorating security environment.

Here is why Israel should pay attention: Pakistan’s Defence Minister Khawaja Asif claimed on 3 March that the “true objective” of Epic Fury is to extend Israeli influence to Pakistan’s borders, describing a “joint agenda” involving Afghanistan, India, and Israel. This is conspiratorial overreach. But it reveals genuine anxiety in Islamabad — and conspiracy theories, once embedded in the political discourse of a nuclear-armed state, have consequences that outlast the crises that spawn them.

Then came the streets. Within hours of Khamenei’s killing, Pakistan erupted. According to Associated Press reports, at least 34 people were killed in protests nationwide. Demonstrators stormed the US Consulate in Karachi, breaching the outer gate and smashing windows. In Islamabad, up to 8,000 protesters gathered near the diplomatic enclave. In Skardu, protesters set fire to UN offices.

Pakistan is home to one of the world’s largest Shia populations — over 20 per cent of 250 million people. For many, Khamenei was not merely Iran’s political leader but a spiritual figure of profound significance. The fury is not performative. It is existential.

The precedent haunting Pakistani security planners is November 1979, when a mob set fire to the US Embassy in Islamabad — killing two Americans and two Pakistani staff — after Ayatollah Khomeini falsely broadcast that the US and Israel were behind the seizure of Mecca’s Grand Mosque. The current situation is more volatile by orders of magnitude: Pakistan is simultaneously fighting a foreign war, enduring a border security collapse, and confronting the largest Shia mobilisation in its recent history. Any crackdown on protesters risks deepening sectarian fissures in a country where Sunni-Shia violence has historically been devastating.

Beijing, meanwhile, is watching its flagship investments burn at both ends. The $60 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor runs from Gwadar port in Balochistan to the Khunjerab Pass. Both extremities are now engulfed in conflict. The Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline, planned through Balochistan’s most volatile stretch, is effectively dead — Pakistan is diverting funds to its military campaign, and no investor will finance pipeline construction in an active war zone.

But China’s response reveals its limits. As Foreign Policy noted on 3 March, Beijing is an “unentangled superpower” — willing to sell missiles to Tehran and share satellite intelligence, but unwilling to provide the security guarantees its investments require. For Israel, this is both opportunity and risk. Epic Fury degrades one of the pillars of China’s regional infrastructure diplomacy: a weakened Iran cannot serve as a reliable corridor state for Chinese trade routes. The risk is that Beijing may eventually conclude its sunk costs demand a more assertive security posture — potentially including Chinese security personnel in Balochistan, a prospect that Baloch leaders have already warned India’s External Affairs Minister about.

Looming over everything is the nuclear dimension. Pakistan possesses approximately 170 warheads, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and maintains a doctrine of “full-spectrum deterrence.” The Geopolitical Monitor has argued that Epic Fury represents a turning point in non-proliferation — a shift from persuasive compliance to coercive enforcement, with the unmistakable lesson that only nuclear weapons provide genuine regime security. That lesson resonates nowhere more powerfully than in Islamabad, which already has the bomb but now faces an existential neighbourhood.

A nuclear-armed state fighting a two-front war while experiencing widespread domestic unrest is, by definition, a scenario that concentrates minds in every capital from Washington to Tel Aviv.

Pakistan’s diplomatic response has been a masterclass in strategic ambiguity. In January, Prime Minister Sharif joined Trump’s Board of Peace at Davos. At Munich in February, Asif told France 24 that Israeli recognition was “not on the cards” — but added “maybe” in the future. Reports have emerged of Pakistan exploring normalisation with Israel, even as Asif simultaneously describes Zionism as “a threat to humanity.” Pakistan condemned Israel’s attack on Iran but did not mention the United States. It accepted American praise for fighting the Taliban while seeking to maintain ties with a post-Khamenei Iran. This is not walking a tightrope. It is standing on several simultaneously — and the wind is picking up.

What Pakistan faces is not a sequence of manageable crises but a correlation crisis — a simultaneous failure of every hedging strategy Islamabad has relied upon for decades. The Taliban were supposed to provide strategic depth; now they are the enemy. Iran was supposed to be a manageable neighbour; it is collapsing. China was supposed to be an unconditional patron; it offers words but not swords. The sectarian compact that held Pakistan’s Muslim population together is fracturing under the weight of Khamenei’s assassination.

Israeli readers may be tempted to view Pakistan’s agony as a distant sideshow. That would be a mistake. This is a nuclear-armed state of 250 million people, the seventh-largest military by active personnel, positioned at the intersection of the Middle East and South Asia, now experiencing the most dangerous convergence of security threats in its 79-year history. If this trajectory holds — and every indicator suggests it will — expect CPEC to be functionally dead within twelve months, the Balochistan insurgency to metastasise across the Iranian border, and Pakistan’s diplomatic balancing act between Washington and Beijing to collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. Jerusalem should be gaming Pakistan scenarios in its post-Epic Fury planning with the same rigour it applies to Tehran, Damascus, and Beirut — because a destabilised nuclear-armed state on Iran’s eastern border is not a second-order problem. It is the problem that shapes all the others. The correlation crisis has begun. It will not resolve itself neatly.