There is something almost surreal about Pakistan’s latest wanted notice for Masood Azhar, the founder and current leader of the anti-India Salafi-Jihadist group Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM). When you open the Federal Investigation Agency’s 2026 “Red Book” of most-wanted terrorists, the JeM founder appears as expected. The document mentions his crimes and a reward for information leading to his arrest. Reportedly, this bounty has risen from five million Pakistani rupees in 2021 to seven million today. Pakistani authorities supposedly have no idea as to where these terrorists live. They are meant to be on the run, and the law is supposed to be hunting them.

The Red Book curiously lists Azhar’s address. Azhar is mentioned as the “Head of Jaish-e-Mohammed” who lives in Kausar Colony, Model Town, Bahawalpur. The document also links Azhar to three Counter Terrorism Department cases registered in Punjab between 2020 and 2021. This raises an important question: If Pakistani authorities know Azhar’s address, what is stopping them from arresting him?

The US Treasury also has Azhar’s address. It has long associated Azhar with Kausar Colony in Bahawalpur, and JeM’s infrastructure in the city has been an open secret for years. After Indian strikes hit JeM’s headquarters in the Markaz Subhan Allah complex, Bahawalpur, in May 2025, Azhar himself confirmed that ten members of his family died in the strikes. None of this proves precisely where Azhar is sleeping tonight, but that is not really the point. The striking fact is that Pakistan’s own law-enforcement bureaucracy continues to describe Azhar as a Pakistan-linked militant leader with a Pakistani residential trail, domestic terrorism cases and an organization that Islamabad itself officially proscribes.

Yet Pakistan’s diplomatic story has increasingly placed him elsewhere. In September 2022, Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry reported it had raised Azhar’s alleged presence in Afghanistan with the Taliban government and possessed information suggesting he was there. Islamabad reportedly asked Kabul to locate and arrest him in Nangarhar or Kunar provinces in eastern Afghanistan. The Taliban government disputed that account, as it has always done when Islamabad outsources terrorism charges to Kabul. The Pakistani diplomatic narrative blames Afghanistan for terrorism even when Islamabad’s own counterterrorism files continue to point toward Punjab.

Any information leading to Azhar’s location and subsequent arrest is consequential to South Asia’s Jihadist landscape. He founded one of the region’s most notorious terrorist organizations, which earned sanctions from the United Nations in 2001. In 2019, the UN Security Council sanctioned Azhar personally as the leader of JeM. Under Azhar’s command, JeM has conducted repeated attacks against India, including the 2001 attack on the Indian parliament and the 2019 vehicle-borne improvised explosive device attack that killed 40 Indian paramilitary personnel in the Kashmir valley.

JeM’s continued survival has long illustrated a central problem in Pakistan’s counterterrorism policy, where Islamabad has often fought militant organizations that directly threaten the Pakistani state far more aggressively than groups whose violence is directed outward, particularly toward India and Afghanistan.

Pakistan’s counterterrorism problem is duplicity

The US State Department’s terrorism reporting has noted that groups including JeM and Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) — another anti-India Jihadist group — continued to operate from Pakistani territory even as Pakistan conducted significant counterterrorism operations against other militant organizations. Thousands of Pakistani civilians and security personnel have died in terrorist and insurgent attacks. Indeed, Pakistan’s security forces have conducted costly campaigns against organizations such as the Pakistani Taliban.

The problem, therefore, is not that Pakistan never fights terrorism. Simply put, the problem is Pakistan’s selective enforcement of counterterrorism campaigns. Islamabad draws a clear distinction, developed over decades within parts of the security establishment, between militants viewed as existential threats to Pakistan and militants considered useful, tolerable or at least manageable instruments of state policy that can be directed against neighbors to further Pakistani interests.

David Coleman Headley, who conducted surveillance for the 2008 Mumbai attacks, testified in a US court about contacts between LeT and members of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). American prosecutors documented his testimony concerning an alleged ISI officer who helped finance and direct reconnaissance connected to the Mumbai attacks. Pakistan is not formally designated by Washington as a “State Sponsor of Terrorism,” and it would be legally inaccurate to claim otherwise. But decades of evidence regarding relationships between elements of the Pakistani security establishment and externally focused militant groups make the broader accusation of state-enabled terrorism impossible to dismiss.

This support of terrorism has landed Pakistan in trouble with the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) — an intergovernmental body established in 1989 by the G7 countries to combat money laundering and terrorist financing. In June 2018, the FATF placed Pakistan on its Grey List, which is officially termed “Jurisdictions under Increased Monitoring.” The FATF did so because of long-standing concerns regarding persistent and consistent concerns about terrorist financing in Pakistan. This put enormous pressure on Pakistan’s fragile economy. In October 2022, Pakistan exited the Grey List.

FATF should look beyond the paper trail

The FATF will hold its next plenary in Paris from October 26 to 30. While the body has not publicly announced that Pakistan faces a specific Grey List decision at that meeting — and it would be premature to claim otherwise — the country’s compliance record remains the central issue. The FATF acknowledged genuine Pakistani reforms when it concluded that Islamabad had addressed the deficiencies outlined in its action plans, effectively ending four years of increased monitoring. However, the FATF’s demands were never supposed to end with better Pakistani paperwork.

The FATF specifically required Pakistan to demonstrate that terrorist-financing investigations and prosecutions targeted senior leaders and commanders of UN-designated terrorist organizations, and that financial sanctions against those networks were effectively implemented. That distinction matters because states under international scrutiny have strong incentives to produce visible evidence of compliance. These can include proscription lists, terrorism cases, frozen accounts, wanted notices and increasingly impressive bounties. Such measures can become empty gestures if the organizations and their leaders can still operate freely in these states.

Azhar’s new wanted poster poses a simple question that Western governments and FATF members should ask Pakistan: What happens after the poster is printed? Islamabad says Azhar is wanted. Its own files identify his organization, Pakistani criminal cases and a Bahawalpur residential trail. Its diplomats suggest he is in Afghanistan while Kabul says he is not.

After more than two decades of JeM operating in the region, the international community should no longer measure Pakistani counterterrorism policy by the sophistication of its documentation. The relevant metric is whether internationally designated terrorist leaders are located, prosecuted, stripped of organizational infrastructure and prevented from regenerating their networks. Otherwise, the Red Book risks becoming exactly what critics suspect it is — not evidence that Pakistan has dismantled its old proxy terrorist architecture — but another page in the paper trail designed to deceive the world that it is trying.

[Kaitlyn Diana edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.