Ahmad Shah Abdali invaded India nine times between 1748 and 1767. Every one of them crossed the Punjab twice, going and returning, and the province was the road.
He won at Panipat in 1761 against the Marathas, sacked Delhi, sacked Mathura, took Lahore repeatedly, destroyed the Harmandir twice and killed a large part of the Sikh population at Kup in 1762.
He could not hold the Punjab. Each time the column left, the misls came back out of the Lakhi jungle and the Malwa scrub and took the countryside. By 1765 they were striking coin at Lahore.
The invasions destroyed the Mughal administrative order in the province, destroyed the Maratha claim to it, and cleared the ground for the misls, which is not what they were for.
The Punjabi memory of Abdali is not the Afghan memory of him. In Kabul he is Ahmad Shah Baba, the founder of the country. In Punjab he is the man who filled the sarovar with rubbish.
He tried three times to leave a working administration behind him, appointing his son, then Afghan governors, then local intermediaries. Each arrangement failed within a season of his column leaving.
The plunder, the demolitions at Amritsar, the Vadda Ghallughara and Panipat all belong to those crossings. The province was the corridor and paid for being it.
What the invasions produced in the end was the misls. The administration of the Punjab was destroyed repeatedly and what filled the space was armed bands with local roots.