Pakistan launched deadly air strikes inside Afghanistan this week, the BBC reported, in an operation described as targeting militant positions that Islamabad holds responsible for cross-border attacks. The strikes killed an unspecified number of people and have reignited tensions between Pakistan and the Taliban-governed Afghan state — a relationship that has deteriorated sharply since the Taliban’s 2021 return to power. The operation follows a period of escalating violence along the Af-Pak border, with Pakistan blaming the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) — a distinct organisation from the Afghan Taliban but one that operates with effective sanctuary inside Afghanistan — for a surge in domestic terrorist attacks. The Afghan Taliban, which has its own sovereignty to defend and its own complicated relationship with the TTP, has condemned the strikes.
The received wisdom
The standard framing in Western security commentary on Pakistan-Afghanistan tensions runs roughly as follows: Pakistan is dealing with a genuine security problem, the TTP has killed hundreds of Pakistani soldiers and civilians, and a government facing its own internal instabilities cannot simply absorb indefinite cross-border attacks without some military response. The Taliban government in Kabul, meanwhile, is an internationally isolated regime with no meaningful leverage except territory and sanctuary, and its condemnations of Pakistani strikes carry little diplomatic weight. The strikes are an unpleasant but understandable exercise of state sovereignty by a nuclear-armed country under genuine threat.
This framing is not entirely wrong. The TTP’s campaign of violence inside Pakistan is real, and any government — right or left, democratic or authoritarian — would face overwhelming domestic pressure to respond. Pakistan’s army, which effectively governs the country’s security policy regardless of the civilian government in Islamabad, has its own institutional logic that makes measured diplomatic responses to cross-border attacks extremely difficult to sustain.
A different read
But the “understandable response” framing obscures a set of structural problems that Pakistan’s air strikes will almost certainly make worse rather than better.
The first problem is that the Af-Pak dynamic has a well-documented history of surgical strikes producing the opposite of their intended effect. The United States carried out hundreds of drone strikes inside Pakistani territory against the TTP and affiliated groups between 2004 and 2018. The strikes killed individual commanders, disrupted specific operations, and provided the US government with a metric of activity — but they did not reduce the TTP’s capacity to regenerate. Every strike that killed civilians — and the Pakistani army’s air campaigns have a documented record of imprecision — produced a new cohort of recruits for the very organisations the strikes were intended to destroy. There is no structural reason to believe Pakistani air strikes inside Afghanistan will follow a different pattern.
The second problem concerns the Taliban’s governing incentives. The Afghan Taliban took power in 2021 on a platform of expelling foreign forces and restoring Afghan sovereignty. For the Taliban leadership to visibly fail to respond to Pakistani strikes on Afghan territory would be a significant domestic political liability — it would validate the critique, from within Taliban ranks as well as from the Afghan population, that the new government is as incapable of defending the country as the republic it replaced. The Taliban therefore faces strong incentives to either allow TTP operations to continue (because visibly suppressing them would look like capitulating to Pakistani pressure) or to escalate the dispute diplomatically and perhaps militarily. Neither option serves Pakistani interests.
The third problem is the regional architecture — or rather, its absence. The 2021 US withdrawal from Afghanistan was sold in part as a transfer of regional security responsibility to the countries most affected. But the regional security architecture that was supposed to fill the vacuum — some combination of Pakistani engagement, Chinese investment, Central Asian diplomacy — has not materialised in any meaningful form. China, which has significant economic interests in both Pakistan and Afghanistan, has been reluctant to play the role of regional security broker that its Belt and Road investment would logically imply. The result is a security vacuum in which Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the TTP are left to conduct their bloody triangular competition with no external framework to manage escalation.
What makes this week’s strikes particularly significant is the timing. The US is currently militarily engaged in the Gulf, European attention is on Ukraine and the Middle East, and South Asian security is effectively an orphaned problem. The BBC’s reporting notes that the strikes have “reignited tensions” — the passive construction understating a situation in which two neighbouring states, one of them nuclear-armed, are in active armed conflict across a shared border, with no functioning diplomatic channel and no external mediator willing to engage. The history of border conflicts between nuclear-armed states — India-Pakistan in Kargil in 1999, the closest contemporary precedent — should instil some urgency in parties currently too distracted to notice.
There is also a humanitarian dimension that tends to drop out of the security framing. Afghanistan under Taliban rule is already experiencing one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world. Air strikes on a civilian population already living under severe deprivation are not neutral security operations; they produce displacement, casualties among non-combatants, and a deepening of the conditions — poverty, disorder, state failure — that generate militant recruitment in the first place.
What to watch
- Whether the Afghan Taliban formally escalates its response — diplomatic, or potentially operational — beyond condemnation.
- China’s posture: Beijing has positioned itself as having influence with both Islamabad and Kabul, and its response (or non-response) to continued Pakistani strikes will reveal the actual limits of its regional broker ambitions.
- Whether the TTP exploits the Pakistani-Taliban tension to reposition itself as a defender of Afghan sovereignty — a narrative shift that could strengthen, not weaken, its recruitment.
- International humanitarian organisations’ access reports from affected border areas: if civilian casualties are significant and undocumented, the accountability vacuum will compound.
— J