Pakistan launched air strikes and sent ground troops into Afghan border provinces on Sunday, killing at least twenty-eight civilians and injuring a further forty-nine, according to UNAMA, the United Nations mission in Afghanistan. Women and children were among the dead; most casualties were concentrated in Mandokhail, a village in Paktia province. Afghanistan’s Taliban government put the civilian death toll at thirty-six and said more than 160 had been injured — figures the BBC notes it could not independently verify. Pakistan’s information minister said twenty-nine militants had been killed in an operation responding to “recent terrorist attacks against innocent people.” The strikes came one day after three members of Pakistan’s Sindh Rangers paramilitary force were killed in a suicide attack in Karachi; Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, a splinter faction of the Pakistan Taliban (TTP), claimed responsibility. The operation targeted what Islamabad described as militant hideouts in Paktia, Paktika and Kunar provinces. Al Jazeera reported similar casualty figures.
The received wisdom
The liberal internationalist framing of Pakistani cross-border operations is simple: they are disproportionate, they kill civilians, and they undermine any prospect of stability in a region that has endured half a century of conflict. When a Pakistani strike on a Kabul drug rehabilitation centre in March killed hundreds, the international reaction was horror followed by near-silence — a silence that emboldens further operations. The Taliban government’s description of Sunday’s strikes as a “cowardly act” and an “atrocity” is, in this reading, at least factually accurate even if the source is not sympathetic.
Humanitarian advocates would add that the broader Pakistan-Afghanistan border conflict — involving dozens of deaths in intermittent clashes through early 2026 — represents exactly the kind of festering regional war that the international community should be pressing both sides to resolve through diplomacy rather than artillery. A ceasefire agreed last October has collapsed. International engagement is minimal. The people paying the price are Afghan villagers.
A different read
Understanding Pakistan’s actions requires taking its security predicament seriously, even when the response is clearly disproportionate. The TTP and its affiliates have killed hundreds of Pakistani civilians and military personnel over the past decade. Islamabad has long accused the Taliban government in Kabul of harbouring TTP leadership — an accusation Kabul denies but that has been substantiated by UN monitoring reports linking senior TTP commanders to Afghan territory. The suicide attack in Karachi the day before Sunday’s strikes was the immediate trigger, but the underlying dynamic has been building for years.
This is a structural tragedy rather than a simple story of Pakistani aggression. When the United States withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021 and the Taliban resumed power, it did not merely change the Afghan government. It removed the principal external actor with leverage over both Kabul’s behaviour toward Pakistan and Pakistan’s behaviour toward Kabul. American drone strikes against TTP targets in Afghanistan, however legally and ethically contested, provided a form of deterrence and a channel of communication. That channel no longer exists. Pakistan now conducts its own strikes — less precise, less targeted, and with no accountability mechanism beyond UNAMA statements that nobody acts upon.
The deeper problem is that the international community, having disengaged from Afghanistan almost entirely after the Taliban takeover, has no tools left for the second-order crises that disengagement produces. The October 2024 ceasefire between Pakistan and Afghanistan — which has now fallen apart — was reached without significant international mediation. It lacked verification mechanisms, confidence-building measures, or any third-party guarantor with leverage over either side. When it collapsed, as unsupported bilateral ceasefires in conflict zones usually do, there was nowhere for either side to appeal.
Compare this with the elaborate architecture the international community built around, say, the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict in 2020-2023, with the OSCE Minsk Group, EU monitoring missions, and direct Russian and Turkish involvement. None of that architecture ultimately prevented renewed fighting either, but it created friction, imposed costs, and slowed the tempo of violence. On the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, there is no friction at all. Pakistan calculates that international condemnation will be perfunctory — and it is right. The Taliban government calculates that it can absorb Pakistani strikes without consequence — and it is right too. The only people for whom the calculation is wrong are the inhabitants of Mandokhail.
There is a conservative argument — not for ignoring civilian casualties but for clarity about what creates them — that excessive moralism substituting for strategic engagement is itself a form of negligence. Western commentators who are rightly horrified by the civilian death toll in Paktia should ask what policy framework they would recommend for stabilising a border between a nuclear-armed state and a Taliban-governed country with no central-government monopoly on force, in a region where the US has chosen to have minimal footprint. Saying “Pakistan should stop bombing” is not a policy. It is a statement of preference. What is missing is an international engagement strategy that might actually reduce the underlying pressure that produces the bombing.
What to watch
Whether UNAMA’s documentation of civilian casualties prompts anything beyond a statement from the UN Secretary-General is the first test. In March, when hundreds died in the Kabul drug centre strike, international reaction was brief. A pattern of impunity is being established.
Pakistan’s domestic politics are the key variable. The Pakistani military’s legitimacy depends partly on its ability to respond to domestic terrorist attacks. With the Karachi bombing fresh, the political pressure to demonstrate toughness is acute. Watch whether the TTP uses the strikes as a recruitment tool — attacks of this kind consistently generate more insurgents than they eliminate.
The October 2024 ceasefire’s collapse also matters for regional stability. Both China and Gulf states have economic interests in stabilising the border; whether any of them step in as mediators — or whether they, too, simply look away — will shape what happens next.
— J