Airstrikes by Pakistani warplanes inside Afghanistan have intensified tensions in recent days in an already volatile region. Once-close ties between Pakistan’s leaders and the Afghan Taliban have frayed, and violent cross-border exchanges have becom…
Officially, the Pakistani government has been tight-lipped about the strikes in Afghanistan on Dec. 24. But security officials privately said that the Pakistani military had targeted hide-outs of Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, a militant group also know…
The security officials said that several top militants from the Pakistani Taliban had died in the airstrikes, which came days after 16 Pakistani military personnel were ambushed and killed in a border district. The Taliban regime in Afghanistan said…
Ofcials in Pakistan have not ofcially commented on those attacks. But they reported that they had
thwarted a cross-border incursion by militants they said had been facilitated by Taliban authorities.
The airstrikes were the Pakistani military’s third major operation on Afghan soil since the Taliban’s
return to power in August 2021, and the second in 2024 alone.
Pakistani ofcials accuse the Taliban of providing sanctuary to the TTP, a charge that Taliban leaders
deny. Pakistani ofcials defend the incursions into Afghanistan as essential to curbing TTP attacks
on Pakistani citizens and soldiers, as well as on Chinese nationals involved in projects under the Belt
and Road Initiative, Beijing’s infrastructure investment program.
“This is a red line for us: If the TTP operates from there, it is not acceptable for us,” Prime Minister
Shehbaz Sharif of Pakistan said Friday during a meeting with government ministers, referring to
Afghanistan. “We will defend Pakistan’s sovereignty at every cost.”countries, said Syed Akhtar Ali Shah, a former senior police ofcer who served in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, a province bordering Afghanistan.
Pakistan’s government must show its people that it will respond to attacks, even as the country faces
multiple crises that hinder its ght against terrorism, including weak governance and economic
constraints.
After a Pakistani Taliban attack on a border post in September 2023, Pakistan launched a crackdown
on Afghans living in the country illegally, deporting more than 800,000 people to Afghanistan.
Pakistan also tightened trade restrictions on landlocked Afghanistan to pressure the Taliban.
For their part, the Taliban are caught between Pakistan’s demands to take action against the TTP and
strong domestic incentives not to do so.
By resisting the entreaties of a more powerful neighbor, the Taliban stoke nationalist sentiments
among Afghans, helping the group project an image as Afghanistan’s legitimate rulers rather than as
the insurgents they once were, Shah said.
The Taliban may also fear that a crackdown on the TTP — with which they share jihadi beliefs and
deeply rooted bonds — could divide the militant group’s ranks. That could push ghters toward the
Islamic State group’s afliate in Afghanistan, which poses a growing threat to the Taliban
administration.
Pakistan’s frustrations with the Taliban represent a sharp turnabout. When the Taliban took control
of Afghanistan three years ago, Pakistan initially considered it a strategic victory.
The U.S. withdrawal precipitated the fall of Ashraf Ghani’s administration in Kabul, which the
Pakistani government had seen as supportive of India, Pakistan’s archrival In addition, Pakistan was optimistic that the new Taliban regime would rein in the TTP. Those hopes
rested on the notion that the Taliban would reward Pakistan for the covert support it provided during
the U.S.-led war.
But the Taliban’s rise instead revitalized the militant group, which has about 6,000 ghters. The
Pakistani Taliban capitalized on newfound resources, including advanced U.S.-made weapons seized
during the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, and the release of hundreds of ghters from Afghan
prisons.
Emboldened, the group escalated its attacks inside Pakistan, targeting security and police forces in
particular. The year that just ended was the deadliest in a decade for Pakistani civilians and security
forces, with 1,612 fatalities in 444 terrorist attacks, according to the Center for Research and Security
Studies, a research group in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital.
Experts said that Pakistan had made a strategic miscalculation with the Taliban.
“Expectation is not a strategy,” said Abdul Basit, a senior associate fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School
of International Studies in Singapore. A clear, written agreement, Basit said, “should have been
established with the Taliban regarding the TTP from the outset.”
The two countries have taken some steps to try to improve relations. On the same day as the latest
airstrikes, a newly appointed Pakistani special envoy, Mohammad Sadiq, was meeting in Kabul with central Afghanistan, distancing them from the border region.
In Pakistan, antipathy toward the Pakistani Taliban has run especially deep since 2014, when the
group killed more than 145 people, mostly children, in an attack on a military-run school in
northwestern Pakistan.
A military crackdown that Pakistan intensied after the school attack drove many Pakistani Taliban
leaders and members, along with ordinary displaced families, into Paktika province in eastern
Afghanistan. That province is where the Pakistani military focused its airstrikes last week.
Pakistan has been linked to several operations in Paktika and neighboring Afghan provinces in
recent years in which key TTP militants were killed. Among them was Omar Khalid Khorasani, a top
commander, who died in a roadside bombing in 2022.
The Pakistani Taliban attacks have provided fuel in the political inghting that has racked Pakistan
in recent years.
The Pakistani military has sharply criticized a key decision during the tenure of Imran Khan, the
former prime minister who was ousted in April 2022 after falling out with the military and now is in
prison.
In 2021, Pakistani ofcials engaged in peace talks with the TTP that were facilitated by the Taliban
after their return to power. The yearlong negotiations, which included a brief ceasere, ultimately
failed