Published: 04:09 PM, 24 June 2026
Afghanistan: Death comes again from the sky
In the early morning of 10 June 2026, Pakistani military aircraft launched a series of cross-border airstrikes on eastern Afghanistan, targeting areas in Khost, Kunar and Paktika. According to the Taliban government’s chief spokesperson, Zabihullah Mujahid, the strikes killed at least thirteen people: eleven children, one woman and an elderly man. Fourteen other women and children were reportedly wounded.
Pakistan acknowledged the strikes, but denied the Afghan account of civilian casualties. Islamabad claimed that the operation had targeted militant infrastructure along the border and killed twenty-six members of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan. Information Minister Attaullah Tarar described the airstrikes as “precise and calibrated,” conducted against militant hideouts and safe havens in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region. He rejected Afghan reports of civilian deaths as Taliban propaganda.
This is the familiar language of states that have lost control of both their borders and their narrative. Every strike is precise. Every target is militant. Every dead child is propaganda. Every village is a hideout, until the bodies become too many to explain.
The June 10 strikes were not an isolated incident. They were part of a continuing cycle of escalation that began in February, when Pakistan launched airstrikes across eastern and south-eastern Afghanistan. Those strikes reportedly killed at least eighteen civilians, including women and children. On 26 February, Afghan forces responded with cross-border attacks on Pakistani military positions under Operation Radd-ul-Zulm, “Repelling Oppression.” The same day, Pakistan escalated further with Operation Ghazab-lil-Haq, “Righteous Fury,” a name that tells us more about Pakistan’s political psychology than about its military objectives.
Since then, the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier has become a theatre of undeclared war. Islamabad insists that the Afghan Taliban are sheltering the TTP and allowing them to use Afghan soil for attacks inside Pakistan. The Taliban government denies the accusation, repeating the now-standard formula that it does not permit any individual or group to use Afghan territory against another state. Between the two statements lies the corpse of Pakistan’s old strategic doctrine.
For decades, Pakistan treated Afghanistan not as a neighbour but as strategic depth, a buffer, a laboratory and a rear base. It cultivated jihadist networks, patronised the Taliban, celebrated the fall of Kabul in 2021 and imagined that the new order in Afghanistan would serve Pakistani interests. Instead, Islamabad has inherited the blowback of its own architecture. The Taliban it once helped nurture are no longer obedient clients. The militant ecosystem Pakistan once considered manageable has become unmanageable. The border Pakistan tried to control through proxies has become porous, violent and politically humiliating.
This is the central irony of the current conflict. Pakistan is not merely fighting the TTP. It is fighting the afterlife of its own policies.
The human cost is already staggering. According to a 12 May 2026 report by the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, at least 372 civilians were killed and 397 injured in cross-border clashes between Afghanistan and Pakistan during the first three months of the year. UNAMA recorded ninety-five incidents of civilian harm in that period. Pakistani armed forces were responsible for civilian casualties in ninety-four cases, while Afghanistan’s Taliban authorities were blamed in one. Pakistani airstrikes accounted for nearly two-thirds of the civilian casualties; the remaining deaths and injuries were caused mainly by cross-border artillery and mortar fire.
The most horrifying incident came on 16 March, when Pakistani airstrikes targeted the Omid Drug Rehabilitation Hospital in Kabul. According to UNAMA, at least 269 civilians were killed and more than 122 injured in that attack. If those figures do not provoke international outrage, it is only because Afghan civilians have long been treated as statistics in someone else’s security doctrine.
The June 10 strikes therefore belong to a pattern: Pakistan acts militarily across the border, claims precision, denies civilian harm, and presents the operation as part of a necessary counterterror campaign. The vocabulary is clean. The consequences are not. Children in Khost, Kunar and Paktika do not die from vocabulary. They die from bombs dropped by aircraft sent by a state that claims to be defending stability while exporting violence.
Islamabad calls its broader strategy Azm-e-Istehkam, “Resolve for Stability.” It is a revealing name. Pakistan’s ruling establishment has always preferred grand martial slogans to political introspection. Stability, in its vocabulary, rarely means justice, accountability or institutional reform. It means coercion. It means border strikes. It means operations with religiously loaded names. It means treating symptoms with firepower while refusing to confront the disease.
That disease is the militarisation of Pakistani policy itself.
Pakistan’s security establishment has spent decades building, tolerating, protecting or manipulating militant actors when they served strategic purposes, then rediscovering counterterrorism when those same actors escaped control. This cycle has repeated itself with almost tragic precision: proxies are useful, then embarrassing; assets become threats; sanctuaries become accusations; denial becomes doctrine. The same state that once lectured the world about understanding the Taliban now bombs Afghan territory because the Taliban will not—or cannot—control the TTP to Islamabad’s satisfaction.
The result is a dangerous regional spiral. On 18 March, both Pakistan and the Taliban government agreed to a temporary pause in cross-border violence for Eid al-Fitr, after requests from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Türkiye and other Islamic countries. The pause lasted from midnight on 18/19 March until midnight on 23/24 March. Three days later, on 26 March, Pakistan’s Foreign Office declared that the temporary pause in Operation Ghazab-lil-Haq had concluded and that the operation would continue “until its objectives are achieved.”
The phrase is deliberately open-ended. What are the objectives? The destruction of TTP sanctuaries? The coercion of the Taliban government? The restoration of Pakistani deterrence? The performance of strength for a domestic audience increasingly aware that the army can no longer guarantee security at home? Islamabad does not say, because ambiguity is useful. It permits escalation without accountability.
In April, Afghanistan and Pakistan held informal peace talks in Urumqi, China. Between 1 and 7 April, representatives of both sides reaffirmed their commitment to the UN Charter and the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence. They agreed to avoid actions that could further escalate or complicate the situation. It was the sort of language diplomats produce when they need to prove that a process exists, even if events on the ground are already mocking it.
While the talks continued, the border kept burning. Between 1 April and 9 June, at least ten incidents of cross-border firing were reported along the 2,600-kilometre frontier. Three civilians and fifty-eight terrorists were reported killed, while eleven civilians and more than eighty terrorists were injured. Then came the June 10 airstrikes, adding thirteen more civilian deaths according to Kabul’s account.
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif made Pakistan’s position explicit on 19 May during a visit to the Command and Staff College in Quetta. Operation Ghazab-lil-Haq, he said, would continue with full resolve against alleged terrorist proxies operating from Afghan territory. The message was unmistakable: any attack inside Pakistan attributed to Afghanistan-based groups could trigger a military response across the border.
This is escalation dressed as deterrence. It may satisfy Rawalpindi’s need to look decisive, but it does not solve the underlying problem. Airstrikes may kill militants. They may also kill children. They may temporarily disrupt networks. They may also deepen Afghan hostility, strengthen anti-Pakistan sentiment and make cooperation with Kabul even more difficult. They may reassure a domestic audience for a day. They may create new enemies for a generation.
Pakistan’s dilemma is real. The TTP is a serious threat. Pakistani civilians and security personnel have been killed in attacks. No state can be expected to ignore cross-border militancy. But Pakistan’s right to defend its citizens does not include the right to erase Afghan civilians from the moral equation. Counterterrorism does not become lawful or legitimate merely because a minister calls it precise. A state that demands international sympathy for terrorism on its own soil cannot dismiss dead Afghan children as propaganda when its own aircraft cross the border.
This is where Pakistan’s credibility collapses. It wants the world to accept its account when Pakistanis are killed, but refuses independent scrutiny when Afghans are killed. It demands that Kabul control militants, but has spent decades denying its own role in cultivating militant infrastructure. It invokes sovereignty when criticised over Balochistan, Pashtun areas, Pakistan-administered Kashmir or political repression at home, but violates Afghan territory when it decides sovereignty has become inconvenient.
The Taliban government is hardly a credible defender of human rights. Its rule in Afghanistan has been brutal, repressive and especially catastrophic for women and girls. But Pakistan’s conduct cannot be excused by pointing to the Taliban’s illegitimacy. Civilian life does not become expendable because the government ruling over it is odious. Afghan children do not become less dead because Kabul is governed by the Taliban.
What June 10 shows is the emergence of a new and unstable regional reality. Pakistan no longer controls the Taliban. The Taliban no longer needs to obey Pakistan. The TTP is exploiting the space between them. China is trying to manage the diplomatic fallout. Gulf states are calling for pauses. Islamabad is escalating militarily. Kabul is denying responsibility. Civilians are dying.
And behind all of it stands the failure of Pakistan’s strategic culture. For years, Rawalpindi believed it could instrumentalise Islamist militancy, manipulate Afghanistan, contain blowback and sell itself to the world as both firefighter and arsonist. That model is now collapsing. The fire has crossed the Durand Line, and Pakistan is bombing the ruins of its own illusions.
The June 10 airstrikes should therefore be understood not simply as a border incident, but as a symptom of strategic bankruptcy. Pakistan is attempting to impose through airpower what it can no longer secure through influence. It is trying to bomb its way out of a political failure. It is calling this stability.
But stability built on denial is not stability. It is postponement. Stability built on civilian casualties is not counterterrorism. It is the production of future wars. Stability built on violating borders while invoking sovereignty is not strategy. It is hypocrisy with aircraft.
The dead of Khost, Kunar and Paktika will almost certainly be absorbed into the machinery of competing claims: militants or civilians, precision or propaganda, deterrence or aggression. But the larger truth is already clear. Pakistan’s Afghan policy has come full circle. The jihadist ecosystem it once cultivated has turned against it. The Taliban victory it once welcomed has become a strategic embarrassment. The border it once imagined as depth has become a front line.
And once again, civilians are paying the price for Pakistan’s oldest habit: mistaking coercion for policy.
>> Source: Stringerasia
