Pakistan and Afghanistan on brink of open war after retaliatory airstrikes

Pakistan launched airstrikes against several major Afghan cities, including the capital of Kabul and the city of Kandahar, as Islamabad’s defense minister declared the two nations are in a state of “open war.”

The widespread strikes were carried out in retaliation for an Afghan attack on Pakistani border posts Thursday night. Fighting reportedly continues near the Torkham border crossing, where Pakistani mortar shells have allegedly struck civilian areas, including a refugee camp.

Casualty figures remain disputed as both sides provided conflicting accounts. Pakistan claims to have killed 133 Taliban officials and wounded more than 200 others.

The Afghan Ministry of Defense countered those figures, claiming that 55 Pakistani soldiers were killed and several others were captured alive. Islamabad has denied those claims.

Tensions between the neighboring nations have simmered for months. Pakistan accuses the Taliban government in Afghanistan of harboring militant groups, including the Pakistani Taliban (TTP) and Baloch separatists, who use Afghan territory to launch attacks inside Pakistan.

A ceasefire agreement brokered by Qatar between the two sides collapsed last year.

The Pakistani Defense Ministry’s recent declaration of "open war" marks a perilous escalation and a definitive collapse of Islamabad’s post-2021 strategic calculus. Following the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, Pakistan had bet on a Taliban-led government to secure its western flank and provide "strategic depth" in its long-standing rivalry with India. That gamble has now fundamentally failed.

At the heart of the crisis is the contested Durand Line and the symbiotic, yet volatile, relationship between the Afghan Taliban and the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). Despite shared ideological roots, the authorities in Kabul have shown either an inability or a profound unwillingness to rein in TTP militants operating from Afghan soil. For Islamabad, the persistent cross-border insurgency has transformed from a manageable friction point into an existential security threat. By extending kinetic operations toward Taliban power centers like Kabul and Kandahar, Pakistan is signaling that its diplomatic patience has reached its limit.

The implications of this shift threaten to destabilize the broader South and Central Asian corridors. A full-scale conventional conflict would not only trigger a massive humanitarian crisis but also risk turning the border regions into an ungoverned sanctuary for global terror franchises. Regional stakeholders are already on high alert: Beijing remains deeply concerned over the security of its multi-billion-dollar investments in the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), while New Delhi is closely monitoring the potential for a regional power vacuum. Any further expansion of hostilities risks drawing in external actors, complicating an already fractured geopolitical landscape.