Tensions that had simmered for months along the shared border of Pakistan and Afghanistan have boiled over once again, after Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban regime announced it had launched cross-border strikes targeting positions inside Pakistan. The assault, which the Taliban confirmed Wednesday, left multiple people injured in Pakistan’s restive southwestern Balochistan province, according to initial reports.
In response to the incursion, Pakistan’s military issued a statement confirming it had intercepted and downed four crude unmanned aerial vehicles launched from the Afghan side of the border. The statement carried a sharp warning, noting that any additional acts of provocation from Afghan territory would be met with a firm and appropriate response. To date, the BBC has not been able to deploy independent observers to verify the details of the Taliban’s strike on Pakistani soil.
This latest exchange of hostilities comes just days after Pakistan launched its own large-scale air operations inside Afghan territory on Sunday, a strike that the United Nations says killed 28 civilians. The Taliban administration in Kabul has put the civilian death toll from Sunday’s Pakistani strikes far higher, at 36, with more than 160 people injured, labeling the operation a “cowardly act” and an “atrocity” that targeted residential civilian homes.
Pakistan has pushed back on the criticism, saying its Sunday operations only targeted militant hideouts in the eastern Afghan provinces of Paktia, Paktika and Kunar. Information Minister Attaullah Tarar confirmed the operation killed 29 militants, framing the strike as a necessary response to recent deadly terrorist attacks targeting Pakistani civilians. Like the Taliban’s claims, Pakistani casualty figures have not been independently verified by third-party media.
The renewed clashes break a period of tentative calm that followed a bilateral ceasefire agreed by both sides in October, which ended weeks of violent back-and-forth hostilities. Cross-border violence has plagued the region for much of this year, with intermittent clashes and air strikes leaving dozens, and in some cases hundreds, of people dead. In February alone, border skirmishes killed dozens of people on both sides. A March Pakistani strike on a Kabul drug rehabilitation centre left hundreds dead, according to local reports. As recently as early June, another round of Pakistani air strikes killed 26 militants; the Taliban government confirmed at the time that 13 additional civilians, most of them children, also died in the operation.
At the core of the long-running dispute between the two neighbors is Pakistan’s consistent accusation that the Taliban administration harbors militant groups that carry out fatal attacks inside Pakistan. The Taliban has repeatedly rejected these claims, and in turn accuses Islamabad of launching unprovoked strikes that intentionally kill innocent Afghan civilians, a charge Pakistan denies, maintaining it only targets militant infrastructure and personnel along the shared border.