Afghanistan Peace CampaignScott Briscoe
Security Management
A publication of SIS International
19 March 2026
The world is focused on the west side of Iran and the surrounding region, where the oil-rich Persian Gulf states are. On the east side of Iran, however, lie Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the escalating conflict between those two nations bears monitoring.
On 16 March, Pakistan bombed a building in the Afghanistan capital of Kabul not far from the Afghanistan’s largest airport, killing at least 143 people. The building lies within a facility that used to be a U.S. airbase before the United States pulled out of Afghanistan in 2021. The building housed a drug rehabilitation center, and reportedly it was treating at least 200 patients when it was hit.
The attack is the latest escalation in the conflict between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Pakistan was once friendly with Afghanistan’s Taliban leaders—even helping them establish their rule in the country in the 1990s—but that has changed in recent years. Pakistan said Afghanistan supported a group known as the Pakistani Taliban, which has perpetuated a number of terrorist attacks on Pakistan over the last several years.
In October 2025, Pakistan strikes against what it said were terrorist operation centers in Afghanistan led to open skirmishing on the Pakistani-Afghan border.
Peace talks initiated by Qatar, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia did not have the desired effect. In late February 2026, Afghanistan bombed Pakistani military bases on the border, which precipitated Pakistani airstrikes on military targets in increasingly urban areas, and led Pakistan Defense Minister Khawaja Mohammad Asif to say on X that it was now “open war” between the two countries.
After the strike on the rehabilitation center, Pakistan publicly maintained it has only targeted military and terrorist targets. However, growing international outrage at the 16 March attack has led Pakistan to say it will pause airstrikes for the Eid al Fitr celebrations marking the end of Ramadan. Afghanistan said it, too, would honor that pause.
The geopolitical implications of the conflict are wide-reaching. Pakistan, which joined the number of nations with nuclear weapons in the 1990s, has close economic and defense ties with China and Russia. Afghanistan also has close economic ties to China, and Russia is one of the few countries that has recognized the Taliban as Afghanistan’s official government. However, an international affairs expert in Pakistan, Huma Baqai, told German news outlet DW that the attack on the former U.S. military base—which U.S. President Donald Trump said in 2021 had such strategic importance that it was a grave mistake to abandon it—had symbolic meaning. She said it showed “Pakistan definitely has Washington’s approval to continue its operations.”
In the same article, the DW quoted Afghanistan researcher Sardar Rahimi:
“The attack on Bagram Airfield is like a ‘yes’ to Trump,” Rahimi said, which sends the signal that Pakistan is ready to take on security responsibilities in Afghanistan that Washington has not pursued since its withdrawal. The whole thing is part of “a larger geopolitical puzzle” in which Pakistan is trying to position itself in the region in line with U.S. interests, he added.
The conflict also has implications in Pakistan’s continual conflict with India. Pakistan has said the Pakistani Taliban supports Indian terrorists in the Kashmir region. In that same X post where Pakistani Defense Minister Asif used the term “open war,” he said Afghanistan’s Taliban had become a proxy for India.