Afghanistan Peace CampaignOn 1 October 2026, Pakistan again carried out airstrikes inside Afghanistan, this time targeting areas in Kunar and Helmand provinces. The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) confirmed that at least 10 civilians were killed, most of them children, and nine others were injured. Afghan authorities said three civilian homes were struck. Pakistan, however, said the attacks were based on credible intelligence and targeted hideouts belonging to the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA), claiming that 22 militants were killed.
The latest attacks came only a week after Pakistan’s air force struck ten locations in Kandahar, Paktia and Khost on 24 September, killing four civilians according to Afghan authorities, and just days after earlier strikes in Kunar and Paktika in which the UN confirmed three civilian deaths.
Islamabad has repeatedly described its attacks as deliberate, precise and proportionate, presenting them as necessary responses to militant attacks and threats allegedly originating from Afghan territory. Yet the growing civilian toll and continuing deterioration of Pakistan’s own security situation raise serious questions about that justification. These strikes appear to serve two additional political goals for Islamabad that go beyond its stated counterterrorism strategy against the TTP: avoiding the difficult commitments Pakistan faces under the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement and diverting attention from Field Marshal Syed Asim Munir’s failure to contain the worsening security situation inside Pakistan.
The record of the past year provides enough evidence to judge Pakistan’s air campaign by its results rather than its stated intentions. Between October 2025 and September 2026, Pakistan carried out repeated air and drone strikes inside Afghanistan, targeting Kabul and the provinces of Kandahar, Kunar, Khost, Nangarhar, Paktia and Paktika. The October strikes have now extended that campaign into Helmand as well.
The civilian cost has been severe. Between 26 January and 31 March alone, the United Nations recorded 764 civilian casualties from hostilities between Afghanistan and Pakistan: 372 people killed and 392 injured. By late September, UNAMA said cross-border armed violence had caused more than 1,100 civilian deaths and injuries in Afghanistan during 2026. The October 1 strikes provided another grim reminder of that toll, with the UN once again confirming civilian deaths, most of them children.
The deadliest incident occurred on 16 March, when Pakistani airstrikes hit the Omid Drug Rehabilitation and Treatment Centre in Kabul. UNAMA later verified that at least 269 civilians were killed and 122 injured, most of them patients. Amnesty International found no evidence supporting Pakistan’s assertion that the centre was being used to store weapons, ammunition or for other military purposes and called for the strike to be investigated as a possible war crime. That finding seriously undermined Islamabad’s justification for one of the deadliest attacks of the conflict.
Pakistan’s counterterrorism strategy also appears to be failing by its own stated objective: reducing militant violence at home.
On 18 September, a suicide vehicle bombing and subsequent armed assault struck the Old Police Lines complex in Kohat, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, during Friday prayers. The reported death toll later rose to at least 31, while more than 100 people were injured. It was the deadliest attack on a police facility in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa since the 2023 Peshawar Police Lines bombing. Just before the Kohat attack, an improvised explosive device struck a security forces convoy in Hangu, killing six Pakistani soldiers.
The broader statistics are equally troubling for Islamabad. The Islamabad-based Center for Research and Security Studies recorded 774 violence-linked deaths across Pakistan during the second quarter of 2026. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa alone accounted for 475 deaths—a 53 percent increase from the previous quarter—while Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan together accounted for almost 96 percent of all violence-linked fatalities in the country.
These figures show little evidence that repeated strikes inside Afghanistan have deterred militant violence in Pakistan’s border provinces. The October 1 attacks reinforce that contradiction: Pakistan said it had once again destroyed militant hideouts, yet its previous rounds of cross-border military action have not prevented increasingly deadly attacks inside Pakistan.
What the air campaign has produced instead is a growing civilian toll and deeper hostility among Afghans. Civilian homes, religious institutions and a major medical facility have been among the sites reported hit during the conflict, while Kabul has repeatedly disputed Pakistan’s claims about the targets it says it is attacking.
The air campaign has also unfolded alongside other punitive measures. Pakistan has repeatedly shut border crossings and disrupted trade with Afghanistan, severely restricting the movement of essential goods. It has continued large-scale deportations of Afghan refugees and migrants, while the Durand Line remains a source of deep political disagreement. To many Afghans, these policies are increasingly viewed not as attempts to solve bilateral disputes but as instruments of coercion.
Pakistan’s approach to outside mediation raises further questions about its intentions.
Qatar and Türkiye brokered a ceasefire between Afghanistan and Pakistan in Doha in October 2025. Subsequent talks in Istanbul produced agreement on a monitoring and verification mechanism, but the process failed to produce a durable political settlement. By February 2026, fighting had resumed on a scale that rendered the ceasefire largely meaningless. China has also attempted to reduce tensions between Kabul and Islamabad without producing a lasting breakthrough.
More recently, Türkiye’s intelligence chief Ibrahim Kalın and a senior Qatari security official travelled to Afghanistan and met senior Taliban officials, including the acting defence and interior ministers and intelligence chief. Their discussions included tensions between Kabul and Islamabad. Within days of those diplomatic efforts, Pakistan launched further rounds of airstrikes inside Afghanistan.
That sequence matters. If mediation succeeds, Pakistan and Afghanistan would both have to accept clearer and more reciprocal commitments. Continued military escalation, by contrast, allows Islamabad to act unilaterally while placing responsibility for failed diplomacy on Kabul. This makes the timing of Pakistan’s latest escalation particularly significant.
The wider regional context provides another possible explanation.
In August, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Türkiye signed the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement, establishing a collective-defence arrangement under which an attack against one member is to be treated as an attack against all three. The agreement quickly faced its first serious test.
On 8 September, Houthi forces launched a major series of missile and drone attacks against Saudi Arabia, targeting energy facilities and military sites. The following day, Pakistani Defence Minister Khawaja Asif said that aggression against Saudi Arabia could make the Mecca agreement operational and stressed that Pakistan was bound by its terms.
Pakistan’s rhetoric became even stronger in the following days. Senior Pakistani military officials pledged to stand with Saudi Arabia against aggression, while Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif told the United Nations General Assembly on 25 September that any threat to Mecca or Medina represented a “red line.” The three countries also moved toward consultations among their military chiefs on how to respond to the growing Houthi threat.
Yet strong rhetoric is not the same as committing troops or entering another Middle Eastern war.
That distinction matters because Pakistan has been here before. In 2015, despite intense pressure from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan’s parliament voted to remain neutral in the Yemen war. A decade later, Islamabad again faces the difficult task of balancing its strategic dependence on Saudi Arabia against the enormous political and military risks of becoming directly involved in Yemen.
Afghan officials have drawn their own conclusion from this timing. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid has accused Pakistan of attacking Afghanistan partly to evade responsibilities under the Mecca pact and to divert attention from its domestic political, economic and security failures. Kabul obviously has its own interests in advancing this argument, and the allegation cannot by itself establish Islamabad’s motives. But it cannot simply be dismissed either.
The sequence is striking. As pressure increased on members of the Mecca pact to translate collective-defence promises into action, Pakistan simultaneously intensified military operations on its western frontier. By presenting itself as already engaged in a serious conflict with Afghanistan, Pakistan’s military leadership gains a politically convenient argument against deeper involvement elsewhere while preserving its strategic relationship with Riyadh.
The second motive is domestic and centres on Field Marshal Munir’s repeated inability to reverse Pakistan’s deteriorating security situation.
Military action across the Afghan border offers something that a difficult domestic political settlement does not: immediate images of retaliation, strength and national resolve. Airstrikes can dominate headlines after militant attacks and allow the military to demonstrate that it is “responding.” But retaliation is not the same as strategy.
Pakistan’s security crisis has deep political, social and historical roots, particularly in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the former tribal areas. Bombing targets across an international border cannot substitute for addressing those grievances, strengthening civilian institutions or pursuing the political compromises required for long-term stability.
Nor can repeated airstrikes conceal the basic contradiction in Islamabad’s approach. If nearly a year of military pressure inside Afghanistan has failed to reduce militant attacks in Pakistan—and violence in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is instead increasing—then more of the same cannot credibly be presented as a successful counterterrorism policy.
The events of October 1 show that the cycle described here is no longer merely a prediction. Less than a week after the previous round of Pakistani strikes, Afghan civilians were again killed in cross-border air attacks, even as Islamabad once more declared that militant targets had been successfully eliminated.
The likely pattern is therefore grim but increasingly familiar: militant attacks inside Pakistan, followed by Pakistani strikes inside Afghanistan, followed by civilian casualties, public anger and another round of escalation.
That cycle may provide short-term political cover for Pakistan’s military leadership. It does not provide security for Pakistan, peace for Afghanistan or a path toward resolving the disputes between the two countries.
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Khaama Press.