Pakistan launched two airstrikes in Afghanistan on Monday morning that killed at least eight people, Afghan officials said, escalating tensions between the two countries.
The pre-dawn raids took place in Paktika and Khost provinces in eastern Afghanistan around 3 a.m., Afghan officials said. Three children were among the dead, according to Taliban officials, who condemned the attacks as a violation of Afghan territory.
The strikes came amid a surge in attacks by militants in Pakistan after the Taliban seized power in neighboring Afghanistan. Pakistani officials have blamed militants hosted on Afghan soil and protected by the Taliban leadership for the attacks. Taliban officials have denied these claims.
Zabihullah Mujahid, a spokesman for the Taliban leadership, said in a statement to X that his country “has a long experience of freedom struggle against the world’s superpowers” and “does not allow anyone to invade its territory.”
“Such incidents can have very bad consequences that will be beyond Pakistan’s control,” he added.
The Pakistani action came two days after militants attacked a military outpost in northwestern Pakistan near the border with Afghanistan. In a statement released Monday night, Pakistan’s foreign ministry said the country was conducting “intelligence-based counter-terrorism operations” inside Afghanistan and accused the Taliban leadership of aiding militants operating in Pakistan.
Over the past two years, the statement said, the Pakistani government has “repeatedly urged the Afghan authorities to take concrete and effective action to ensure that Afghan soil is not used as a breeding ground for terrorism against Pakistan.”
“However, some elements among those in power in Afghanistan are actively patronizing the TTP and using it as a proxy against Pakistan,” he added, referring to the Pakistani Taliban, also known as Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP.
The strikes and the statement appeared to signal that Pakistan’s newly elected government will take a tough stance against the Taliban’s leadership in Afghanistan over militant violence that has flared in Pakistan in recent years. That violence has marred a relatively calm period since the country’s army launched a large-scale military operation in 2014 and forced militants across the border into Afghanistan.
After the fall of the US-backed government in Afghanistan in August 2021, the pace of attacks by militants increased in Pakistan, with the attacks themselves becoming more daring. In 2023, the number of attacks by militant groups in Pakistan increased by nearly 20 percent compared to the previous year, according to the Pak Institute for Peace Studies, which monitors extremist violence and is based in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital.
The violence has raised fears of a wider conflict erupting along the historically disputed border, known as the Durand Line, between Afghanistan and Pakistan. It has also fueled growing tensions between Pakistani authorities and Taliban officials, who deny providing support to militant groups operating in Pakistan, including their ally, the Pakistani Taliban.
Pakistani officials have repeatedly called on the Taliban leadership in Afghanistan to rein in the militants. In response, Taliban officials suggested Pakistan address the militants’ demands and offered to mediate the talks.
Pakistani authorities’ frustration with the Taliban leadership appeared to boil over in September, when the Pakistani government announced a policy aimed at deporting more than half a million Afghans residing illegally in Pakistan.
Monday’s strikes appeared to send another message to the Taliban leadership that Pakistan’s military and newly elected government will take a tougher stance against the militants’ violence.
The airstrikes sought to “dispel perceptions of a weak Pakistani state,” said Mohammad Amir Rana, head of the Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies. They also “reflect a unified counter-terrorism policy between the new civilian government and the military,” he added.
While sporadic cross-border shelling by Pakistan has often killed civilians in Afghanistan during the US-led war, Monday’s strikes were the first launched by Pakistan in Afghanistan in nearly two years. The latest strikes, in April 2022, killed at least 45 people in the Khost and Kunar provinces of eastern Afghanistan.
Monday’s strikes were part of the military’s response to the attack on the military outpost on Saturday, a suicide bombing that killed seven members of the Pakistani security forces, according to Pakistan’s foreign ministry. That attack also prompted the army to launch an operation in the area and kill eight militants, according to a statement Monday from the Office of Public Relations Services, the media wing of the Pakistani military.
Pakistani government officials promised a sustained response to the militant attack.
“Pakistan has decided that whoever enters our borders, our homes or our country to commit terrorism, we will respond strongly, regardless of their identity or country of origin,” President Asif Ali Zardari said at the funeral for dead army officers. in the attack.
Safiullah Padshah contributed to the report from Kabul; and Salman Masood from Islamabad, Pakistan.
