Islamabad’s cross-border airstrikes on Afghanistan a calculated deflection from its own domestic failure
As families in eastern Afghanistan broke their Ramadan fasts, Pakistani airstrikes tore through the provinces of Nangarhar and Paktika reducing homes, a madrassa, and ordinary lives to rubble. Islamabad claimed 70 militants were eliminated. Kabul counted 18 civilians dead, among them women and children.
The Afghan government’s spokesperson, Zabihullah Mujahid, dismissed Pakistan’s militant death toll as fiction. A local tribal elder was blunter: “Those killed were neither Taliban, nor military personnel they were poor people who suffered greatly.”
India did not stay silent. The Ministry of External Affairs condemned the strikes in unambiguous terms, calling them “another attempt by Pakistan to externalise its internal failures” a pointed diagnosis of a nation deflecting its political crises outward through military theatre.
Kabul swiftly summoned Pakistan’s ambassador and warned of consequences, framing the strikes as a “flagrant breach of territorial integrity.” Afghanistan’s airspace, its sovereignty, and its mourning families now sit at the centre of a dangerous regional confrontation one ignited not by war, but by a neighbour’s desperation.
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