Pakistan is in 'open war' with Afghanistan, its defense minister says
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Pakistan and Afghanistan traded cross-border attacks overnight, government officials from both countries confirmed to NBC News on Friday, alleging heavy losses on both sides as Pakistan's defense minister declared "open war" between the two South Asian nations.
Tensions between the two countries, which share a 1,600-mile border, have been simmering for months as they struggle to maintain a Qatar-mediated ceasefire they reached in October, with occasional cross-border skirmishes. Pakistan, which is struggling with a surge in militant attacks since the United States withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021, says the attackers are using Afghanistan as a base.
The Taliban, which returned to power with the U.S. withdrawal, denies harboring militants.
The fighting between Afghanistan and Pakistan threatens to further destabilize a region where terrorist groups such as the Islamic State and Al Qaeda are trying to remobilize.
The latest violence began Thursday night when the Taliban launched what it called retaliatory attacks on military installations in northwest Pakistan.
Residents and government and military officials in Pakistan's border areas said heavy fighting started around 8 p.m. local time (10 a.m. ET), causing panic among residents.
"We had to leave our homes in the middle of the night" as Afghan forces fired rockets and mortar shells from across the border, said Dilbar Khan Afridi, a tribesman fleeing the Tirah Valley, a mountainous region in the Khyber district of Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.
Hours later, Pakistan said it had struck military targets in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, as well as Kandahar and Paktia provinces.
"Pakistani counterstrikes against targets in Afghanistan continue," a Pakistani government spokesperson, Mosharraf Zaidi, said early Friday on X. Earlier, he said Pakistan had conducted the strikes "in response to unprovoked Afghan attacks."
There were conflicting claims from the two sides about the damage and casualties they inflicted on each other.
Pakistan said 133 Afghan Taliban had been killed and more than 200 had been wounded, with "many more casualties" estimated. Zaidi did not specify where the casualties occurred. He also said 27 Afghan Taliban posts had been destroyed and nine had been captured.
Taliban government spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said that eight Taliban fighters had been killed and 11 wounded in Nangarhar province.
He said Afghanistan's earlier attack on Pakistan killed 55 Pakistani soldiers, some of whose bodies were taken to Afghanistan, and that others were captured alive. Nineteen Pakistani army posts were seized, he said.Zaidi denied the claims.
The Taliban said the attacks Thursday night were in retaliation for Pakistan's deadly strikes on Afghan border areas Sunday. Pakistan said that those attacks targeted militants and that at least 70 were killed, while Afghanistan said dozens of civilians were killed, including women and children.
Pakistan Defense Minister Khawaja Asif said Friday that since regaining power in 2021, the Taliban had turned Afghanistan into a "proxy for India" — Pakistan's archrival — and made it a gathering place for militants who started "exporting terrorism."
"Our cup of patience has overflowed," Asif said on X. "Now it is open war between us and you."
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres urged both sides to protect civilians and "to continue to seek to resolve any differences through diplomacy," U.N. spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said.
Zalmay Khalilzad, a former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, also called for a peaceful resolution. Pakistan and Afghanistan have yet to reach a formal agreement after several rounds of peace talks failed in November.
"This is a terrible dynamic that must stop," Khalilzad said on X. "Innocent Afghans and Pakistanis are getting injured or killed."
The latest attacks are a "dangerous escalation" that take the conflict between Afghanistan and Pakistan into "uncharted territory," said Abdul Basit, a senior associate fellow at the International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research at Nanyang Technological University's S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore.
Frustrated by Afghanistan's refusal to disown the Pakistani Taliban, or TTP — a militant group Pakistan blames for much of the violence that is separate from but closely allied with the Afghan Taliban — Pakistan is now attacking not just border areas but cities, and not just militants but the Taliban government that is protecting them, Basit said.
"I think Pakistani patience has run out. It has been four years now," Basit said. "They have been trying to convince them, and they have been picking up dead bodies of their men, their officers, of civilians, and now they have come to a state where they're saying, 'Enough is enough.'"
But the latest attacks have brought the conflict to a new level, he said, and any de-escalation is likely to be temporary "unless a miracle happens."
With the Taliban lacking conventional capabilities such as an air force or missiles, that could mean sending proxies as suicide bombers in Pakistani cities as the end of winter leads into the peak season for attacks, Basit said.
"I think summer has arrived early in 2026, and we are looking at a bloody summer," he said.
The conflict between Afghanistan and Pakistan also has implications far beyond the region, Basit said. Tensions between the two countries strengthen global terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, and they are not likely to contain their attacks to South Asia.
"If they get strengthened, that undermines U.S. homeland security as well," he said.
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The Taliban can not be trusted. Pakistan is now reaping what it has sown for harboring these terrorists for all those years.
your hero apparently thought different when he let them all out of prison in his last term ...
too bad we can't take advantage of this abrahamic culling situation by injecting some radical bible thumpers and radical foreskin pruners in the region into this current rug sniffer dust up ...
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do you mean trump's poison pill with an impossible withdrawal timetable set forth in the final days of a revenge consumed traitor who should have rightly and justly decorated the entrance to arlington 90 days after he left office?
I never said I was a marine, my dad was. he was also a brainwashed teabag moron that repeatedly beat me as a young child, molested my 2 sisters, and cheated repeatedly on my mom. even the VA wouldn't take him, so I let him languish in a nursing home his final years and he died alone. he's in a can stored away waiting for me to decide whether he goes into the sewer or a dumpster, the 2 places where most maga veterans that have reneged on their oaths of service to defend the constitution belong ...
although I had been groomed for the military ever since I could remember, and had passed all the entry tests, I didn't think it was a good idea for me to be put into an armed position of having to fight on the same side as nixonites in the early 70's, especially after taking an oath to defend the constitution, which at the time I interpreted as my patriotic duty to exterminate nixon supporting republicans wherever and whenever I found them ...
maga vets throwing military service or patriotism cards in their defense of trump are simply unamerican demonstrations of the effectiveness of military brainwashing, maga hypocrisy, and laughable ignorance to me ...
in maga's quest to designate americans that they determine are less than, the reality is now obvious it's them ...
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And are you sure about that? Real sure?
I just shook my head when I read this yesterday on my newsfeed. It's not like we didn't see this coming, but I'd hoped the Afghan Taliban could reign in the TTP.
Now, let's toss in the US going to war with Iran and the whole region could destabilize. I wonder how Saudi Arabia feels about all this?
Well... well... well...
dead soldiers and sailors should go a long way in keeping those child molesting allegations out of the news cycle ...
And China supposedly sending Carrier Killer hyper speed missiles to Iran
The axis of evil.
I found out this morning that a friend of mine's son is on one of those carriers and my cousin's son in the army was deployed to the area last week but she doesn't know where yet.
Infighting among the terrorist nations. Not our circus...not our monkeys. Let them work it out among themselves.
Afghanistan must be cursed or something. That place hasn't seen peace in nearly 50 years. It's hard not to feel sorry for them.
I do not feel sorry for them, they have brought the curse upon themselves
Afghan, loosely recognized since 1747, splintered after the first Emir's death. 7 decades of Civil war followed by the British - India invasion in 1838 through 1842.
They fought for the British in WW1eventually becoming independent under the Kahn until 1973 when a coup upset the status quo and it's been chaos ever since, fighting the Soviets from 1979 to 1989.
They are great fighters and good people hampered by their religious beliefs, greed and the usual human failings.
There are millions of innocent Afghanis who just want to live their lives peacefully, take care of their families and not cause anyone any trouble. I feel sorry for them. The same can be said for most of the people of the world.
I don't feel sorry for them. Not in the least. It's all self-inflicted.
the paks have nukes and the taliban have opened their gate to the chinese that apparently are now willing to glow in the dark.
Rare earth, again? /S