Pakistan's military said Thursday that it had killed 22 suspected militants in fresh air attacks on targets inside Afghanistan's eastern border provinces, the latest breach of a truce that has collapsed and been patched back together repeatedly over the past year without ever stopping the underlying fight.
Military officials in Islamabad said the strikes hit camps used by fighters they link to a surge of bombings and ambushes inside Pakistan, though Pakistan's government did not immediately detail the exact locations beyond the border region bordering Afghanistan's Kunar and Paktika provinces. Afghanistan's Taliban administration, which has disputed Pakistani casualty figures after nearly every previous round of strikes, had not issued its own death toll by Thursday evening.
A ceasefire that keeps collapsing
The exchange is the newest flashpoint in a conflict that erupted in earnest in October 2025, when overnight clashes along the roughly 2,600-kilometer frontier killed dozens of Afghan civilians by Kabul's count and more than 20 Pakistani soldiers by Islamabad's, in the worst fighting between the neighbors since the Taliban retook power in 2021. Qatar brokered an immediate ceasefire in Doha that October, with Turkish officials joining follow-up talks in Istanbul meant to lock in a lasting truce, respect for each side's territorial sovereignty and a joint mechanism to police violations.
That framework has never fully held. By February, Pakistan's defense minister said the country was effectively in "open war" with Afghanistan after a new round of airstrikes reached Kabul itself. Fighting flared again in March within days of a separate ceasefire ending, and Pakistani forces reported killing 29 militants in a June border operation that Kabul said had instead killed dozens of civilians. As recently as late September, the two sides were trading blame for brief cross-border fire even as their delegations sat across from each other at another round of talks in Turkey.
No resolution in sight
At the center of the dispute is Islamabad's long-standing accusation that Afghanistan's Taliban government shelters and tacitly tolerates the Pakistani Taliban, a separate militant movement known as the TTP, which has intensified bombings and ambushes against Pakistani security forces over the past three years. Kabul rejects the charge, arguing Pakistan is using its stronger air force to punish Afghan civilians for a domestic insurgency it has failed to contain, and has in turn accused Islamabad of sheltering Islamic State-linked fighters to destabilize Afghanistan.
Pakistan's information ministry, responding to the most recent border fire before Thursday's strikes, said in a statement that "firing was initiated from the Afghan side, to which our security forces responded immediately in a measured and responsible manner." Afghan officials have offered mirror-image accounts after nearly every incident, accusing Pakistani forces of firing first and of using Afghan civilian casualties to justify a broader air campaign.
Qatari and Turkish mediators, who invested significant diplomatic capital in last October's ceasefire and the Istanbul follow-up talks, have continued to press both governments to return to the negotiating table rather than let the frontier slide back into the kind of sustained fighting seen in February. But with each side blaming the other for every violation and neither willing to concede the core complaint — TTP sanctuary on one side, indiscriminate bombing on the other — diplomats involved in the process have struggled to move past short-lived pauses in the shooting.
For residents of the border districts in Kunar, Paktika and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the practical effect has been a year of intermittent displacement and loss, with no round of talks yet producing a mechanism that outlives the next incident. Pakistani and Afghan officials are expected to remain in indirect contact through Qatari and Turkish channels in the coming days, though neither government has announced a date for a new round of formal negotiations following Thursday's strikes.
