Pakistan’s Info Minister Attaullah Tarar was express: Operation Ghazab Lil Haq would resume with higher depth the second any cross-border assault, drone strike, or terrorist incident occurred inside Pakistan in the course of the vacation interval. On Monday, because the ceasefire approached its midnight deadline, Deputy Prime Minister and Overseas Minister Ishaq Dar reaffirmed that Pakistan’s method had not shifted. “Pakistan stays firmly dedicated to eradicating the menace of terrorism,” he stated.
Earlier ceasefires haven’t held. The one brokered by the identical mediators in October 2025 collapsed inside days – Istanbul peace talks broke down on October 29, and Pakistan threatened to “obliterate” the Taliban authorities shortly after. Saudi-led mediation in December 2025 additionally failed.
What has modified is the dimensions of the battle. Pakistan declared “open struggle” towards Afghanistan. Late February introduced Operation Ghazab Lil Haq — air and floor strikes hammering Taliban positions throughout Kabul, Kandahar, Paktia, Nangarhar, Khost, and Paktika, probably the most vital cross-border navy motion because the Taliban retook energy in 2021. Pakistani officers now declare greater than 684 Taliban fighters killed, over 912 injured, 252 posts destroyed, and 229 tanks, armored automobiles, and artillery weapons taken out of motion.
The Taliban dispute almost all of these figures. Pakistani airstrikes have hit Kabul repeatedly, Afghan forces have despatched drones and mortars again throughout the border, and the United Nations has tallied not less than 289 Afghan civilian casualties because the combating started — 104 of them kids, 59 ladies.
The worst single day got here on March 16. A Pakistani airstrike hit the Omid Dependancy Remedy Hospital in Kabul whereas sufferers had been inside. Afghan authorities counted greater than 400 useless. The UN put the confirmed determine at 143 or extra. Pakistan stated it had struck solely navy infrastructure. The next day, mass funerals moved via the capital.
Aparna Pande, Senior Fellow for India and South Asia on the Hudson Institute, tells The Cipher Temporary that the ceasefire sample ought to shock nobody.
“Traditionally talking, these ceasefires have by no means been sturdy,” she says. “Either side has merely used the pause in combating to rebuild and replenish earlier than the following spherical.”
With the truce now expiring and either side’ core grievances solely unresolved, the query urgent analysts is whether or not Islamabad has a practical end-state in thoughts, or whether or not open struggle with a nuclear-armed state’s most risky neighbor has develop into a coverage that Pakistan can begin however not end.
A relationship Pakistan can now not handle
The roots of this battle run straight via Islamabad’s personal strategic selections. For many years, Pakistan cultivated the Afghan Taliban as a buffer towards Indian affect, the doctrine of “strategic depth,” conceived within the Eighties, envisioned a pliant Kabul as an extension of Pakistani safety house.
That calculation has collapsed solely. The rapid set off for the present struggle is the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, the militant group that Islamabad accuses Kabul of sheltering and enabling. TTP assaults inside Pakistan have dramatically escalated since 2021, and Pakistan’s Military Chief Area Marshal Asim Munir stated throughout a March 4 go to to troops in South Waziristan that peace can solely exist if the Taliban “renounced their help for terrorism and terrorist organisations.”
The Taliban, in the meantime, have by no means acknowledged the Durand Line, the colonial-era border Pakistan regards as sacrosanct, and that dispute alone makes any sturdy political settlement almost unimaginable to realize.
Aref Dostyar, Director of the Afghanistan Program on the College of Notre Dame and former senior Afghan diplomat, tells The Cipher Temporary that Pakistan’s navy logic is backfiring on itself.
“If the aim is to weaken the Taliban, Pakistan’s aggression is backfiring as a result of it’s triggering a ‘rally around the flag’ impact,” he says. “Even Taliban opponents are being cornered to decide on between supporting the present regime’s stance towards Pakistan or showing to justify international aggression. Most are selecting the previous.”
The strategic paradox right here is stark: Islamabad is now at struggle with an actor it as soon as created, sustained, and anticipated to serve its pursuits indefinitely. Pande is equally direct: any sturdy settlement would require either side to maneuver off entrenched positions that the opposite has proven no willingness to desert.
The Afghan Taliban would want to strain their ideological ally, the TTP, to ease assaults inside Pakistan. For its half, Pakistan would want to simply accept that “it can’t fight an rebel motion via standard means and therefore provide some financial and different incentives,” Pande says, underscoring that “there’s a cause a compromise has not occurred as either side are sticking to their hardline positions.”
Dostyar additionally questions Islamabad’s underlying aims.
“Pakistan cites the TTP as justification for ‘open struggle,’ however its true goals are unclear,” he analyzes. “Mapping the precise areas of Afghan targets might reveal an agenda that contradicts their said counter-terrorism targets.”
The Iranian dimension
The struggle in Afghanistan, nonetheless, is just not occurring in isolation. On February 28, coordinated United States and Israeli strikes on Iran killed Supreme Chief Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and triggered a quickly increasing Center East battle. For Pakistan, already engaged in open combating on its northwestern border, the implications of Iranian instability on its southwestern frontier are extreme.
Pakistan’s western frontier with Iran runs for 565 miles, slicing via territory the place either side of the border — Pakistan’s Balochistan and Iran’s Sistan-Balochistan — have lengthy hosted ethno-separatist insurgencies. Roughly $1.4 billion in items moved between the 2 nations in 2024-2025, most of it via barter offers and casual crossings reasonably than something approaching a proper commerce structure.
Iranian gasoline and meals have saved Balochistan’s markets from seizing up solely because the Afghan border shut in October. That lifeline now runs via a struggle zone, and the border districts of Balochistan, amongst Pakistan’s poorest, would really feel any disruption most acutely.
Afghanistan shares its personal 572-mile border with Iran, and the stakes for Kabul are equally acute. Iran hosts an estimated three to 5 million Afghan refugees and migrant employees. It serves as Afghanistan’s major remaining commerce route to the ocean by way of Chabahar port, a lifeline that turned crucial after Pakistan closed its border in October. With that route now disrupted by the struggle, Afghanistan faces a twin financial squeeze that has no near-term decision.
Pande factors out that the safety calculus round Balochistan is shifting quick.
“Teams just like the BLA have used Iranian and Afghan Baluchistan to function inside Pakistani Baluchistan,” she observes.
The BLA, the Balochistan Liberation Military, is probably the most highly effective of a number of rebel teams working within the province, a banned separatist group designated a international terrorist group by the USA that seeks to carve an impartial Balochistan from Pakistani territory and has escalated sharply in current months, finishing up coordinated bombings, prepare hijackings, and mass casualty assaults.
“Instability inside Iran will be useful to those teams as it might make it simpler for them to maneuver throughout the borders and in addition simpler to seek out entry to navy gear,” Pande continues, stressing that the image cuts each methods. “Instability inside Iran and the Iranian state’s give attention to the western frontier means the Pakistani state might discover it simpler to focus on these Baluch teams, understanding that Iran’s consideration is diverted.”
Pakistan can be residence to an estimated 15 to twenty p.c Shia inhabitants, one of many largest exterior Iran. Violence erupted in Pakistani cities following information of Khamenei’s loss of life. Jihadist networks, together with the Islamic State Khorasan Province, al-Qaeda, and the TTP, have been making an attempt to develop their footprints in Balochistan, and instability in Iran would divert Pakistani safety assets towards border administration, creating a gap for these networks to develop.
In Balochistan’s Makran coast area, residence to the Chinese language-operated deep-sea port of Gwadar, native officers have suggested residents to keep away from Iranian territory solely.
A nuclear state on three fronts
Then there’s India. Final Might, the 2 nuclear-armed neighbors fought their most intense conflict since 1971. India launched Operation Sindoor on Might 7, putting 9 websites linked to militant teams Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba in Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir — the primary time India had struck inside Pakistan’s Punjab province because the 1971 struggle.
When reviews surfaced that Pakistan had summoned its Nuclear Command Authority, the physique that controls selections over its nuclear arsenal, the disaster took on a special character altogether. Analysts learn it as a calculated sign. Pakistani officers later stated no such assembly occurred. Fears of escalation to the nuclear threshold drove United States authorities involvement, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio working the telephones earlier than President Trump introduced the ceasefire on social media on Might 10.
The intervention produced a fragile truce but left the underlying tensions solely intact. Delhi has held the Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance since then, a transfer Islamabad has referred to as an act of struggle. The Indus basin provides roughly 80 p.c of Pakistan’s irrigated agricultural land and underpins a sector that accounts for almost 1 / 4 of GDP.
Dostyar doesn’t mince phrases about the place all this leaves Islamabad.
“Pakistan is going through a failing financial system, political instability, and inner separatist actions,” he asserts. “Within the face of all this, it is a gigantic gamble to have interaction in a number of exterior conflicts. It might be a ‘distraction’ technique, nevertheless it poses a big regional danger, notably concerning the safety of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.”
Pande agrees the navy believes it will probably handle all three frontiers for now, partly due to what she describes as confidence in Washington’s backing and a mutual protection association Pakistan concluded with Saudi Arabia in September 2025, which stipulates that any aggression towards both nation is handled as aggression towards each. Nonetheless, she flags a structural weak point within the data marketing campaign that sustains it.
“The message being despatched by the highest brass is that occasions which are occurring are a conspiracy towards Pakistan, in an try to rally the individuals to help the state and its actions,” she says.
That Washington has left the mediation work solely to Ankara, Doha, and Riyadh is itself telling and consequential. As Dostyar places it, “Washington’s obvious absence from mediation is probably going pushed by both inadequate consciousness about what is actually occurring or a strategic selection as a result of competing priorities.” In plain phrases, the USA is both not paying shut sufficient consideration or has determined this hearth is another person’s to place out.
That calculation carries prices. A nuclear state combating one neighbor, frozen out by one other, and watching a 3rd descend into struggle on its doorstep is precisely the type of cascading regional breakdown that tends to drag Washington again in no matter its intentions.
The safety of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal below simultaneous strain on three fronts, the chance of jihadist networks exploiting the chaos in Balochistan, and the potential for an escalation that pulls in India — all of those are American nationwide safety equities, whether or not Washington chooses to have interaction or not.
The Eid pause now expiring provides diplomats the narrowest of home windows. Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey all referred to as this week for a path towards a sustainable settlement. Whether or not the structural circumstances for such an settlement exist is one other matter solely. Pakistan’s preconditions — TTP sanctuaries dismantled, militant leaders handed over — are non-starters for a Taliban authorities that has staked its home legitimacy on refusing to be seen as compliant with Islamabad’s calls for. The Taliban’s personal precondition, recognition of Afghan sovereignty over the Durand Line, is equally unacceptable to Pakistan’s navy institution.
The underlying drivers are unchanged.
As Pande frames it, the core drawback is just not a scarcity of mediation however a scarcity of political will on either side.
“The Afghan Taliban believes they’re now not beholden to Pakistan, they’re in energy, and they’re reluctant to behave towards their ideological ally, the TTP,” she provides. “Pakistan believes that because it helped the Afghan Taliban regain energy, the latter must be grateful to Pakistan, ought to preserve Pakistan’s pursuits in thoughts and may tame the TTP. The important thing problem for Pakistan is the continuing battle with its former proxy.”
The Cipher Temporary is dedicated to publishing a spread of views on nationwide safety points submitted by deeply skilled nationwide safety professionals. Opinions expressed are these of the creator and don’t characterize the views or opinions of The Cipher Temporary.
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