Tensions between neighbors Pakistan and Afghanistan are running high as the Pakistani Defense Minister Khawaja Asif said this week that his country plans to continue launching cross-border attacks as part of a new military operation to curb terrorism. The comments mark a notable shift for Pakistani officials who, until now, had only admitted to one such cross-border strike in March.
“We won’t serve them with cake and pastries. If attacked, we’ll attack back,” Asif told the BBC.
Pakistan has experienced a surge in violence since the Pakistani Taliban, or Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP), a close ally of the Afghan Taliban, unilaterally ended a ceasefire with Islamabad in November 2022. Last year alone, more than 700 attacks killed nearly 1,000 people.
The Pakistani government accuses the Afghan Taliban of providing a safe haven to the TTP. In recent years, Islamabad has made various attempts to contain the TTP, including talks, erecting a border fence between Pakistan and Afghanistan, and applying pressure on the Afghan government to stop assisting the militant group. This included the expulsion of over 500,000 Afghan refugees last October, with a second phase to expel another 800,000 commencing earlier this month.
Yet experts tell TIME that Pakistan has little power to stem the violence that overwhelmingly afflicts its two border regions with Afghanistan. That’s because Islamabad can no longer leverage the wartime support it offered the Taliban during the U.S. war in Afghanistan to help rein in the TTP. “Pakistan finds itself in a predicament largely of its own making—the Taliban leadership that it supported throughout much of the 20-year insurgency in Afghanistan is now sheltering militant groups targeting Islamabad,” says Joshua White, a professor in international affairs at Johns Hopkins University.
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