Intense clashes erupted along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border on Saturday night, after an attack by the Afghan Taliban on Pakistani military posts led to a heavy exchange of fire and reportedly left dozens of soldiers dead.
According to officials, Afghan troops opened fire on Pakistani army posts along the north-western border with Pakistan on Saturday night and seized several of the posts. The attacks came after the Taliban regime in Afghanistan accused Pakistan of carrying out airstrikes on Afghan territory, including in the capital, Kabul, earlier this week.
On Sunday, Pakistan responded with retaliatory strikes, gunfire and ground raids on Afghan Taliban posts along the border.
In a statement, the media wing of the Pakistan military said 23 soldiers had been killed and another 29 wounded in the attacks. They claimed that 200 “Taliban and affiliated terrorists” from the Afghan side were killed in their retaliatory strikes and that terrorist training camps had been dismantled.
The Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid had earlier claimed that Taliban forces killed 58 Pakistani soldiers in the attacks, while just nine from the Taliban side were killed.
The clashes signal a new low in Afghan-Pakistan relations, which have become increasingly hostile amid claims that Afghanistan is giving a safe haven to Islamist militants carrying out an escalating number of deadly attacks on Pakistani soil.
Early on Sunday morning, the Taliban government’s defence ministry said its forces had conducted “retaliatory and successful operations” along the border. “If the opposing side again violates Afghanistan’s territorial integrity, our armed forces are fully prepared to defend the nation’s borders and will deliver a strong response,” said the ministry.
Pakistan’s media wing accused the Afghan Taliban of launching attacks to “facilitate terrorism”.
“Exercising the right of self-defence, the alert armed forces of Pakistan repelled the assault decisively all along the border and inflicted heavy casualties on Taliban forces,” said the statement.
“We will not tolerate the treacherous use of Afghan soil for terrorism against Pakistan … the state of Pakistan will not rest until the menace of terrorism emanating from Afghanistan is completely eliminated.”
The cross-border strikes came after two explosions were reported in the Afghan capital and another in south-eastern Afghanistan on Thursday. The Taliban-run defence ministry subsequently accused Pakistan of “violating its sovereignty” in connection with the attacks. Pakistan has neither denied nor confirmed carrying out the Kabul strike, only stating that it had carried out “a series of retribution operations”.
Analysts said recent days showed just how volatile the situation along the Afghan-Pakistan border had become. The two countries share a nearly 1,600-mile (2,600km) rugged and mountainous border known as the Durand Line, which is contested by Afghanistan.
Since the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan in 2021, the Pakistan government has accused them of giving shelter to the Pakistani Taliban, known as Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), an Islamist militant group who are behind a deadly rise in insurgent attacks in Pakistan’s border region of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
Thousands of TTP militant attacks – mostly targeting Pakistani police, paramilitary and army – have been carried out over the past four years, leaving more than 2,500 dead. Islamabad has grown increasingly impatient with Kabul, publicly calling on the Afghan Taliban to stop harbouring TTP militants, accusing them of turning a blind eye to training camps and giving funding and arms to TTP fighters who carry out attacks on Pakistani soil, allegations backed by UN findings.
Imtiaz Gul, a security analyst based in Islamabad, said “Pakistan’s patience with Kabul had been wearing thin” as TTP attacks continued to escalate. Just earlier this week, at least three senior army officers, including 20 soldiers, were killed in attacks by the Pakistani Taliban. According to Armed Conflict Location and Event Data, there have been more than 600 attacks by TTP so far this year, the most in a decade.
Gul described the clashes as a “logical conclusion of the tensions that had been brewing up between the two countries, particularly after the continuous refusal of the Afghan regime to take demonstrable conclusive action against the TTP, which is spearheading the terrorist attacks in Pakistan.”
Speaking at a press conference in Delhi, where he was on an official visit to India this week, the Afghan Taliban foreign minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi, denied that Afghanistan was giving shelter to TTP fighters. “There is no safe haven for TTP in Afghanistan,” he said.
Muttaqi said the situation along the Afghan-Pakistan border was now “under control” and that allies Qatar and Saudi Arabia had reached out to “express that the war should stop”.
“Afghanistan has the right to keep its territory and its borders safe and so it has retaliated to the violation,” he said. “We achieved the objective of our retaliatory mission … so from our end, we have stopped.”
Michael Kugelman, a South Asia analyst based in Washington DC, described the border situation as “precarious”. He emphasised that while the cash-strapped Taliban in Afghanistan “lacks the capacity to fight the Pakistani military head-on”, he cautioned that the strikes could further fuel the cross-border militant insurgency in Pakistan.
“The risk is that its recent strikes in Afghanistan will galvanise TTP to carry out reprisals, which could invite further and perhaps more intense Pakistani operations in Afghanistan,” said Kugelman. “And then the cycle could play out again. There are no winners or easy long-term solutions here.”
