Pakistan launched a new wave of overnight airstrikes deep inside Afghan territory in the early hours of Monday, June 29 — and the international community is watching closely as two nuclear-armed neighbours move dangerously closer to full-scale war.
According to report, Pakistani forces killed at least 36 civilians and injured more than 160 others in the strikes.
The operation began with a ground incursion along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border late Sunday night, before escalating into what Islamabad described as “calibrated strikes” targeting militant camps in Afghanistan’s eastern Paktia, Paktika, and Kunar provinces.
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Pakistan’s Information Minister Attaullah Tarar announced the operation on X, claiming 29 “terrorists” were killed and weapons stockpiles destroyed.
He said the strikes were a direct response to a militant attack on a Pakistan Rangers paramilitary headquarters in Karachi on Saturday — one of the worst strikes on Pakistan’s largest city in years — in which three soldiers were killed, and an Afghan national was among those arrested.
Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, a breakaway faction of the Pakistani Taliban, claimed responsibility for the Karachi attack.
“Pakistan’s relentless counter-terrorism campaign will continue at full pace to wipe out the menace of foreign-sponsored and supported terrorism from the country,” Tarar said.
Afghanistan’s Taliban government told a completely different story. Hamdullah Fitrat, the Taliban government’s deputy spokesperson, said Pakistani forces struck a home in Paktia’s Chamkani district, killing an elderly man and a child.
When residents rushed to the rubble to rescue survivors, the area was struck a second time, killing 28 villagers and wounding 158 in a single blow.
Six more people, mostly women and children, were killed in a separate strike on a home in Paktika province’s Giyan district.
Afghanistan’s deputy minister for publications, Hayatullah Mohajer Farahi, condemned the strikes in the sharpest possible terms, calling them a “cowardly act of aggression” and an “act of brutality.”
He did not mince words on what comes next. “The military regime in a cowardly manner bombed Paktia, Paktika, and Kunar provinces last night,” Farahi said.
“This will definitely be retaliated against in due time. The decisions of the regime are not made based on emotions, but rather serious measures are taken at the right time.”
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Pakistani officials also used the strikes to blame India, accusing New Delhi of backing the militant groups responsible for the Karachi attack — an allegation India’s Foreign Ministry dismissed as “baseless allegations,” saying Pakistan should “look inwards, take credible action against the terror infrastructure on its territory.”
Sunday’s strikes came less than three weeks after Pakistan’s military launched a previous round of airstrikes on Afghanistan, ending what had been a fragile month of relative calm.
That calm itself followed what Islamabad had publicly described as an “open war” between the two neighbours — an extraordinary admission between two countries that share a long, contested border and a historically fraught relationship.
The conflict has been escalating since February 2026, when Afghanistan launched its own retaliatory strikes after Pakistan hit Afghan territory.
At least 372 Afghan civilians were killed and 397 wounded in the first three months of this year alone. Multiple internationally mediated peace efforts, including talks hosted by China in April where both sides reportedly agreed not to escalate, have failed to hold.
Pakistan’s core grievance is the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) — a militant group, separate from but allied with Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban, that has carried out hundreds of bombings and assassinations inside Pakistan.
Islamabad accuses Kabul of giving the TTP sanctuary. Kabul denies it. As of Monday morning, NBC News reports that an “uneasy calm” prevails along the border, with Pakistani security forces on high alert.
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Nigeria may appear distant from the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier, but this crisis carries direct implications.
As a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council, Nigeria has a platform and responsibility to push for de-escalation and civilian protection in a conflict already condemned by the UN.
Beyond the diplomatic stage, the pattern here- a state resorting to cross-border military strikes against non-state armed groups using a neighbour’s territory is one Nigerian security strategists must study carefully. Nigeria faces its own version of this dilemma in the Lake Chad Basin, where militants from Boko Haram and ISWAP operate across porous borders with Niger, Chad, and Cameroon.
The lesson from Pakistan and Afghanistan is sobering: military strikes without lasting political solutions do not end conflicts; they deepen them
