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 mentioned.
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 size of the battle. Pakistan declared “open struggle” in opposition to Afghanistan. Late February introduced Operation Ghazab Lil Haq — air and floor strikes hammering Taliban positions throughout Kabul, Kandahar, Paktia, Nangarhar, Khost, and Paktika, essentially the most important cross-border army 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 no less than 289 Afghan civilian casualties because the combating started — 104 of them youngsters, 59 girls.
The worst single day got here on March 16. A Pakistani airstrike hit the Omid Habit Therapy 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 mentioned it had struck solely army 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 Transient 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 completely 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 change into a coverage that Pakistan can begin however not end.
A relationship Pakistan can 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 in opposition to Indian affect, the doctrine of “strategic depth,” conceived within the Nineteen Eighties, envisioned a pliant Kabul as an extension of Pakistani safety house.
That calculation has collapsed completely. The speedy 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 Discipline Marshal Asim Munir mentioned throughout a March 4 go to to troops in South Waziristan that peace can solely exist if the Taliban “renounced their assist 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 not possible to attain.
Aref Dostyar, Director of the Afghanistan Program on the College of Notre Dame and former senior Afghan diplomat, tells The Cipher Transient that Pakistan’s army logic is backfiring on itself.
“If the objective 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 in opposition to Pakistan or showing to justify overseas 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 all sides to maneuver off entrenched positions that the opposite has proven no willingness to desert.
The Afghan Taliban would wish to strain their ideological ally, the TTP, to ease assaults inside Pakistan. For its half, Pakistan would wish to simply accept that “it can’t fight an rebel motion via typical means and therefore provide some financial and different incentives,” Pande says, underscoring that “there’s a purpose a compromise has not occurred as either side are sticking to their hardline positions.”
Dostyar additionally questions Islamabad’s underlying goals.
“Pakistan cites the TTP as justification for ‘open struggle,’ however its true goals are unclear,” he analyzes. “Mapping the particular places of Afghan targets could reveal an agenda that contradicts their acknowledged counter-terrorism objectives.”
The Iranian dimension
The struggle in Afghanistan, nevertheless, will not be 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, chopping 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 international locations in 2024-2025, most of it via barter offers and casual crossings relatively than something approaching a proper commerce structure.
Iranian gasoline and meals have stored Balochistan’s markets from seizing up completely 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 staff. It serves as Afghanistan’s major remaining commerce route to the ocean through Chabahar port, a lifeline that turned essential 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 essentially the most highly effective of a number of rebel teams working within the province, a banned separatist group designated a overseas terrorist group by america 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 could 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 army gear,” Pande continues, stressing that the image cuts each methods. “Instability inside Iran and the Iranian state’s concentrate on the western frontier means the Pakistani state could discover it simpler to focus on these Baluch teams, realizing that Iran’s consideration is diverted.”
Pakistan can also be house 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 attempting to broaden their footprints in Balochistan, and instability in Iran would divert Pakistani safety sources towards border administration, creating a gap for these networks to develop.
In Balochistan’s Makran coast area, house to the Chinese language-operated deep-sea port of Gwadar, native officers have suggested residents to keep away from Iranian territory completely.
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, placing 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 stories surfaced that Pakistan had summoned its Nuclear Command Authority, the physique that controls choices over its nuclear arsenal, the disaster took on a distinct character altogether. Analysts learn it as a calculated sign. Pakistani officers later mentioned 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 completely intact. Delhi has held the Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance since then, a transfer Islamabad has known 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 dealing with a failing financial system, political instability, and inner separatist actions,” he asserts. “Within the face of all this, it is a gigantic gamble to interact in a number of exterior conflicts. It might be a ‘distraction’ technique, but it surely poses a major regional threat, notably relating to the safety of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.”
Pande agrees the army believes it could actually 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 in opposition to both nation is handled as aggression in opposition to each. Nonetheless, she flags a structural weak point within the info marketing campaign that sustains it.
“The message being despatched by the highest brass is that occasions which are occurring are a conspiracy in opposition to Pakistan, in an try and rally the individuals to assist the state and its actions,” she says.
That Washington has left the mediation work completely 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 really happening or a strategic selection as a consequence of competing priorities.” In plain phrases, america is both not paying shut sufficient consideration or has determined this fireplace 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 form 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 interact or not.
The Eid pause now expiring offers diplomats the narrowest of home windows. Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey all known as this week for a path towards a sustainable settlement. Whether or not the structural situations for such an settlement exist is one other matter completely. 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 army institution.
The underlying drivers are unchanged.
As Pande frames it, the core downside will not be a scarcity of mediation however a scarcity of political will on either side.
“The Afghan Taliban believes they’re not beholden to Pakistan, they’re in energy, and they’re reluctant to behave in opposition to their ideological ally, the TTP,” she provides. “Pakistan believes that because it helped the Afghan Taliban regain energy, the latter ought to be grateful to Pakistan, ought to maintain Pakistan’s pursuits in thoughts and will tame the TTP. The important thing problem for Pakistan is the continuing battle with its former proxy.”
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