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Pakistan launched air strikes on Afghanistan early on Friday as tensions between the neighbours threatened to break out into open war.
The bombardment included extensive air strikes and artillery fire targeting major urban areas, including the capital Kabul and Kandahar, where Taliban supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada is based.
The assault came in response to an Afghan Taliban attack overnight on Pakistani border posts, officials in Islamabad said. That followed air strikes at the weekend by Pakistan on what it said were militant positions in east Afghanistan.
This week’s fighting has been the worst for several months as a fragile ceasefire appears to have broken down. Relations between Pakistan and the Taliban have deteriorated over the past year, as Islamabad battles two increasingly violent insurgencies in border regions that it claims receive support from Kabul.
Pakistani defence minister Khawaja Asif, a civilian official who has limited power due to the military’s dominance over policymaking, wrote on X that “it is now open war” between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
He also accused the Taliban of being “a proxy for India”, a reference to warming ties between the Islamist group and Islamabad’s arch-rival India.
Islamabad said on Friday it had killed 133 Afghan Taliban fighters, occupied nine Taliban military positions and destroyed dozens of bases, depots, tanks and artillery guns in Afghanistan.
The Taliban reported it had killed 55 Pakistani soldiers, retrieving some of their bodies, and seized 19 posts in cross-border raids. Islamabad and Kabul have denied each other’s claims and neither side has acknowledged any losses.
Later on Friday morning, the Taliban used drones to attack three army installations in north-western Pakistan, including near Abbottabad, home to the country’s premier military academy, according to Pakistani and Afghan officials.
All were shot down with no casualties, according to Pakistan’s information minister Attaullah Tarar.
Zabihullah Mujahid, the Islamist group’s spokesperson, said on Thursday night that the Taliban had launched its “offensive operations” against “Pakistani army centres and facilities” in response to last weekend’s air strikes, which the UN says killed at least 13 civilians.
Pakistan said the Taliban assault was “unprovoked” and claimed the strikes over the weekend targeted hideouts belonging to Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, a militant group that is officially separate from the Afghan Taliban, and a local branch of Isis. The latter had claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing this month in Islamabad that killed more than 30 people.
“By expanding its targeting from TTP militant facilities to the Taliban regime itself, Pakistan is signalling its willingness to take its fight directly to the Afghan state,” said Michael Kugelman, a senior fellow for South Asia at the Atlantic Council think-tank in Washington.
“The Taliban, meanwhile, is messaging its intent to launch a sustained campaign against Pakistan,” he added. “Diplomatic efforts . . . have failed to address the root causes of the crisis.”
The Taliban deny hosting militant groups that target Pakistan, but international observers disagree.
Hamid Karzai, the former president of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, the Nato-backed government that was deposed by the Taliban in 2021, wrote on X: “The Afghans will defend their beloved homeland with complete unity in all circumstances.”
Pakistan “must change its own policy and choose the path of good neighbourliness, respect and civilized relations with Afghanistan”, Karzai added.
Since October, negotiators for Islamabad and the Taliban have held four rounds of talks in Doha, Istanbul and Riyadh aimed at maintaining a fragile truce. These latest tit-for-tat attacks come despite the Taliban releasing three Pakistani soldiers last week under a Saudi Arabia-brokered deal.
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