Born and raised in Kabul, Haroon, a 45-year-old former educator who asked to use a pseudonym due to safety fears, is no stranger to the sound of explosions. But he wasn’t expecting to be jolted awake on the night of Feb. 26 as the sound of nearby airstrikes reverberated across his house in West Kabul.

“At first, we thought it was an earthquake, but then we heard two more explosions,” he told Foreign Policy.

Since the Afghan-Pakistani war broke out that night, Pakistan has conducted near-daily strikes on key locations across Afghanistan, including a base at Bagram and weapons depots across Kandahar, believed to be holding U.S. equipment seized by the Taliban during the withdrawal of foreign troops from Afghanistan. Pakistan has also struck civilian areas across 10 provinces, reportedly including health facilities and humanitarian sites such as a camp for individuals displaced by the earthquakes in Afghanistan’s southern provinces last year.

As of March 17, United Nations officials had documented 76 civilian deaths and 213 injuries. The Taliban have responded by launching their own offensive on the Pakistani territory, prompting Khawaja Asif, the Pakistani defense minister, to declare that they are in an “open war” with Afghanistan.

Haroon is not an admirer of the Taliban, who have severely restricted individual rights and freedoms, particularly for women. But, like nearly all Afghans I’ve spoken to, he was grateful for the end of the war. The Taliban themselves were the source of most of the suicide bombs, improvised explosive devices, and insurgent attacks during the years of the U.S. occupation. With their victory and the U.S. departure, violence shrunk dramatically, except for the occasional attacks by the fledgling Islamic State insurgency, which seemed to usually target Chinese or Russian interests, and a few similar Pakistani airstrikes in October 2025.

But now Afghans are back at war. What started as a border skirmish has evolved into a conflict involving nonstate actors, primarily the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which Islamabad claims is supported by its Afghan counterparts. The TTP, or the Pakistani Taliban, is a militant group—an affiliate of al Qaeda—with ideologies not too dissimilar to the Afghan Taliban. With an estimated membership of 30,000-35,000 people, the group is most active in the tribal regions on the Afghan-Pakistani border, and it is vehemently opposed to the Pakistani government, whom it sees as its primary enemy.

Similar clashes were reported in October, which resulted in Pakistani airstrikes in Afghanistan, including on Kabul. The conflict was, however, quickly de-escalated thanks to the intervention of Qatar, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia, which negotiated a cease-fire.

That fragile peace was quickly broken when a suicide bombing attack that hit a Pakistani security checkpoint on Feb. 16 killed 12 people, including a child. The following week, Pakistan conducted airstrikes on what it described as terrorist sites in Afghanistan, which—according to local reports—killed 18 civilians, including children.

The war has blocked one major trade route, and the U.S. war on Iran has blocked another, resulting in soaring prices and more public anger.

“Pakistan claims to be an Islamic country but still bombs another Muslim country—that, too, during the holy month of Ramadan,” said 60-year-old Maryam from Kabul.

Maryam’s family members distrust the Taliban, but they are angry about Pakistan’s attacks. Having lived through decades of war, they are now clearing up their basement for the first time since the civil war in the 1990s to create space for a makeshift bomb shelter in case the conflict escalates further.

“What kind of Islam are they following where they attack civilians and terrorize children during Ramadan?” she said, the anger very evident in her voice.

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The Taliban were once Islamabad’s allies. For decades, Pakistan’s establishment spent massive resources in arming, sheltering and supporting the Afghan Taliban. Analysts say this approach, often referred to as the “strategic depth,” was intended to counter the rival influence of India in the region and to mitigate threats emerging from the TTP.

After the Taliban seized Kabul in August 2021, an image—showing Lt. Gen. Faiz Hameed, the director-general of Pakistan’s spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence, sipping coffee at the popular Serena Hotel in Kabul—spread rapidly that September.

The official statement claimed that he was there to assist the Taliban in creating an inclusive government. However, to many Afghans and analysts watching Afghanistan, the picture reaffirmed what they suspected all along: Pakistan remained intimately involved with the Afghan Taliban, propping up its insurgency in Afghanistan for over two decades.

But four years of the Taliban’s renewed control of Afghanistan yielded little, if any, geopolitical rewards for Pakistan. Not only has the Taliban’s relationship with India grown, with the Taliban reopening a diplomatic mission in New Delhi, but the TTP have also found a flourishing base in Afghanistan.

“The Taliban are hyper-ideological. For them, no amount of convergence of political interest can overcome ideological misalignment,” said Ahmad Shuja Jamal, a former director at the Afghan National Security Council who is now a security analyst based in Australia. “They lost power in 2001 precisely because they saw their affinity with al Qaeda as more important than maintaining their grip on power,” he said, referring to the refusal to surrender Osama bin Laden to Americans.

While the Taliban insist that no terrorist groups operate in Afghanistan, the most recent U.N. Security Council report, published in December, noted that the “TTP maintained a strength of around 6,000 fighters” across the country, with additional fighters associated with “more than a dozen subgroups or factions.”

The TTP leader, Noor Wali Mehsud, is believed to have spent time last year in Kabul and Kandahar, among other provinces, and the U.N. stated that the Taliban continue to provide the group with “logistical and operational space and financial support.”

For the Pakistani establishment, this amounts to a strategic loss, especially after years of investment into the Afghan Taliban.

“Over the past two years, Pakistan tried carrots with the Taliban, giving them the ultimate diplomatic prize a few months ago—the upgrade of their ties with the dispatch of an ambassador to Kabul,” Jamal said. “But for the Taliban, all that—plus a trade corridor and vital imports like cheap pharmaceuticals with Pakistan—is subservient to their ideological affinity with the TTP.”

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Despite nearly a month of fighting, Pakistan has failed to kill or injure even a single Taliban leader, security experts watching the conflict have pointed out—a stark contrast to U.S. and Israeli strikes in Iran.

Sources inside Afghanistan say that the initial strikes failed to inflict any significant damage on any known TTP camps.

“Most of the targets in the last week, aside from the ones on civilian homes, were on weapons depots and military equipment, most of which were left behind by the U.S. forces during evacuations,” one former Afghan senior security official, who asked to be identified only by the single name Safi, told Foreign Policy on March 2.

An assessment by the U.S. Defense Department found that more than $7 billion worth of military equipment had essentially been abandoned to the Taliban during the withdrawals in 2021. U.S. President Donald Trump has demanded the return of the weapons as well as the control of the Bagram Airfield, a key military base north of Kabul.

On March 1, Pakistani airstrikes hit the Bagram base, where some of the discarded U.S. military equipment is reportedly stored.

“If the war is against the TTP, why are the depots being targeted and not the actual camps?” Safi asked.

Assessing the strike patterns, Safi said, seems to indicate that U.S. weapons and equipment are the main targets for Pakistan. “It seems to me that Pakistan is destroying the U.S. weapons and equipment to make President Trump happy and to gain his favor against the Taliban,” he said.

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As the conflict continues, local insurgencies are being empowered. There is evidence that the Taliban are moving fighters from the north to the southern front lines, Jamal said.

“The al Qaeda, IMU [Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan], and other terrorist groups are filling the gaps in priority provinces like Panjshir, where the Taliban are massively concentrating forces and need all the help they can get,” he said.

The U.N. Security Council report observed that “Afghan arena remains the symbolic homeland for Al-Qaida” and that the Taliban government “continues to host and support the group.” It also documented that senior al Qaeda commanders are reported to be living in Kabul.

“So the conflict is involving these international terrorists more directly in the regime’s population suppression apparatus,” Jamal added.

One clear winner from this conflict is the Islamic State’s regional branch, called the Islamic State-Khorasan Province (ISKP).

“Pakistan is targeting the Taliban’s logistical capability, such as their weapons depots and security posts. This will weaken the Taliban in a fight against the ISKP,” Safi said. And if the ISKP were to attack, there is very little the Taliban could do at this point.

Pakistan’s claim of targeting terrorist groups in Afghanistan also sets a precedent for other regional countries to target the groups that they deem to be a threat.

“In the worst-case scenario, Afghanistan becomes a battleground for different jihadi groups with varying ideologies,” Safi said. “Each group starts claiming some geography.”

“Afghanistan could become another Syria, with Taliban acting like the Assad regime,” Safi warned.

“We must not forget that the Taliban have no real significant allies except global terrorist groups. They are already operating under Hibatullah [Akhundzada]’s command and even independently,” he said, adding that it is unlikely that the confrontation with Pakistan will make the Taliban give up their alliance with the TTP.

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The Taliban will have a hard time offering any meaningful response to Pakistan’s strikes and incursions.

“They are not built for a long-term conventional war with a state that is equipped with air assets,” Jamal pointed out, noting Pakistan’s total air supremacy.

Even for sustained guerrilla warfare, Safi said, the Taliban are missing key assets, suppliers, and local support inside Pakistan.

“Their earlier successes were thanks to supplies, support, and even geography from Pakistan. Their safe haven in Waziristan and Quetta played an important role in the Taliban’s fight against the former Afghan government. They don’t have that backing anymore,” Safi added.

And yet, while the Taliban may not have logistics or equipment on their side, the war could still play out in their favor.

“Pakistan’s ground incursions into Afghanistan’s territory have galvanized Afghan public opinion against it. The people who are opposed to the Taliban are even more opposed to Pakistani military incursions,” Jamal said, adding that the Taliban were experienced in long wars and that Pakistan had to “make the confrontation count; otherwise, they will lose the war despite having won each battle.”

There is a lesson in the war, Jamal said, for countries such as India that seek to build relations with the Taliban.

“It’s all well and good with the Taliban as long as they can derive a benefit from you—and there is, no doubt, an asymmetry of benefits here, because the Taliban are getting far more than they’re giving to India,” Jamal said. “But the moment they stop deriving benefit, the ideological misalignment will assert itself.”