Pakistan’s Military Uses Conflict with Afghanistan to Escape Domestic Accountability
Eastern Afghanistan, where a Pakistani airstrike killed most members of a family, including women and children. Photo: @ATTOCK
By Rahmatullah Achakzai
February was among the bloodiest months in Pakistan’s recent history, not because of any foreign aggressor but because the country’s own security apparatus failed, repeatedly and at scale, to protect the people it claims to serve.
A suicide bombing struck a Shia mosque in Islamabad on February 6, killing 36 worshippers and wounding more than 170. This was followed by another incident in Bajaur that killed 11 soldiers, and further bombings in the Bannu area of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. These were not isolated incidents but a continuation of a pattern of catastrophic security failures that have plagued Pakistan under Field Marshal Syed Asim Munir’s watch. Rather than address these failures honestly, the military chose the oldest institutional reflex in its playbook: manufacture an external crisis to drown out internal accountability.
Thousands of mourners buried the victims of the Shia Islamabad Mosque attack while citizens openly decried the security lapse. Reports claimed that Pakistani authorities had advance intelligence about the imminent threat yet failed to act. The ongoing security crisis is a direct consequence of the military establishment’s support for jihadist groups, pointing out that while Munir has sought to rhetorically rebrand militant outfits, he has simultaneously espoused inflammatory, racially discriminatory rhetoric that mirrors his own Islamist worldview.
On the night of February 21, the Pakistan Air Force conducted strikes in the Afghan provinces of Nangarhar, Paktika, and Khost, claiming to target Tahrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP) camps. But what followed was not a precision counterterrorism operation – it was a military institution performing strength for a domestic audience.
Afghan authorities reported at least 18 people killed in the strikes, including women and children, in Paktika province. The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) confirmed at least 13 civilians killed and seven injured in the strikes. This was not collateral damage, but a predictable outcome of Pakistan choosing to drop bombs on a country with limited air defense capacity, knowing the optics of “retaliation” would play well on Pakistani television.
The current escalation reflects a shift in Pakistan’s strategy” toward more aggressive kinetic operations in Afghanistan. What analysts are less willing to say plainly is this: Munir’s military launched those strikes precisely because it could not answer for its domestic failures. After the Islamabad Mosque bombing incident, questions about intelligence failures and the army’s preoccupation with managing civilian politics rather than fighting terrorism were growing louder.
The airstrikes in Afghanistan gave the establishment a narrative redirect – Pakistan as the aggrieved party, fighting “Afghan-based terrorism,” rather than a failing security state unable to protect worshippers in its own capital, eleven miles from Army headquarters in Rawalpindi.
The escalation spiralled, and Pakistan declared itself in “open war” with Afghanistan by February 27, with Defense Minister Khawaja Asif saying Islamabad’s patience had run out. Pakistan struck Kabul and other Afghan provinces. Afghan Deputy Spokesman Hamdullah Fitrat accused Pakistan of deliberately targeting the residences of ordinary civilians, most of the dead and wounded being women and children. The UN’s Diplomats Without Borders warned that further confrontation risked broader regional instability and noted with alarm that much of the world’s diplomatic bandwidth was consumed elsewhere, leaving this war potentially unattended.
This violence against Afghans did not emerge from a vacuum. It is the foreign extension of an institutional culture already well-practiced in brutality at home by the Pakistan military.
According to the Baloch Yakjehti Committee, 1,223 Baloch individuals were forcibly disappeared in 2025 alone, including 18 women. More than 200 cases of extrajudicial killings by Pakistani security forces were reported in the same period.
In February 2026 alone, multiple cases of enforced disappearance and in-custody killings were documented in Balochistan, with families reporting that bodies discovered bore visible signs of severe torture.
The UN Special Rapporteurs have called these practices a serious human rights violation and an international crime, urging Pakistan to establish independent investigation mechanisms and criminalize enforced disappearance. The military’s treatment of Afghan civilians is thus not an aberration, but the same contempt for civilian lives, applied in Pakistan.
That contempt has long defined Pakistan’s handling of Afghan refugees as well. Pakistani police have forcibly evicted Afghan families, looted their property, and denied refugees due process, including the right to present documents or access legal representation.
Around US$4 billion in Afghan-owned properties and other assets have reportedly been seized by Pakistan’s government. Between September 2023 and February 2026, Pakistan forcibly deported over 1 million Afghan nationals. Many international organizations and human rights groups have described this policy as a violation of the principle of non-refoulement and have repeatedly called on Pakistan to reverse course. Afghans who spent decades building lives in Pakistan have watched their businesses, homes, and savings stripped away by the same security establishment now presenting itself to the world as Afghanistan’s aggrieved neighbor.
This contradictory posture is part of a wider pattern under Munir. He has been making desperate attempts to appear powerful on the international stage by posturing aggressively against Afghanistan and punishing political rivals like Imran Khan at home. Additionally, his “hard state” policy against local rebel groups and minority communities only led to growing resentment across the country. The army continues to disappear students, silence lawyers, and bomb villages in its own country, while Munir poses for photographs with world leaders.
There is growing anger against Munir and civilian government representatives across the country. Recently, slogans of “Murdabad” (death to) Asim Munir and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif erupted in Pakistan-occupied Gilgit-Baltistan, over killings of innocent civilians by security forces during local protests.
On social media, hashtags such as “Resign Asim Munir,” “Pakistan under military fascism,” and “Boycott military businesses” regularly trend, with users recalling violent crackdowns and no freedom of expression by the state authorities. Similarly, protests in Afghanistan against the Pakistani airstrikes have been equally damning, with demonstrators in several provinces taking to the streets to condemn what they described as state terrorism against a defenseless civilian population. The military’s record over the past two years has been abysmal, and with an active military conflict with Afghanistan, the Pakistan Army has exacerbated “manufactured” instability to divert the population from more pressing issues.
Rahmatullah Achakzai is a journalist based in Balochistan, covering human rights, regional politics, and cross-border issues.
Note: The contents of the article are the sole responsibility of the author. Afghan Diaspora Network will not be responsible for any incorrect statements in the articles.
