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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