The civilian cost of Pakistan’s counter-terrorism war in Afghanistan

In late February, Pakistan launched ‘open war’ on Afghanistan with Operation Ghazal lil-Haq (Wrath for the Truth), marking the most violent period of fighting between the two countries since the Taliban takeover in 2021. For Pakistan, it was a war of retaliation against the Tehreek-e-Taliban, or TTP, a militia sympathetic to the Afghan Taliban. Pakistan has long accused Afghanistan of offering safe harbour to the TTP ‘Tashkeel,’ or administrative structures and combat units, and was fed up with inaction. 

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The TTP is largely active in the western province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, a diverse region with generations of tribal history reaching across both sides of the Durand Line. The group of about 6,500 fighters shifted from fighting the United States and NATO forces, to fighting the Pakistani state. Despite Pakistan’s goal of eradicating the group a decade ago, the TTP has rallied support in border regions against Pakistan’s central government.

By February, conflict escalated, with Pakistani airstrikes and artillery fire shaking the eastern provinces of Khost, Kunar and Nangarhar. In the coming weeks, civilian infrastructure would be struck, with shelling of commercial markets in Torkham and the Hijra Abad refugee settlement in Khas Kunar. Afghanistan’s own drone strikes hit civilian villages in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and injured civilians in Balochistan and Punjab. In March, Pakistan was accused of bombing Kabul’s Omid Hospital, a drug rehabilitation centre built on a former NATO camp, killing over 400 and injuring over 250 people. ‘The scale of death and destruction raises serious concerns about whether the Pakistani military conducted an adequate proportionality assessment,’ Amnesty had said. Human Rights Watch urged investigation for an ‘unlawful attack’ and ‘possible war crime.’

‘Afghans continue to be deported from Pakistan’ even amid conflict, Naser Nasrat of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in Kandahar wrote to FairPlanet. Pakistan had paused deportations through the Torkham crossing in March, but repatriations continued through the Spin Boldak crossing. ‘Hundreds of returnees were received from Pakistan even the day after Pakistani strikes targeted several locations in Afghanistan,’ Nasrat said.

As the worst of the fighting diminished, over 190,000 people crossed into Afghanistan in April alone. By May, that number had dropped significantly, with the IOM reporting that over 40 per cent of crossings into Afghanistan were again through Torkham. 

Fighting only compounded the pressures on Afghanistan’s humanitarian network, already strained by mass repatriations and Kunar’s devastating earthquake. The OCHA reported that over 94,000 people were displaced by fighting in early April, and over 34,000 people relied on emergency food assistance. An aid network already hollowed out by last year’s USAID shut-down. Conflict and landmines, road closures, and landslides all further impeded emergency response.

Most of the attacks were carried out ‘at night, during Ramadan,’ Azizullah Aziz told FairPlanet, Afghan journalist and eastern zone coordinator of the Afghan Journalists Safety Committee. A temporary ceasefire was agreed for Eid al-Fitr, as evacuation efforts from affected regions continued. Official death counts have been disputed with the Taliban claiming 800 Afghan civilians were killed by April, and Pakistan claiming to have killed over 640 militants and 850 ‘facilitators.’

‘The civilian casualties here are also hidden to some extent, because locals say that this instills greater fear,’ Aziz said. Because of the Taliban’s media restrictions, in some affected communities ‘there are no pictures of many children, women and local civilians.’ 

In early April, China brokered peace talks that Taliban officials called ‘useful,’ quietening the conflict, but Afghans have remained in the dark. ‘The current situation in Afghanistan is very sad because no-one knows what will happen and where the situation is heading,’ Aziz said. Cross-border shelling resumed, striking civilian border communities in Pakistan and Afghan universities. 

In remote areas, Aziz continued, ‘it is not possible to treat serious injuries and the wounded in any hospital, because there are neither professional surgeons nor sufficient medical equipment.’ The OCHA reported a shortage of oxygen in April, expecting ‘mounting challenges’ for humanitarian response and ‘significant underfunding’ for food programmes. Smaller hospitals in eastern provinces have to transfer the wounded to Kabul, or to private hospitals. ‘Most doctors and nurses have left the country, so it is not possible to properly treat patients in hospitals,’ Aziz said.

Normalised conflict

In what Pearl Pandya, South East Asia Senior Analyst at ACLED called a ‘relentless bombing campaign,’ one of the world’s most powerful militaries struck deep into Kabul and Kandahar. ‘It’s partly a show of strength, that we can strike you in the heart of Kabul and in the heart of Kandahar, which is the spiritual centre of the Taliban,’ Pandya told FairPlanet in a video call.

A series of tragedies escalated into war. In October, the TTP attacked a military convoy in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Orakzai. At that month’s Moscow Format Consultations on Afghanistan, Pakistan’s Special Representative to Afghanistan Mohammad Sadiq urged for the dismantling of ‘all terrorist groups operating from Afghan soil.’ Other high-profile terrorist attacks in Pakistan followed, including an Islamic State bombing of a mosque in Islamabad during Ramadan, and a car-bomb attack on a police station and homes in Bannu. What started as Pakistan’s targeted retaliation against TTP bases and camps in October turned into ‘open war’ on all of Afghanistan.

‘We’ve come to a state where routine or small-scale ambushes, and army convoys, and attacks on police stations have almost been normalised,’ Pandya told FairPlanet. Security guarantees are critical to the Doha agreement and the Taliban’s regional diplomacy. And ‘for better or for worse,’ Pandya said, the Taliban actually reduced domestic armed activity since returning to power by quelling Islamic State, the Uighur ETIM, and even national Afghan resistance groups. 

A decrease in TTP activity in April, ‘could have created an opening for peace talks toward a comprehensive agreement.’ But in mid-May, another deadly suicide attack in Bannu ‘dimmed any such prospects,’ she said. Conflict again escalated in June when the Taliban launched drone strikes in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan provinces against alleged militant bases. In a statement, Pandya called drones a ‘cheap alternative to the Afghan Taliban forces’ that ‘could become more sophisticated over time.’

Scapegoating Pashtuns

Hosting Afghan refugees during the Soviet and NATO wars was the ‘biggest mistake’ Pakistan ever made, Pakistan’s Defence Minister Khawaja Asif said in March. This statement does not ‘actively construct the political and legal environment in which millions of Afghans live,’ Naade Ali, Pakistan and Afghanistan expert at the Middle East Institute, wrote to FairPlanet.

Pakistan’s religious decree against terrorism in 2018 forbids the shedding of Muslim blood as haram. ‘In Islamic ethics, the bond between the host and the refugee is sacrosanct,’ Ali said, which Afghanistan is seen as having broken.

This fatwa exacerbated a historically hostile political climate toward Afghans in Pakistan. Since 1947, western tribal territories existed semi-autonomously as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). Home to many Pashtun communities, these lands were long maligned for also hosting the largely Pashtun Taliban, with years of reports on ‘torture, enforced disappearance, or deaths in custody’ and routine state violence.

By 2018, the FATA were merged into the wider Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, as military doctrine and immigration policy were rapidly changing. Pakistan’s National Security Policy (2022-2026) then bolstered a ‘formal hierarchy’ that excluded Afghans ‘regardless of how long they have lived in Pakistan or whether they were born there,’ Ali said. And the subsequent Illegal Foreigners’ Repatriation Plan, targeting 2.5 million Afghans, justified deportation as a counter-terrorism measure ‘on the grounds that Afghan migrants were disproportionately involved in terrorist activities.’

‘Pakistan lacks the institutional capacity to distinguish between those who pose a genuine security risk and those who do not,’ Ali said. ‘In practice, if not in official policy, ethnicity has become an unavoidable filter through which Pakistan’s security policy is perceived.’