In late February, tensions between Afghanistan and Pakistan escalated into sustained ground clashes and air strikes. Pakistan increasingly blames the Afghan government for rising terrorist violence inside Pakistan. After Pakistani air strikes against seven alleged militant facilities on Feb. 21, Afghanistan retaliated with drone attacks and border raids on Feb. 26. Pakistan’s Defense Minister Khawaja Asif declared on social media that same day that the situation was now one of “open war” (khulī jang).
U.S.-Iran hostilities have dominated the news cycle in recent weeks, but fighting continues along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. On Mar. 16, Pakistani air strikes impacted a Kabul addiction treatment hospital, according to the U.N. To discuss the conflict, Good Authority editor Christopher Clary checked in with Asfandyar Mir, senior fellow for South Asia at the Stimson Center. His insights, lightly edited for clarity and length, are below.
Christopher Clary: What were the background conditions that led to this most recent escalation?
Asfandyar Mir: This escalation had been building since October 2025 – when Pakistan and the Taliban, after an intense but brief military exchange, agreed to a ceasefire mediated by Qatar and Turkey. But the negotiations that followed proved inconclusive. In those talks, Pakistan sought actions by the Taliban to constrain the TTP and other anti-Pakistan terror groups based in Afghanistan. The Taliban balked, and the mediated process collapsed. The Saudis intervened after the Qatar- and Turkey-led processes fell apart. Taliban clerics then issued an edict in December against the export of jihad beyond Afghanistan’s borders. But the edict also asserted the right to resist military actions by foreign powers, effectively hedging in both directions. Taliban edicts on restricting anti-Pakistan groups, in any case, have proven cheap talk. Attacks by anti-Pakistan groups with Afghan fighters have continued at a steady pace.
In January and February, there was a wave of attacks inside Pakistan. Pakistan responded with air strikes on Feb. 21-22 against TTP and other terror groups in eastern Afghanistan. The Taliban retaliated with a conventional military attack on Feb. 26, hitting Pakistani border posts. That triggered Pakistan’s largest military response to date. The operation is open-ended and involves air assaults by fighter jets and drones, ground operations, and heavy weaponry targeting positions along the border and deeper in the country. For their part, the Taliban have attempted local counterassaults against Pakistani border positions and small-scale drone attacks on mainland Pakistan.
Among analysts tracking Taliban activities, the conventional wisdom tends to be that the Taliban are far too stubborn and committed to their militant allies to give in to Pakistani demands, so that forms a key factor in understanding the breakdown in negotiations. Yet there is another factor that has precipitated the current escalation: the Taliban’s misreading of Pakistani political dynamics on this issue.
For the last few years, Pakistan’s domestic political frictions appear to have led the Taliban to conclude that Pakistan’s military leadership could be compelled into concessions – or at least managed – under pressure. The Taliban, who were long allied with Pakistan, also seem to have assumed that their historic ties to Pakistani security, political, and religious circles put a ceiling on Pakistani counter-actions. That was a significant miscalculation. The high levels of anti-Pakistan militant violence, Taliban support for such groups, and the very public warming of Taliban relations with India have consolidated Pakistani opinion on the Afghan question. The Taliban are now facing a more resolved and harsher Pakistani posture than at any point since their return to power.
We spoke last about this conflict after the October 2025 round of air strikes. You suggested the Pakistani strikes might be less about directly weakening militant groups and more about coercing the Afghan Taliban into cutting their support for those anti-Pakistan groups. Do you still think coercion is the primary goal?
Coercing the Taliban into giving up support for anti-Pakistan terror groups seems to be the overarching objective. There are significant degradation elements embedded within the campaign, but their main focus is the Afghan Taliban, not anti-Pakistan militants in Afghanistan. Notably, Pakistan seems to be stopping short of an outright regime change objective.
I see traces of three pathways of coercion at play. The first is the neutralization of the Taliban’s capacity to project cross-border power. Pakistan is systematically striking border outposts; corps, brigade, and battalion headquarters relevant to the border; weapons depots; munitions dumps; and drone storage sites. Both Afghan drones and conventional weapons appear to be a key focus. The Taliban have acquired some drone capabilities while the left-behind weapons from the former U.S.-backed government remain a significant component of their conventional arsenal. Pakistan may also be seeking to establish a de facto buffer zone along large stretches of the border.
The second pathway is the weakening of the regime’s material strength. When the Taliban came to power in 2021, they inherited a relatively strong state structure and military apparatus from the U.S. withdrawal. They are now losing those military assets. Border closures, imposed coercively by Islamabad since September-October, and disrupted trade across the Iranian border due to the U.S.-Iran war, are compounding the economic pressure on the Taliban government. For landlocked Afghanistan, the economic squeeze is real and tightening.
The third pathway is humiliation. The Taliban rely on the political argument – a critical point for purposes of internal legitimacy – that they have defeated superpowers like the United States and can therefore take on Pakistan, and defend national sovereignty. The Pakistani campaign is seeking to signal to the Taliban’s base and the broader Afghan public that Pakistan can strike the Taliban at will, neutralize any counter moves, and undermine the Taliban’s ability to protect Afghan sovereignty.
Will this coercion succeed or fail? Let me answer it this way: The Pakistani campaign doesn’t map neatly onto any single coercion model, but the closest fit combines elements of U.S. military strategist John Warden’s strategic paralysis approach – weakening the regime’s system by degrading its military capacity and humiliation – with a standard denial framework. Pakistan is raising the costs of Taliban cross-border operations, both directly and through proxies.
Empirically, the relevant historical parallel is NATO’s 78-day 1999 air campaign against Serbia seeking a withdrawal from Kosovo: a significant power asymmetry; economic isolation tightening from multiple directions; and critically, no external patron willing to come to the target regime’s rescue. A bit like Slobodan Milosevic’s patronage networks, individual Taliban leaders are also seeing direct damage to their significant business interests. Given time and sustained pressure, Pakistan’s approach could produce a different Taliban posture on their support for militant partners.
Nevertheless, coercion is generally hard for any country to pull off. The Taliban are both fairly committed to their militant allies – a reminder that they lost their government in 2001 to the U.S. in defense of al-Qaeda – and have a history of enduring a lot of pain. It’s possible we’ll see a nationalistic rally-around-the-flag effect, and even further radicalization, in response to the current coercion effort, but the Taliban leadership remains politically divided at the top levels. For example, the supreme leader has been largely absent and not saying much on the crisis. Successful coercion is also a bit of an “art,” as Reid Pauly argues in his excellent new book. Among other things, he argues this requires the application of well-directed pressure and the presentation of clear and credible off-ramps so the target state isn’t in a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation. Let’s see if Pakistan can calibrate.
How would you characterize the fighting now compared to at the onset of hostilities?
We can think of the fighting along an escalation ladder. I would say we are still somewhere in the middle rungs. Pakistan is hitting the Taliban on a near-daily basis. The Taliban attack Pakistani positions along the border intermittently and have launched drone attacks against Pakistani cities.
What we are not seeing from Pakistan are larger territorial seizure operations, though there are reports of Pakistani forces having taken a small enclave in Kandahar province. We have also not seen Pakistan strike Taliban leadership targets directly. As for the Taliban, we have not seen complex attacks by their proxy militants, including the TTP, in recent weeks. In fact, militant violence in Pakistan has been more subdued. After Pakistan launched its operation on Feb. 27, the Taliban threatened a wave of attacks, interpreted as a threat of large-scale suicide bombings. And multiple Taliban-allied militants simultaneously announced they would carry out complex attacks against Pakistan to avenge the attacks on the Taliban in Afghanistan. Those attacks have not yet materialized. The Taliban could also strike Pakistani critical infrastructure but have not done so.
What do you expect next? What are you looking for?
I am watching for signs that the conflict is moving to the next rung of the escalation ladder. If there is a major complex attack inside Pakistan by the TTP or other militants, I expect Pakistan may try to strike Taliban political leadership targets. If precise enough, that would unleash new dynamics. There are divisions within the Taliban between Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada’s circle in Kandahar and political heavyweights like Sirajuddin Haqqani and Mullah Yaqub in Kabul. Depending on who is targeted, it could create opportunities for consolidation and power plays by the competing faction. That will bear directly on the regime’s trajectory, perhaps even its survival.
Third-party mediation remains important. The Taliban’s counter-strategy is to draw in third parties to arrest Pakistani coercive pressure before it compounds further. But Pakistan’s receptiveness to mediation has diminished; the government still seems open to talks only if third parties can secure outcomes on TTP leadership handover and demobilization. China has attempted to mediate the conflict, but it’s not clear if other parties like Qatar, Turkey, or Saudi Arabia can break the impasse.
The U.S.-Iran war is also bearing on this conflict. Iran has been the Taliban’s most important trade partner – and a critical transit route for trade with the rest of the world, particularly after Pakistan closed its border last fall. The economic pressure on the Taliban is now tightening from both directions simultaneously. The U.S. government will probably watch for any signs of Taliban help to anyone fleeing from Iran toward Afghanistan, especially Tehran-based al-Qaeda leaders. On the flipside, the Taliban may still have an opportunity to seek military capabilities from Iran, including drones and missiles.
A final point: U.S. policy on the Taliban has entered a more coercive phase and is generally supportive of the Pakistani campaign. When President Trump was asked about Pakistani actions in Afghanistan, his response was that Pakistan is doing “terrifically well.” A senior State Department official then noted that Pakistan has the right to defend itself. Separately, on March 9, the State Department designated Afghanistan as a “state sponsor of wrongful detention” – a new sanctioning authority under a September 2025 executive order – over the Taliban’s imprisonment of U.S. citizens. The designation enables sanctions, export controls, and travel restrictions, and can also limit aid flows to Afghanistan that the Taliban have relied upon to sustain the economy.
There’s another big factor to mention: the rumors about the Bagram air base. The Taliban believe the Pakistani campaign is part of a broader American plan to create conditions for the U.S. to retake the air base. I do not believe the Taliban were particularly capable of preventing the U.S. from taking Bagram even before the Pakistani campaign, nor that Washington needed Islamabad to soften the ground. Regardless, Bagram remains on the minds of some senior U.S. officials, and once the high-tempo phase of the Iran campaign winds down, Trump could revisit that question.
Just to clarify, you assess the Trump administration might try to seize Bagram militarily?
Yes.
Stay up to date on all things politics and political science. Bookmark our landing page and sign up for Good Authority’s weekly newsletter by entering your email address in the box below.
