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 Pakistan: Broker of Peace While Still at War
 
 
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 Pakistan: Broker of Peace While Still at War
 22 April, 2026 International Taliban security personnel stand guard near the Torkham border crossing between Afghanistan and Pakistan in the Nangarhar province on February 27, 2026. AFP journalists in Kabul and Kandahar heard blasts and jets overhead, as Pakistan launched air strikes on the Afghan capital and southern power base of the Taliban authorities.
 
 
 ( Photo by Aimal Zahir / AFP via Getty Images)
 
 
 By
 Hollie McKay Contributing Cipher Brief Reporter Hollie McKay is a Cipher Brief contributing writer, war crimes investigator, and author of «Only Cry for the Living: Memos from Inside the ISIS Battlefield». She previously worked as an investigative and international affairs/war correspondent for Fox News Digital for over fourteen years with a focus on war, terrorism, and crimes against humanity. Just a few weeks ago, Pakistan, the host for fragile ceasefire talks aiming to end the war between the U.S. and Iran, was at war with Afghanistan in what has been described as the worst conflict between the two countries in years. A ceasefire between Pakistan and Afghanistan that was scheduled to run from midnight March 19 to midnight March 24 — and brokered at the request of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey — offered the first lull in nearly a month of what was widely described as open warfare. Few analysts were treating it as anything more than a pause, risking Pakistan’s Information Minister Attaullah Tarar was explicit: Operation Ghazab Lil Haq would resume with greater intensity the moment any cross-border attack, drone strike, or terrorist incident occurred inside Pakistan during the holiday period. On Monday, as the ceasefire approached its midnight deadline, Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar reaffirmed that Pakistan’s approach had not shifted. “Pakistan remains firmly committed to eradicating the menace of terrorism,†he said. Previous ceasefires have not held. The one brokered by the same mediators in October 2025 collapsed within days — Istanbul peace talks broke down on October 29, and Pakistan threatened to “obliterate†the Taliban government shortly after. Saudi-led mediation in December 2025 also failed. What has changed is the scale of the conflict. Pakistan declared “open war†against Afghanistan. Late February brought Operation Ghazab Lil Haq — air and ground strikes hammering Taliban positions across Kabul, Kandahar, Paktia, Nangarhar, Khost, and Paktika, the most significant cross-border military action since the Taliban retook power in 2021. Pakistani officials now claim more than 684 Taliban fighters killed, over 912 injured, 252 posts destroyed, and 229 tanks, armored vehicles, and artillery guns taken out of action. The Taliban dispute nearly all of those figures. Pakistani airstrikes have hit Kabul repeatedly, Afghan forces have sent drones and mortars back across the border, and the United Nations has tallied at least 289 Afghan civilian casualties since the fighting began — 104 of them children, 59 women. The worst single day came on March 16. A Pakistani airstrike hit the Omid Addiction Treatment Hospital in Kabul while patients were inside. Afghan authorities counted more than 400 dead. The UN put the confirmed figure at 143 or more. Pakistan said it had struck only military infrastructure. The following day, mass funerals moved through the capital. Aparna Pande, Senior Fellow for India and South Asia at the Hudson Institute, tells The Cipher Brief that the ceasefire pattern should surprise no one. “Historically speaking, these ceasefires have never been durable,†she says. “Each side has simply used the pause in fighting to rebuild and replenish before the next round.†With the truce now expiring and both sides’ core grievances entirely unresolved, the question pressing analysts is whether Islamabad has a realistic end-state in mind, or whether open war with a nuclear-armed state’s most volatile neighbor has become a policy that Pakistan can start but not finish. A relationship Pakistan can no longer manage The roots of this conflict run directly through Islamabad’s own strategic choices. For decades, Pakistan cultivated the Afghan Taliban as a buffer against Indian influence, the doctrine of “strategic depth,†conceived in the 1980s, envisioned a pliant Kabul as an extension of Pakistani security space. That calculation has collapsed entirely. The immediate trigger for the current war is the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, the militant group that Islamabad accuses Kabul of sheltering and enabling. TTP attacks inside Pakistan have dramatically escalated since 2021, and Pakistan’s Army Chief Field Marshal Asim Munir said during a March 4 visit to troops in South Waziristan that peace can only exist if the Taliban “renounced their support for terrorism and terrorist organisations.†The Taliban, meanwhile, have never recognized the Durand Line, the colonial-era border Pakistan regards as sacrosanct, and that dispute alone makes any durable political settlement nearly impossible to achieve. Aref Dostyar, Director of the Afghanistan Program at the University of Notre Dame and former senior Afghan diplomat, tells The Cipher Brief that Pakistan’s military logic is backfiring on itself. “If the goal is to weaken the Taliban, Pakistan’s aggression is backfiring because it is triggering a ‘rally round the flag’ effect,†he says. “Even Taliban opponents are being cornered to choose between supporting the current regime’s stance against Pakistan or appearing to justify foreign aggression. Most are choosing the former.†The strategic paradox here is stark: Islamabad is now at war with an actor it once created, sustained, and expected to serve its interests indefinitely. Pande is equally direct: any durable agreement would require each side to move off entrenched positions that the other has shown no willingness to abandon. The Afghan Taliban would need to pressure their ideological ally, the TTP, to ease attacks inside Pakistan. For its part, Pakistan would need to accept that “it cannot combat an insurgent movement through conventional means and hence offer some economic and other incentives,†Pande says, underscoring that “there is a reason a compromise has not happened as both sides are sticking to their hardline positions.†Dostyar also questions Islamabad’s underlying objectives. “Pakistan cites the TTP as justification for ‘open war,’ but its true aims are unclear,†he analyzes. “Mapping the specific locations of Afghan targets may reveal an agenda that contradicts their stated counter-terrorism goals.†The Iranian dimension The war in Afghanistan, however, is not happening in isolation. On February 28, coordinated United States and Israeli strikes on Iran killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and triggered a rapidly expanding Middle East conflict. For Pakistan, already engaged in open fighting on its northwestern border, the implications of Iranian instability on its southwestern frontier are severe. Pakistan’s western frontier with Iran runs for 565 miles, cutting through territory where both sides of the border — Pakistan’s Balochistan and Iran’s Sistan-Balochistan — have long hosted ethno-separatist insurgencies. Roughly $1.4 billion in goods moved between the two countries in 2024-2025, most of it through barter deals and informal crossings rather than anything approaching a formal trade architecture. Iranian fuel and food have kept Balochistan’s markets from seizing up entirely since the Afghan border shut in October. That lifeline now runs through a war zone, and the border districts of Balochistan, among Pakistan’s poorest, would feel any disruption most acutely. Afghanistan shares its own 572-mile border with Iran, and the stakes for Kabul are equally acute. Iran hosts an estimated three to five million Afghan refugees and migrant workers. It serves as Afghanistan’s primary remaining trade route to the sea via Chabahar port, a lifeline that became critical after Pakistan closed its border in October. With that route now disrupted by the war, Afghanistan faces a dual economic squeeze that has no near-term resolution. Pande points out that the security calculus around Balochistan is shifting fast. “Groups like the BLA have used Iranian and Afghan Baluchistan to operate inside Pakistani Baluchistan,†she observes. The BLA, the Balochistan Liberation Army, is the most powerful of several insurgent groups operating in the province, a banned separatist organization designated a foreign terrorist group by the United States that seeks to carve an independent Balochistan from Pakistani territory and has escalated sharply in recent months, carrying out coordinated bombings, train hijackings, and mass casualty attacks. “Instability inside Iran can be helpful to these groups as it may make it easier for them to move across the borders and also easier to find access to military equipment,†Pande continues, stressing that the picture cuts both ways. “Instability inside Iran and the Iranian state’s focus on the western frontier means the Pakistani state may find it easier to target these Baluch groups, knowing that Iran’s attention is diverted.†Pakistan is also home to an estimated 15 to 20 percent Shia population, one of the largest outside Iran. Violence erupted in Pakistani cities following news of Khamenei’s death. Jihadist networks, including the Islamic State Khorasan Province, al-Qaeda, and the TTP, have been trying to expand their footprints in Balochistan, and instability in Iran would divert Pakistani security resources toward border management, creating an opening for those networks to grow. In Balochistan’s Makran coast region, home to the Chinese-operated deep-sea port of Gwadar, local officials have advised residents to avoid Iranian territory entirely. A nuclear state on three fronts Then there is India. Last May, the two nuclear-armed neighbors fought their most intense clash since 1971. India launched Operation Sindoor on May 7, striking nine sites linked to militant groups Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba in Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir — the first time India had struck inside Pakistan’s Punjab province since the 1971 war. When reports surfaced that Pakistan had summoned its Nuclear Command Authority, the body that controls decisions over its nuclear arsenal, the crisis took on a different character altogether. Analysts read it as a calculated signal. Pakistani officials later said no such meeting occurred. Fears of escalation to the nuclear threshold drove United States government involvement, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio working the phones before President Trump announced the ceasefire on social media on May 10. The intervention produced a fragile truce yet left the underlying tensions entirely intact. Delhi has held the Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance since then, a move Islamabad has called an act of war. The Indus basin supplies roughly 80 percent of Pakistan’s irrigated agricultural land and underpins a sector that accounts for nearly a quarter of GDP. Dostyar does not mince words about where all this leaves Islamabad. “Pakistan is facing a failing economy, political instability, and internal separatist movements,†he asserts. “In the face of all this, it is an enormous gamble to engage in multiple external conflicts. It may be a ‘distraction’ strategy, but it poses a significant regional risk, particularly regarding the security of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.†Pande agrees the military believes it can manage all three frontiers for now, partly because of what she describes as confidence in Washington’s backing and a mutual defense arrangement Pakistan concluded with Saudi Arabia in September 2025, which stipulates that any aggression against either country is treated as aggression against both. Still, she flags a structural weakness in the information campaign that sustains it. “The message being sent by the top brass is that events that are happening are a conspiracy against Pakistan, in an attempt to rally the people to support the state and its actions,†she says. That Washington has left the mediation work entirely to Ankara, Doha, and Riyadh is itself telling and consequential. As Dostyar puts it, “Washington’s apparent absence from mediation is likely driven by either insufficient awareness about what is truly going on or a strategic choice due to competing priorities.†In plain terms, the United States is either not paying close enough attention or has decided this fire is someone else’s to put out. That calculation carries costs. A nuclear state fighting one neighbor, frozen out by another, and watching a third descend into war on its doorstep is exactly the kind of cascading regional breakdown that tends to pull Washington back in regardless of its intentions. The security of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal under simultaneous pressure on three fronts, the risk of jihadist networks exploiting the chaos in Balochistan, and the potential for an escalation that pulls in India — all of these are American national security equities, whether Washington chooses to engage or not. The Eid pause now expiring gives diplomats the narrowest of windows. Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey all called this week for a path toward a sustainable agreement. Whether the structural conditions for such an agreement exist is another matter entirely. Pakistan’s preconditions — TTP sanctuaries dismantled, militant leaders handed over — are non-starters for a Taliban government that has staked its domestic legitimacy on refusing to be seen as compliant with Islamabad’s demands. The Taliban’s own precondition, recognition of Afghan sovereignty over the Durand Line, is equally unacceptable to Pakistan’s military establishment. The underlying drivers are unchanged. As Pande frames it, the core problem is not a lack of mediation but a lack of political will on both sides. “The Afghan Taliban believes they are no longer beholden to Pakistan, they are in power, and they are reluctant to act against their ideological ally, the TTP,†she adds. “Pakistan believes that since it helped the Afghan Taliban regain power, the latter should be grateful to Pakistan, should keep Pakistan’s interests in mind and should tame the TTP. The key challenge for Pakistan is the ongoing conflict with its former proxy.†The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief. Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration. Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief Keep reading...Show less 
 Access all of The Cipher Brief’s national security-focused expert insight by becoming a Cipher Brief Subscriber+
 Member.
 Sign UpLog In

 Pakistan: Broker of Peace While Still at War
 22 April, 2026 International Taliban security personnel stand guard near the Torkham border crossing between Afghanistan and Pakistan in the Nangarhar province on February 27, 2026. AFP journalists in Kabul and Kandahar heard blasts and jets overhead, as Pakistan launched air strikes on the Afghan capital and southern power base of the Taliban authorities.
 
 
 ( Photo by Aimal Zahir / AFP via Getty Images)
 
 
 By
 Hollie McKay Contributing Cipher Brief Reporter Hollie McKay is a Cipher Brief contributing writer, war crimes investigator, and author of «Only Cry for the Living: Memos from Inside the ISIS Battlefield». She previously worked as an investigative and international affairs/war correspondent for Fox News Digital for over fourteen years with a focus on war, terrorism, and crimes against humanity. Just a few weeks ago, Pakistan, the host for fragile ceasefire talks aiming to end the war between the U.S. and Iran, was at war with Afghanistan in what has been described as the worst conflict between the two countries in years. A ceasefire between Pakistan and Afghanistan that was scheduled to run from midnight March 19 to midnight March 24 — and brokered at the request of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey — offered the first lull in nearly a month of what was widely described as open warfare. Few analysts were treating it as anything more than a pause, risking Pakistan’s Information Minister Attaullah Tarar was explicit: Operation Ghazab Lil Haq would resume with greater intensity the moment any cross-border attack, drone strike, or terrorist incident occurred inside Pakistan during the holiday period. On Monday, as the ceasefire approached its midnight deadline, Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar reaffirmed that Pakistan’s approach had not shifted. “Pakistan remains firmly committed to eradicating the menace of terrorism,†he said. Previous ceasefires have not held. The one brokered by the same mediators in October 2025 collapsed within days — Istanbul peace talks broke down on October 29, and Pakistan threatened to “obliterate†the Taliban government shortly after. Saudi-led mediation in December 2025 also failed. What has changed is the scale of the conflict. Pakistan declared “open war†against Afghanistan. Late February brought Operation Ghazab Lil Haq — air and ground strikes hammering Taliban positions across Kabul, Kandahar, Paktia, Nangarhar, Khost, and Paktika, the most significant cross-border military action since the Taliban retook power in 2021. Pakistani officials now claim more than 684 Taliban fighters killed, over 912 injured, 252 posts destroyed, and 229 tanks, armored vehicles, and artillery guns taken out of action. The Taliban dispute nearly all of those figures. Pakistani airstrikes have hit Kabul repeatedly, Afghan forces have sent drones and mortars back across the border, and the United Nations has tallied at least 289 Afghan civilian casualties since the fighting began — 104 of them children, 59 women. The worst single day came on March 16. A Pakistani airstrike hit the Omid Addiction Treatment Hospital in Kabul while patients were inside. Afghan authorities counted more than 400 dead. The UN put the confirmed figure at 143 or more. Pakistan said it had struck only military infrastructure. The following day, mass funerals moved through the capital. Aparna Pande, Senior Fellow for India and South Asia at the Hudson Institute, tells The Cipher Brief that the ceasefire pattern should surprise no one. “Historically speaking, these ceasefires have never been durable,†she says. “Each side has simply used the pause in fighting to rebuild and replenish before the next round.†With the truce now expiring and both sides’ core grievances entirely unresolved, the question pressing analysts is whether Islamabad has a realistic end-state in mind, or whether open war with a nuclear-armed state’s most volatile neighbor has become a policy that Pakistan can start but not finish. A relationship Pakistan can no longer manage The roots of this conflict run directly through Islamabad’s own strategic choices. For decades, Pakistan cultivated the Afghan Taliban as a buffer against Indian influence, the doctrine of “strategic depth,†conceived in the 1980s, envisioned a pliant Kabul as an extension of Pakistani security space. That calculation has collapsed entirely. The immediate trigger for the current war is the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, the militant group that Islamabad accuses Kabul of sheltering and enabling. TTP attacks inside Pakistan have dramatically escalated since 2021, and Pakistan’s Army Chief Field Marshal Asim Munir said during a March 4 visit to troops in South Waziristan that peace can only exist if the Taliban “renounced their support for terrorism and terrorist organisations.†The Taliban, meanwhile, have never recognized the Durand Line, the colonial-era border Pakistan regards as sacrosanct, and that dispute alone makes any durable political settlement nearly impossible to achieve. Aref Dostyar, Director of the Afghanistan Program at the University of Notre Dame and former senior Afghan diplomat, tells The Cipher Brief that Pakistan’s military logic is backfiring on itself. “If the goal is to weaken the Taliban, Pakistan’s aggression is backfiring because it is triggering a ‘rally round the flag’ effect,†he says. “Even Taliban opponents are being cornered to choose between supporting the current regime’s stance against Pakistan or appearing to justify foreign aggression. Most are choosing the former.†The strategic paradox here is stark: Islamabad is now at war with an actor it once created, sustained, and expected to serve its interests indefinitely. Pande is equally direct: any durable agreement would require each side to move off entrenched positions that the other has shown no willingness to abandon. The Afghan Taliban would need to pressure their ideological ally, the TTP, to ease attacks inside Pakistan. For its part, Pakistan would need to accept that “it cannot combat an insurgent movement through conventional means and hence offer some economic and other incentives,†Pande says, underscoring that “there is a reason a compromise has not happened as both sides are sticking to their hardline positions.†Dostyar also questions Islamabad’s underlying objectives. “Pakistan cites the TTP as justification for ‘open war,’ but its true aims are unclear,†he analyzes. “Mapping the specific locations of Afghan targets may reveal an agenda that contradicts their stated counter-terrorism goals.†The Iranian dimension The war in Afghanistan, however, is not happening in isolation. On February 28, coordinated United States and Israeli strikes on Iran killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and triggered a rapidly expanding Middle East conflict. For Pakistan, already engaged in open fighting on its northwestern border, the implications of Iranian instability on its southwestern frontier are severe. Pakistan’s western frontier with Iran runs for 565 miles, cutting through territory where both sides of the border — Pakistan’s Balochistan and Iran’s Sistan-Balochistan — have long hosted ethno-separatist insurgencies. Roughly $1.4 billion in goods moved between the two countries in 2024-2025, most of it through barter deals and informal crossings rather than anything approaching a formal trade architecture. Iranian fuel and food have kept Balochistan’s markets from seizing up entirely since the Afghan border shut in October. That lifeline now runs through a war zone, and the border districts of Balochistan, among Pakistan’s poorest, would feel any disruption most acutely. Afghanistan shares its own 572-mile border with Iran, and the stakes for Kabul are equally acute. Iran hosts an estimated three to five million Afghan refugees and migrant workers. It serves as Afghanistan’s primary remaining trade route to the sea via Chabahar port, a lifeline that became critical after Pakistan closed its border in October. With that route now disrupted by the war, Afghanistan faces a dual economic squeeze that has no near-term resolution. Pande points out that the security calculus around Balochistan is shifting fast. “Groups like the BLA have used Iranian and Afghan Baluchistan to operate inside Pakistani Baluchistan,†she observes. The BLA, the Balochistan Liberation Army, is the most powerful of several insurgent groups operating in the province, a banned separatist organization designated a foreign terrorist group by the United States that seeks to carve an independent Balochistan from Pakistani territory and has escalated sharply in recent months, carrying out coordinated bombings, train hijackings, and mass casualty attacks. “Instability inside Iran can be helpful to these groups as it may make it easier for them to move across the borders and also easier to find access to military equipment,†Pande continues, stressing that the picture cuts both ways. “Instability inside Iran and the Iranian state’s focus on the western frontier means the Pakistani state may find it easier to target these Baluch groups, knowing that Iran’s attention is diverted.†Pakistan is also home to an estimated 15 to 20 percent Shia population, one of the largest outside Iran. Violence erupted in Pakistani cities following news of Khamenei’s death. Jihadist networks, including the Islamic State Khorasan Province, al-Qaeda, and the TTP, have been trying to expand their footprints in Balochistan, and instability in Iran would divert Pakistani security resources toward border management, creating an opening for those networks to grow. In Balochistan’s Makran coast region, home to the Chinese-operated deep-sea port of Gwadar, local officials have advised residents to avoid Iranian territory entirely. A nuclear state on three fronts Then there is India. Last May, the two nuclear-armed neighbors fought their most intense clash since 1971. India launched Operation Sindoor on May 7, striking nine sites linked to militant groups Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba in Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir — the first time India had struck inside Pakistan’s Punjab province since the 1971 war. When reports surfaced that Pakistan had summoned its Nuclear Command Authority, the body that controls decisions over its nuclear arsenal, the crisis took on a different character altogether. Analysts read it as a calculated signal. Pakistani officials later said no such meeting occurred. Fears of escalation to the nuclear threshold drove United States government involvement, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio working the phones before President Trump announced the ceasefire on social media on May 10. The intervention produced a fragile truce yet left the underlying tensions entirely intact. Delhi has held the Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance since then, a move Islamabad has called an act of war. The Indus basin supplies roughly 80 percent of Pakistan’s irrigated agricultural land and underpins a sector that accounts for nearly a quarter of GDP. Dostyar does not mince words about where all this leaves Islamabad. “Pakistan is facing a failing economy, political instability, and internal separatist movements,†he asserts. “In the face of all this, it is an enormous gamble to engage in multiple external conflicts. It may be a ‘distraction’ strategy, but it poses a significant regional risk, particularly regarding the security of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.†Pande agrees the military believes it can manage all three frontiers for now, partly because of what she describes as confidence in Washington’s backing and a mutual defense arrangement Pakistan concluded with Saudi Arabia in September 2025, which stipulates that any aggression against either country is treated as aggression against both. Still, she flags a structural weakness in the information campaign that sustains it. “The message being sent by the top brass is that events that are happening are a conspiracy against Pakistan, in an attempt to rally the people to support the state and its actions,†she says. That Washington has left the mediation work entirely to Ankara, Doha, and Riyadh is itself telling and consequential. As Dostyar puts it, “Washington’s apparent absence from mediation is likely driven by either insufficient awareness about what is truly going on or a strategic choice due to competing priorities.†In plain terms, the United States is either not paying close enough attention or has decided this fire is someone else’s to put out. That calculation carries costs. A nuclear state fighting one neighbor, frozen out by another, and watching a third descend into war on its doorstep is exactly the kind of cascading regional breakdown that tends to pull Washington back in regardless of its intentions. The security of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal under simultaneous pressure on three fronts, the risk of jihadist networks exploiting the chaos in Balochistan, and the potential for an escalation that pulls in India — all of these are American national security equities, whether Washington chooses to engage or not. The Eid pause now expiring gives diplomats the narrowest of windows. Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey all called this week for a path toward a sustainable agreement. Whether the structural conditions for such an agreement exist is another matter entirely. Pakistan’s preconditions — TTP sanctuaries dismantled, militant leaders handed over — are non-starters for a Taliban government that has staked its domestic legitimacy on refusing to be seen as compliant with Islamabad’s demands. The Taliban’s own precondition, recognition of Afghan sovereignty over the Durand Line, is equally unacceptable to Pakistan’s military establishment. The underlying drivers are unchanged. As Pande frames it, the core problem is not a lack of mediation but a lack of political will on both sides. “The Afghan Taliban believes they are no longer beholden to Pakistan, they are in power, and they are reluctant to act against their ideological ally, the TTP,†she adds. “Pakistan believes that since it helped the Afghan Taliban regain power, the latter should be grateful to Pakistan, should keep Pakistan’s interests in mind and should tame the TTP. The key challenge for Pakistan is the ongoing conflict with its former proxy.†The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief. Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration. Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief Keep reading...Show less 
 Access all of The Cipher Brief’s national security-focused expert insight by becoming a Cipher Brief Subscriber+
 Member.
 Sign UpLog In
Just a few weeks ago, Pakistan, the host for fragile ceasefire talks aiming to end the war between the U.S. and Iran, was at war with Afghanistan in what has been described as the worst conflict between the two countries in years. A ceasefire between Pakistan and Afghanistan that was scheduled to run from midnight March 19 to midnight March 24 — and brokered at the request of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey — offered the first lull in nearly a month of what was widely described as open warfare. Few analysts were treating it as anything more than a pause, risking Pakistan’s Information Minister Attaullah Tarar was explicit: Operation Ghazab Lil Haq would resume with greater intensity the moment any cross-border attack, drone strike, or terrorist incident occurred inside Pakistan during the holiday period. On Monday, as the ceasefire approached its midnight deadline, Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar reaffirmed that Pakistan’s approach had not shifted. “Pakistan remains firmly committed to eradicating the menace of terrorism,†he said. Previous ceasefires have not held. The one brokered by the same mediators in October 2025 collapsed within days — Istanbul peace talks broke down on October 29, and Pakistan threatened to “obliterate†the Taliban government shortly after. Saudi-led mediation in December 2025 also failed. What has changed is the scale of the conflict. Pakistan declared “open war†against Afghanistan. Late February brought Operation Ghazab Lil Haq — air and ground strikes hammering Taliban positions across Kabul, Kandahar, Paktia, Nangarhar, Khost, and Paktika, the most significant cross-border military action since the Taliban retook power in 2021. Pakistani officials now claim more than 684 Taliban fighters killed, over 912 injured, 252 posts destroyed, and 229 tanks, armored vehicles, and artillery guns taken out of action. The Taliban dispute nearly all of those figures. Pakistani airstrikes have hit Kabul repeatedly, Afghan forces have sent drones and mortars back across the border, and the United Nations has tallied at least 289 Afghan civilian casualties since the fighting began — 104 of them children, 59 women. The worst single day came on March 16. A Pakistani airstrike hit the Omid Addiction Treatment Hospital in Kabul while patients were inside. Afghan authorities counted more than 400 dead. The UN put the confirmed figure at 143 or more. Pakistan said it had struck only military infrastructure. The following day, mass funerals moved through the capital. Aparna Pande, Senior Fellow for India and South Asia at the Hudson Institute, tells The Cipher Brief that the ceasefire pattern should surprise no one. “Historically speaking, these ceasefires have never been durable,†she says. “Each side has simply used the pause in fighting to rebuild and replenish before the next round.†With the truce now expiring and both sides’ core grievances entirely unresolved, the question pressing analysts is whether Islamabad has a realistic end-state in mind, or whether open war with a nuclear-armed state’s most volatile neighbor has become a policy that Pakistan can start but not finish. A relationship Pakistan can no longer manage The roots of this conflict run directly through Islamabad’s own strategic choices. For decades, Pakistan cultivated the Afghan Taliban as a buffer against Indian influence, the doctrine of “strategic depth,†conceived in the 1980s, envisioned a pliant Kabul as an extension of Pakistani security space. That calculation has collapsed entirely. The immediate trigger for the current war is the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, the militant group that Islamabad accuses Kabul of sheltering and enabling. TTP attacks inside Pakistan have dramatically escalated since 2021, and Pakistan’s Army Chief Field Marshal Asim Munir said during a March 4 visit to troops in South Waziristan that peace can only exist if the Taliban “renounced their support for terrorism and terrorist organisations.†The Taliban, meanwhile, have never recognized the Durand Line, the colonial-era border Pakistan regards as sacrosanct, and that dispute alone makes any durable political settlement nearly impossible to achieve. Aref Dostyar, Director of the Afghanistan Program at the University of Notre Dame and former senior Afghan diplomat, tells The Cipher Brief that Pakistan’s military logic is backfiring on itself. “If the goal is to weaken the Taliban, Pakistan’s aggression is backfiring because it is triggering a ‘rally round the flag’ effect,†he says. “Even Taliban opponents are being cornered to choose between supporting the current regime’s stance against Pakistan or appearing to justify foreign aggression. Most are choosing the former.†The strategic paradox here is stark: Islamabad is now at war with an actor it once created, sustained, and expected to serve its interests indefinitely. Pande is equally direct: any durable agreement would require each side to move off entrenched positions that the other has shown no willingness to abandon. The Afghan Taliban would need to pressure their ideological ally, the TTP, to ease attacks inside Pakistan. For its part, Pakistan would need to accept that “it cannot combat an insurgent movement through conventional means and hence offer some economic and other incentives,†Pande says, underscoring that “there is a reason a compromise has not happened as both sides are sticking to their hardline positions.†Dostyar also questions Islamabad’s underlying objectives. “Pakistan cites the TTP as justification for ‘open war,’ but its true aims are unclear,†he analyzes. “Mapping the specific locations of Afghan targets may reveal an agenda that contradicts their stated counter-terrorism goals.†The Iranian dimension The war in Afghanistan, however, is not happening in isolation. On February 28, coordinated United States and Israeli strikes on Iran killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and triggered a rapidly expanding Middle East conflict. For Pakistan, already engaged in open fighting on its northwestern border, the implications of Iranian instability on its southwestern frontier are severe. Pakistan’s western frontier with Iran runs for 565 miles, cutting through territory where both sides of the border — Pakistan’s Balochistan and Iran’s Sistan-Balochistan — have long hosted ethno-separatist insurgencies. Roughly $1.4 billion in goods moved between the two countries in 2024-2025, most of it through barter deals and informal crossings rather than anything approaching a formal trade architecture. Iranian fuel and food have kept Balochistan’s markets from seizing up entirely since the Afghan border shut in October. That lifeline now runs through a war zone, and the border districts of Balochistan, among Pakistan’s poorest, would feel any disruption most acutely. Afghanistan shares its own 572-mile border with Iran, and the stakes for Kabul are equally acute. Iran hosts an estimated three to five million Afghan refugees and migrant workers. It serves as Afghanistan’s primary remaining trade route to the sea via Chabahar port, a lifeline that became critical after Pakistan closed its border in October. With that route now disrupted by the war, Afghanistan faces a dual economic squeeze that has no near-term resolution. Pande points out that the security calculus around Balochistan is shifting fast. “Groups like the BLA have used Iranian and Afghan Baluchistan to operate inside Pakistani Baluchistan,†she observes. The BLA, the Balochistan Liberation Army, is the most powerful of several insurgent groups operating in the province, a banned separatist organization designated a foreign terrorist group by the United States that seeks to carve an independent Balochistan from Pakistani territory and has escalated sharply in recent months, carrying out coordinated bombings, train hijackings, and mass casualty attacks. “Instability inside Iran can be helpful to these groups as it may make it easier for them to move across the borders and also easier to find access to military equipment,†Pande continues, stressing that the picture cuts both ways. “Instability inside Iran and the Iranian state’s focus on the western frontier means the Pakistani state may find it easier to target these Baluch groups, knowing that Iran’s attention is diverted.†Pakistan is also home to an estimated 15 to 20 percent Shia population, one of the largest outside Iran. Violence erupted in Pakistani cities following news of Khamenei’s death. Jihadist networks, including the Islamic State Khorasan Province, al-Qaeda, and the TTP, have been trying to expand their footprints in Balochistan, and instability in Iran would divert Pakistani security resources toward border management, creating an opening for those networks to grow. In Balochistan’s Makran coast region, home to the Chinese-operated deep-sea port of Gwadar, local officials have advised residents to avoid Iranian territory entirely. A nuclear state on three fronts Then there is India. Last May, the two nuclear-armed neighbors fought their most intense clash since 1971. India launched Operation Sindoor on May 7, striking nine sites linked to militant groups Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba in Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir — the first time India had struck inside Pakistan’s Punjab province since the 1971 war. When reports surfaced that Pakistan had summoned its Nuclear Command Authority, the body that controls decisions over its nuclear arsenal, the crisis took on a different character altogether. Analysts read it as a calculated signal. Pakistani officials later said no such meeting occurred. Fears of escalation to the nuclear threshold drove United States government involvement, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio working the phones before President Trump announced the ceasefire on social media on May 10. The intervention produced a fragile truce yet left the underlying tensions entirely intact. Delhi has held the Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance since then, a move Islamabad has called an act of war. The Indus basin supplies roughly 80 percent of Pakistan’s irrigated agricultural land and underpins a sector that accounts for nearly a quarter of GDP. Dostyar does not mince words about where all this leaves Islamabad. “Pakistan is facing a failing economy, political instability, and internal separatist movements,†he asserts. “In the face of all this, it is an enormous gamble to engage in multiple external conflicts. It may be a ‘distraction’ strategy, but it poses a significant regional risk, particularly regarding the security of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.†Pande agrees the military believes it can manage all three frontiers for now, partly because of what she describes as confidence in Washington’s backing and a mutual defense arrangement Pakistan concluded with Saudi Arabia in September 2025, which stipulates that any aggression against either country is treated as aggression against both. Still, she flags a structural weakness in the information campaign that sustains it. “The message being sent by the top brass is that events that are happening are a conspiracy against Pakistan, in an attempt to rally the people to support the state and its actions,†she says. That Washington has left the mediation work entirely to Ankara, Doha, and Riyadh is itself telling and consequential. As Dostyar puts it, “Washington’s apparent absence from mediation is likely driven by either insufficient awareness about what is truly going on or a strategic choice due to competing priorities.†In plain terms, the United States is either not paying close enough attention or has decided this fire is someone else’s to put out. That calculation carries costs. A nuclear state fighting one neighbor, frozen out by another, and watching a third descend into war on its doorstep is exactly the kind of cascading regional breakdown that tends to pull Washington back in regardless of its intentions. The security of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal under simultaneous pressure on three fronts, the risk of jihadist networks exploiting the chaos in Balochistan, and the potential for an escalation that pulls in India — all of these are American national security equities, whether Washington chooses to engage or not. The Eid pause now expiring gives diplomats the narrowest of windows. Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey all called this week for a path toward a sustainable agreement. Whether the structural conditions for such an agreement exist is another matter entirely. Pakistan’s preconditions — TTP sanctuaries dismantled, militant leaders handed over — are non-starters for a Taliban government that has staked its domestic legitimacy on refusing to be seen as compliant with Islamabad’s demands. The Taliban’s own precondition, recognition of Afghan sovereignty over the Durand Line, is equally unacceptable to Pakistan’s military establishment. The underlying drivers are unchanged. As Pande frames it, the core problem is not a lack of mediation but a lack of political will on both sides. “The Afghan Taliban believes they are no longer beholden to Pakistan, they are in power, and they are reluctant to act against their ideological ally, the TTP,†she adds. “Pakistan believes that since it helped the Afghan Taliban regain power, the latter should be grateful to Pakistan, should keep Pakistan’s interests in mind and should tame the TTP. The key challenge for Pakistan is the ongoing conflict with its former proxy.†The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief. Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration. 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