Pakistan Just Bombed Kabul and Kandahar. This Is Now a War.

At 1:50 in the morning on Friday, explosions shook Kabul.

Pakistani fighter jets hit targets across Afghanistan's capital — home to six million people — then struck Kandahar, the spiritual heartland of the Taliban, where supreme leader Sheikh Haibatullah Akhundzada lives.

"Our cup of patience has overflowed," Pakistan's Defence Minister Khawaja Asif posted on X. "Now it is open war between us and you."

He wasn't exaggerating.

From Border Skirmishes to Bombing Capitals

Three days ago, this was a border dispute. Pakistani and Afghan forces traded fire along the Durand Line — the 2,611-kilometer frontier that Afghanistan has never formally recognized. We covered the first shots when Taliban forces captured Pakistani outposts.

That's over now. Pakistan launched Operation Ghazab Lil Haq — "Righteous Fury" — a full military campaign targeting Taliban positions across six provinces. Two brigade headquarters destroyed. An ammunition depot in Kandahar obliterated. Twenty-seven Taliban posts hit. Pakistani officials claim 133 Taliban fighters killed and 200 wounded.

Afghanistan tells a completely different story. The Taliban says eight fighters died. They claim their own retaliatory strikes killed 55 Pakistani soldiers and captured two military bases and 19 posts along the border.

Both sides' numbers are unverifiable. That's what early-stage wars look like.

A 133-Year-Old Line Nobody Agreed On

Every conflict has a trigger and a root. The trigger was Pakistan's air strikes on Afghan border positions last Sunday, which killed at least 18 people including women and children, according to the Afghan Red Crescent. The Taliban launched what it called "large-scale offensive operations" in retaliation.

The root goes back to 1893.

The Durand Line was drawn by Sir Mortimer Durand, a British colonial officer, to separate British India from Afghanistan. It carved through ethnic Pashtun territory — splitting families, tribes, and communities across two countries. Afghanistan has rejected it as illegitimate under every government since. The Taliban reject it too.

Pakistan built fences. Afghanistan tore them down. Since the Taliban retook power in 2021, there've been 75 recorded clashes between Afghan and Pakistani forces along this line.

The October 2025 ceasefire, brokered by Qatar and Turkey, was supposed to stop the bleeding. It held for four months. It's gone now.

What Pakistan Wants (And Can't Have)

Pakistan's core problem is simple to state and impossible to solve: it helped the Taliban win Afghanistan, and now it can't control them.

During the 20-year US-NATO war, Pakistan's intelligence services maintained ties with Taliban leadership. When the Taliban swept back to power in August 2021, Pakistan expected a friendly neighbor.

Instead, it got the opposite. The Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) — a separate but ideologically aligned group — uses Afghan territory to launch attacks inside Pakistan. Suicide bombings. Targeted killings. Pakistan wants the Afghan Taliban to crack down on TTP. The Afghan Taliban won't.

There's a brutal irony here. Pakistan armed and sheltered one Taliban to fight another country's war. Now a different Taliban shelters fighters waging war on Pakistan.

The Nuclear Shadow

Here's the part that should worry everyone. Pakistan has roughly 170 nuclear warheads. It's one of nine nuclear-armed states. Afghanistan isn't nuclear, but it sits at the intersection of Pakistani, Iranian, Chinese, and Central Asian interests.

Nobody credible thinks Pakistan would use nuclear weapons against Afghanistan. But a destabilized Pakistan — one fighting a war on its western border while managing tensions with India on its eastern border — is a problem with no regional boundary.

India's President Murmu flew a combat helicopter near the Pakistani border this week. Symbolic, maybe. But symbolism matters when your neighbor is bombing capitals and calling it "open war."

How the World Sees This

The framing depends on where you're standing.

Pakistani media presents this as overdue self-defense. The government line: we absorbed years of TTP attacks launched from Afghan soil, we showed patience, Afghanistan broke the ceasefire, and we responded. "Righteous Fury" isn't subtle naming.

Afghan sources frame it as aggression against a sovereign nation. Former President Hamid Karzai — still influential despite holding no official role — wrote that Afghanistan "will defend their beloved homeland with complete unity." He told Pakistan to "choose the path of good neighbourliness" and blamed Islamabad for creating the violence it now faces.

Western media focuses on the scale. Bombing a capital city is a different category than border skirmishes. The words "open war" between two countries — one nuclear-armed — landed hard in newsrooms.

China and the Gulf states, both with interests in Afghan stability, haven't said much publicly yet. That silence tells its own story.

Three Ways This Goes

Escalation. Pakistan keeps bombing. Afghanistan retaliates with cross-border ground operations. The Torkham border crossing — still open for Afghans returning from Pakistan — shuts completely. Humanitarian corridors collapse. Regional powers get pulled in. Stalemate. Both sides declare victory. Pakistan says it destroyed Taliban infrastructure. The Taliban says it repelled Pakistani aggression. Quiet back-channel talks resume. The ceasefire gets patched. Nothing fundamental changes. Fighting flares again in months. Mediation. Qatar and Turkey, who brokered the October ceasefire, step back in. China — Pakistan's closest ally and Afghanistan's biggest infrastructure investor — applies pressure. A new agreement emerges with slightly better enforcement mechanisms. It holds slightly longer than the last one.

History suggests option two, cycling back to option three. But the scale of these strikes — bombing Kabul and Kandahar simultaneously — means Pakistan crossed a line it can't easily uncross.

What's Actually at Stake

Forty million Afghans live under a Taliban government that's already cut off from most of the world. Pakistan hosts 1.7 million Afghan refugees and has been deporting hundreds of thousands more since October 2023.

The Torkham crossing was still processing returnees while shelling echoed nearby Friday morning. People fleeing one crisis walked toward another.

This war won't stay contained. Afghan displacement pushes into Iran. Pakistani instability ripples through Gulf labor markets. Trade routes connecting Central Asia to the Indian Ocean run through this conflict zone.

And the deeper problem remains: a border drawn by a colonial officer 133 years ago, never accepted by one side, never negotiable for the other. Every ceasefire is a bandage on a wound that was designed to stay open.

By Friday afternoon, the Taliban said they were willing to negotiate. Pakistan's jets had already flown home.

The border was quiet. For now.