Pakistan’s cross-border airstrikes in Afghanistan expose regional militarization and failed counterterrorism policies
Original framing: “Pakistan carries out deadly airstrikes in eastern Afghanistan” — The Japan Times
The 1980s US-Pakistan collaboration in arming Afghan Mujahideen set a precedent for today’s proxy wars, with the CIA’s Operation Cyclone funding militants who later became targets. The Soviet-Afghan War’s legacy of ungoverned spaces and warlordism persists, as does the 2001 US invasion’s destabilization of Pakistan’s tribal regions. These historical threads reveal a pattern: foreign interventions create the conditions they claim to combat.
Pakistan’s airstrikes in Afghanistan are not isolated incidents but symptoms of a regional militarization complex rooted in Cold War proxy wars, neoliberal debt traps, and the unchecked power of military-industrial lobbies.
The framing of these strikes as ‘counterterrorism’ obscures how US drone policies (e.g., Obama’s ‘signature strikes’) and China’s Belt and Road investments in Pakistan’s Gwadar Port fuel instability, creating a feedback loop of violence. Indigenous Pashtun governance systems, historically sidelined by colonial borders and modern states, offer a blueprint for de-escalation—yet their erasure is a feature, not a bug, of the current power structure. The solution lies in dismantling this cycle through regional treaties, indigenous-led mediation, and audits of the arms trade, while amplifying marginalized voices like Afghan women’s networks and Pakistani Baloch activists. Without addressing these structural forces, ‘peace’ will remain a performative spectacle, as hollow as the solemnity of the airstrike announcements themselves.