Since Pakistan declared “open war” on the Taliban regime in Kabul last week, it has sent waves of jets over its disputed border with Afghanistan. It continued to do so even as Iran, which neighbors both countries, was attacked by the U.S. and Israel and retaliated with drone and missile strikes across the region.

It takes a particular kind of self-assuredness to push an already unstable situation to the brink. But, when it comes to its neighbors, Pakistan’s military has never run short of confidence.

They should know better. Two live conflicts in this same broken, mountainous arc mean risks have more than doubled. Frontiers are already porous here, crossed by smuggling routes, refugee trails, and militant hideouts. A descent into chaos will offer armed groups an inviting landscape that is controlled by nobody. As they have done so often before, threats born here will spill out onto the world. And, once again, Pakistan will be on the frontline of a global threat.

Pakistan began by saying that it was carrying out “intelligence-based, selective operations,” but that doesn’t quite match its subsequent actions. Information Minister Attaullah Tarar insisted that more than 300 Taliban officials had been killed in strikes on Kabul and two other cities. Meanwhile, the Afghans claimed that more than 50 enemy soldiers had died along the border.

Pakistan’s “establishment” — the catch-all term for its military-led deep state which hoards the real power — has clearly lost patience with its one-time partners. For more than a decade, they were the most assiduous propagators of the “good Taliban” theory: That the Islamist movement included harmless Pashtun nationalists who would just turn to governance if the evil West left them alone.

When President Joe Biden eventually abandoned Afghanistan in 2021, Pakistan’s generals were overjoyed. For over five decades their primary security strategy had been to nurture Islamic extremists. They kept at it, although not even once had it turned out well for them. But, as black-turbaned men drove their flat-bed trucks into Kabul, it seemed to them that their big gamble had finally paid off.

It hasn’t, and for reasons that were entirely predictable. For one, Pashtun nationalists will always have problems with a border that slices their heartland in two. In addition, it is fundamentally unlikely that the Taliban, “good” or otherwise, would have cracked down on their co-ideologues who believe in doing to Islamabad what they have done to Pakistan.

As a consequence, Tareek al Taliban Pakistan’s ambition and audacity has only grown over the past three years. Early in February, a suicide bomber targeted a Shia mosque in the capital, killing 31 people. The conflict data platform ACLED counted 600 TTP attacks in the year to October 2025, and argued that the group is now “positioning itself as an alternative center of power” in the tribal borderlands.

Some in the West will be tempted to see this as the generals’ chickens coming home to roost. The Pakistani state has mobilized against the Taliban over the past week with as much energy as it expended hampering NATO’s campaign in Afghanistan in the two decades after 2002.

The administration in Washington, however, is much more favorably inclined to its new friends in Pakistan. It has stressed the country’s right to defend itself. The generals, meanwhile, have named their attack “Operation Righteous Fury,” which chimes with America’s Operation Epic Fury in Iran.

Islamabad is not yet willing to indulge in a bit of self-reflection. It has blamed this upsurge in terrorism on the ingratitude of its erstwhile proteges, as well as on Indian meddling. What is certain is that the army made a strategic error that it will have to find a better way to live with than regular airstrikes on the Taliban. Unlike the U.S., it cannot withdraw from the neighborhood.

It does have other instruments in its arsenal, however, and is using some of them — for example, a blockade of trade into landlocked Afghanistan. With Iran at war with the U.S. and Israel to its west and a closed border to its east, Kabul may be forced to rely on highways going north that travel through dangerously rebellious parts of the country.

But it’s unclear what outcome the generals hope to precipitate with this offensive. Regime change is presumably impossible without a full-scale invasion of Afghanistan, and that’s never gone well for anyone. Negotiations have been ongoing for years, but trust on both sides has broken down. And Islamabad clearly isn’t winning hearts and minds in Kabul.

What it has done, however, is reunite Pakistan’s political class in support of the army, including the recalcitrant Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf. That party’s jailed leader, the former prime minister Imran Khan, is himself a Pashtun, and made his name in politics by grandstanding against NATO airstrikes on the Taliban. The PTI, which is in power in the Pashtun-majority province of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, refused to back strikes on the Taliban last year; but has now been forced to join a broad national consensus in favor of this war.

But it has also meant that the broader region is even more unstable. The theocrats in both Tehran and Kabul at least kept a lid on the Islamic State presence in the region, which poses a major threat to Central and South Asia. If these two centers of power are simultaneously fighting for their life, what comes after might be even worse.

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This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Mihir Sharma is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A senior fellow at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi, he is author of “Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy.”

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