On October 9, 2025, Pakistani aircraft struck targets in Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital. The strikes reportedly targeted positions of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), including an armored vehicle carrying the group’s leader, Noor Wali Mehsud, who reportedly survived the attack. The operation marked a moment of reckoning for Islamabad: The Pakistani state apparatus, which historically has supported extremist entities as instruments of state policy, put itself at war with its own creations.
[Pakistan’s] goal was to use militant proxies as leverage to shape Afghanistan’s politics, counter India’s influence, and project power in Central Asia.
For decades, Pakistan’s military-intelligence establishment nurtured extremist groups—from the Afghan Taliban to the Haqqani Network, to the TTP—to advance its regional ambitions. Its goal was to use militant proxies as leverage to shape Afghanistan’s politics, counter India’s influence, and project power in Central Asia. Pakistani officials initially viewed the TTP as a controllable offshoot of the Taliban movement. However, the organization, formed in 2007 as an umbrella alliance of militant factions operating in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, turned against the Pakistani state. This reversal stemmed largely from Islamabad’s post-9/11 theoretical alignment with the U.S.-led Global War on Terror—a move the TTP perceived as a betrayal of jihadist ideals and a threat to Pashtun tribal autonomy.
More recently, the TTP has intensified its attacks on Pakistani security forces, perhaps feeling emboldened by Pakistan’s internal political turmoil after India’s May 2025 strikes on Pakistan during Operation Sindoor. The October 8 ambush that killed two senior officers and nine other soldiers was only the latest in a long chain of deadly assaults.
Unable to contain the TTP militants, Islamabad turned its frustration toward Kabul. However, the timing of the strike coincided with Afghan Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi’s first official visit to India and New Delhi’s decision to reopen its embassy in Kabul. India is engaging with the Taliban regime—facilitated by the group’s condemnation of the April 22 terrorist attack in Jammu and Kashmir by The Resistance Front, a shadow group of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba. For Pakistan, long accustomed to viewing Afghanistan as its strategic backyard and India as its existential rival, the image of New Delhi receiving Taliban leaders was intolerable.
The airstrikes thus served a dual purpose: an assertion of military relevance in a region where Pakistan’s influence is fading, and a warning to Kabul against warming ties with India. Yet this act of adventurism revealed weakness more than strength. It exposed a state struggling to control its narrative—militarily humiliated by insurgents, diplomatically sidelined, and politically fractured at home, where unrest simmers in Balochistan, Gilgit-Baltistan, and Pakistan-administered Kashmir. In this context, Pakistan’s bombing of Kabul looks less like a military operation and more like a tantrum—a dangerous attempt to reassert dominance in a region that is moving beyond its control.
The airstrikes [were] an assertion of military relevance in a region where Pakistan’s influence is fading, and a warning to Kabul against warming ties with India.
On October 11-12, 2025, fighting between Pakistan and Afghanistan escalated along the Durand Line. A week later, Pakistan and Afghanistan agreed to a ceasefire after Doha-mediated talks. The initial statement said the agreement would help reduce tensions “on the border between the two brotherly countries.” The Taliban objected to the word “border,” prompting Qatari mediators to delete it to avoid implying recognition of the Durand Line.
This episode underscores the collapse of Pakistan’s “strategic-depth” doctrine—the idea of controlling Afghanistan as a buffer and fallback zone in any conflict with India. By influencing Afghan politics, Islamabad once sought to dilute Indian presence and suppress Pashtun nationalism that could threaten its own cohesion. Yet the Taliban’s post-2021 assertion of sovereignty—rejecting Pakistani directives, cultivating ties with India, and dismissing the Durand Line as illegitimate—has shattered that illusion.
The Taliban, for all its rigidity, is no longer Islamabad’s “compliant client.” Kabul’s rulers act as nationalists first and Islamists second, asserting autonomy in ways that expose Pakistan’s shrinking leverage. The October airstrikes and the subsequent ceasefire dispute reveal a stark reality: Pakistan’s dream of regional hegemony has given way to insecurity, fragmentation, and the slow unraveling of its strategic ambitions.
