When I saw the news this Sunday, staring at photos of a flattened Bagram Air Base, I didn’t feel triumph. Honestly? I just felt exhausted. If you’re sitting comfortably in New York or London right now, I know exactly how your news anchors are spinning this. They’re making it sound like Pakistan just lost its mind, calling our recent airstrikes a sudden “escalation” and “unprovoked aggression.”

It’s almost funny, if it wasn’t so deeply tragic. When I look at the rubble at Bagram, I just see a country that is bone-tired from burying its sons. We are just sick and tired of bleeding. Foreign pundits want to sit in their TV studios and debate the ethics of our “self-defense.” But from where ordinary Pakistanis are standing, the violence isn’t new. The Taliban didn’t suddenly become our enemy yesterday. This war has been tearing through our homes for over a decade. All that changed last week is that we finally decided to hit back.

Look at the reality next door. When the Americans packed up and left, people naively hoped the Taliban might actually step up and build a functioning country. Instead, Afghanistan has collapsed into a massive, lawless black hole. Forget fixing an economy—they can’t even police their own backyard, or behave like a normal neighbor.

For years, we’ve had a poison spilling over the Durand Line. Hundreds of our soldiers and........

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