The author analogizes Pakistan’s 24 Sept. 2026 strikes on ten sites in Kandahar, Paktia, and Khost to Colombia’s 2008 raid on a FARC camp in Ecuador: sovereignty is not a shield for sanctuary. Sequence given: 19 Sept. Kohat mosque bombing (23 dead, 15 police; claimed by Ittihadul Mujahideen Pakistan / Hafiz Gul Bahadur); 21 Sept. eight drones from Afghan soil intercepted and mortar fire on Pakistani posts. Attaullah Tarar: strikes “deliberate, precise, calibrated, and proportionate.”

“Unwilling or unable” is invoked as established practice (Colombia–Ecuador; Turkey–PKK in northern Iraq), not a Pakistani invention. Taliban denials of TTP sanctuary are set against Pakistani and researcher claims of movement, camps, and an unpoliced border. Irregular cells are said to need a rear area the way armies need supply lines.

Years of protests and intel requests are called failed restraint. Ask: dismantle camps, hand over commanders, police the line—or accept that asking failed.

In March 2008, Colombian jets crossed into Ecuadorian airspace and destroyed a Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) encampment a mile past the border, killing the group’s second-in-command. Ecuador called it a violation of sovereignty. Colombia called it self-defense against an armed group that Quito had tolerated, and by several accounts accommodated, on its own soil for years. The raid strained relations for months, but it settled a question that had been left deliberately vague that a state does not get to invoke territorial integrity while hosting the men who plan attacks on its neighbor. Sovereignty is not a shield for sanctuary, and it never has been.

That is the doctrine Pakistan invoked this week when its aircraft struck ten terrorist sites inside Afghanistan. 

On September 19, a suicide bomber tore through Friday prayers at the Police Lines........

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