The Debate | Opinion | South Asia

Pakistan’s Attacks and the World’s Silence Over Afghanistan

The illegitimacy of the Taliban does not mean that the fundamental rights of the Afghan people have been suspended. 

In recent weeks, Pakistan has intensified its airstrikes on Afghanistan. Civilians, including children, are paying the highest price for the ongoing conflict between the neighboring countries. Among these attacks, the bombing of a drug rehabilitation center in Kabul was the most shocking. According to the United Nations, 143 people were killed in that strike and hundreds more were wounded; a figure that reflects nothing less than a human catastrophe. This came even as UNAMA, three weeks before the rehabilitation center attack, had reported that Pakistan’s strikes had killed at least 70 people, injured 478 others, and displaced around 115,000 people in Afghanistan.

The silence surrounding this escalating conflict is profound, and damning. Afghanistan today is suffocating under the harsh and repressive policies of the Taliban on the one hand, and facing cross-border attacks on the other. The people of Afghanistan are trapped in a multilayered siege: freedom and security have been taken from within, while from the outside their safety is being dangerously violated.

Yet, in the face of Afghanistan’s current reality, the silence of many states and institutions that usually speak in the name of protecting civilian life is louder than the explosions themselves. 

Sadly, after several years of professional work and engagement in these same spaces, I have gradually come to a bitter conclusion: the blood of Afghan children and Afghan civilians is often valued less than the blood of children and civilians elsewhere – blood that, when spilled, triggers one emergency meeting after another, brings swift condemnations, and fills the hallways of international institutions with statements of “deep concern.” 

But when it comes to Afghanistan, those same voices fall silent; or if something is said, it is so cautious and lifeless that it sounds more like an attempt to avoid responsibility than an expression of solidarity. It is a silence that sends one message clearly: The standards of empathy and outrage are not the same for everyone, and they are fixed based on where one lives.

More painful than the silence from outside, however, is part of the debate unfolding among Afghans themselves, particularly in the diaspora. Some say Pakistan has a right to defend itself, that Afghanistan has become a sanctuary for terrorist groups, and therefore Pakistan’s attacks were inevitable, justifiable. 

But before anything else, it must be said that a country that for decades has lived by the policy of “good terrorism” and “bad terrorism,” that created some groups, while sheltering , and making use of others in its regional rivalries, can hardly present itself today as a clean and credible actor in fighting terrorism. This duplicity is a political contradiction, and Pakistan knew that when it chose this path.

But even if the Pakistani state claims self-defense in its ongoing battle with Afghanistan, the issue still does not disappear. International law places strict conditions on the use of force, especially in the territory of another state. Necessity, proportionality, and the distinction between military and civilian targets are among the most basic of these conditions. There is no legal principle that says a state may, in the name of pursuing a security threat, attack another country’s territory, place civilian centers at risk of destruction, and then wrap everything up with a few security talking points. 

If that logic is accepted, the world enters a phase in which every state can simply say, “we have evidence,” and turn that into a license to........

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