Pakistan launched airstrikes early on 10 June against Afghanistan’s eastern Khost, Kunar and Paktika provinces. The Taliban government’s spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, said 13 people were killed, 11 of them children, along with a woman and an elderly man, and 14 others were wounded. Pakistan confirmed it had carried out strikes on militant hideouts and infrastructure and said 26 militants were killed. The two governments routinely give very different casualty figures.
The strikes ended more than a month of relative calm in fighting that both sides have at times called open war. They came a day after suspected Pakistani Taliban fighters attacked a security post in Hasan Khel, in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, killing six members of the Federal Constabulary. Islamabad accuses Kabul of sheltering the Pakistani Taliban, known as the TTP; the Taliban deny the charge.
The strikes ended more than a month of calm in a war both sides have called open.
The violence runs along the corridors that link Central and South Asia. The Uzbekistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan railway and the CASA-1000 power line, two projects Central Asia is counting on to reach the sea and sell its surplus electricity, both pass through this border. Each renewed round of fighting is a reminder of the security risk priced into those routes.