Kabul/Islamabad, Sep 30 (IANS) : Pakistan is increasingly turning to direct military force in Afghanistan as Islamabad can neither command the government in Kabul nor build an effective alternative to it, a recent report mentioned. It noted that the shift underscores the extent to which the doctrine of strategic depth has collapsed, with Pakistan now seeking ways to destabilise the very Taliban victory it once celebrated.
“UNAMA has once again confirmed civilian deaths after Pakistani airstrikes in Afghanistan. In Kunar, a man, a woman and a girl were killed in the September attacks. Islamabad announced that it had hit militant hideouts and killed TTP fighters. The identities of those fighters have not been independently established, while the civilians have, as usual now, names, families and a place where they died. This is becoming the recurring imbalance in Pakistan’s Afghan war: the military declares its targets, others document its casualties,” a report in ‘Parrhesia News’ detailed.
According to it, the September strikes were not isolated incidents, with Pakistani operations having repeatedly resulted in the deaths of Afghan civilians from the border provinces to the Omid drug rehabilitation centre in Kabul.
“Pakistan disputes accounts of what it hit and insists that it is attacking militants. It is of course possible for a strike to kill civilians and militants alike: but after so many documented civilian deaths, Islamabad cannot keep treating its stated intention as proof of its result. The question is who was actually hit, and why the evidence for the military’s claims remains so much harder to find than the evidence of civilian harm,” it added.
The Pakistani army has justified its privileged position in politics by claiming that it alone can guarantee national security. The persistent insurgency in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is thus more than an “operational embarrassment” — it directly challenges the institution’s claim to political authority in the name of protection, the report mentioned.
“Striking Afghanistan restores the image of initiative. It supplies the public with an external adversary, ministers with a language of resolve and the generals with an answer to criticism that does not require them to account for their record. The advantage is temporary, which helps explain why the strikes recur. If bombing Afghan territory had broken the TTP’s operational capacity, Pakistan would not need to keep presenting each new raid as a decisive response to the latest attack at home,” it stated.
Highlighting how Pakistan’s Generals are fighting a war in Afghanistan as they have failed to impose their will on Kabul, the report said, “They are also fighting a political battle at home because they cannot admit how little control they have achieved over the TTP. Airstrikes allow them to pursue both battles at once. They can punish an Afghan government that refuses to obey them and present that punishment to Pakistanis as proof of command. What they cannot do is make the evidence of their failure disappear.”
