Afghan Officials Say Pakistani Strikes Killed 36 Civilians
Afghanistan reported 36 civilians killed and more than 160 wounded in eastern provinces; Pakistan said it killed 29 militants. The gap is the story.
Afghan officials said Pakistani airstrikes and a ground operation killed at least 36 civilians and wounded more than 160 in eastern Afghanistan overnight into Monday. Pakistan said it had killed 29 militants. Both numbers cannot be true, and the gap between them is the story.
The strikes hit Paktia, Paktika and Kunar — three rugged border provinces where the frontier between the two countries has never been more than a line on a map. Taliban deputy spokesman Hamdullah Fitrat said one strike destroyed a home in Mandokhail village, in Paktia's Chamkani district, killing an elderly man and a child. When neighbours gathered to dig survivors out, he said, the area was hit a second time, killing 28 villagers and wounding 158. Six more people died in Giyan district, in Paktika, according to Afghan accounts.
Pakistan tells it differently. Information Minister Attaullah Tarar said security forces carried out a ground operation along the border late Sunday, then struck what he described as militant hideouts and safe havens, killing 29 fighters. Islamabad said the operation answered a wave of attacks inside Pakistan, including an assault on a paramilitary Rangers headquarters in Karachi that killed three soldiers and was claimed by the militant group Jamaat-ul-Ahrar.
Kabul condemned the attacks as a cowardly act of aggression
and said they would be met with retaliation. By Monday afternoon the two governments had summoned each other's senior diplomats to lodge formal protests.
A war that keeps not ending
None of this is new, which is part of why it is so grim. Hundreds of people have been killed in cross-border fighting since February, when Afghanistan launched retaliatory strikes after an earlier round of Pakistani airstrikes inside its territory. Round after round of talks has failed to hold. China hosted both sides in April, and Beijing said afterward that the two had agreed not to escalate and to look for a solution. The agreement did not survive the spring.
At the heart of the quarrel is the Pakistani Taliban, or TTP — fighters Islamabad says shelter on the Afghan side of the border and slip across to attack Pakistani soldiers and police. Kabul denies harbouring them. Each strike Pakistan calls precise, the Afghan government calls a massacre, and the civilians of Paktia and Paktika are left to count their own dead while two capitals argue over the arithmetic.
What the dispute over numbers obscures is the thing both sides agree on without saying: the border region has become a place where a militant attack in Karachi can be answered, days later, by bombs falling on a village hundreds of kilometres away. As long as that logic holds, the next round is already being planned, and the count will start again.
