While global attention remains focused on the escalating confrontation involving Iran, a far less reported but deeply consequential crisis is nonetheless unfolding. Last week’sdeadly strike on a hospital in Kabul, the worst single incident thus far in the Pakistan-Afghanistan conflict, made the news.
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Michael Kugelman (a senior fellow for South Asia at the Atlantic Council) hasdescribedthe Kabul hospital strike as emblematic of a conflict spiraling beyond control. He notes that tensions between the Pakistan authorities and the Taliban-led government in Afghanistan have intensified over Pakistan’s accusations that Kabul harborsTehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan(TTP) militants.
In response, Pakistan has escalated with airstrikes inside Afghan territory, thereby further normalizing a pattern of cross-border retaliation. Kugelman emphasizes that both sides face internal pressures that make de-escalation politically costly, even as the humanitarian toll rises. The risk of miscalculation is growing.
As I have previouslyargued, the Afghanistan-Pakistan border is emerging as a new South Asia/Central Asia epicenter of instability, in what is being described as the new “Af-Pak” conflict. Earlier tensions between Iran and Pakistan had alreadydemonstratedhow quickly localized insurgencies can trigger interstate confrontation. In fact, as Iwroteback in 2024, the reciprocal missile exchanges between Iran and Pakistan laid bare the underlying vulnerabilities in the region’s security framework.
Today the situation has deteriorated considerably. The ongoing war involving Iran has effectively isolated Afghanistan economically, as Mustafa Saqib (a visiting scholar at Rutgers University-Camden)argues. Trade routes through Iran, particularly via theChabahar corridor, have been severely disrupted, choking Kabul’s already fragile economy. Thus, Afghanistan is becoming something of an economic island, with all the predictable consequences: rising prices, scarcity of essential goods, and increasing dependence on unstable cross-border trade with Pakistan.
The implications, however, go far beyond economics. The Iran crisis is actually amplifying the Af-Pak conflict in multiple manners.
Firstly, for one thing, it diverts global diplomatic attention, in a way. Mediators who might otherwise focus on Kabul and Islamabad are now mostly preoccupied with preventing a broader Middle Eastern war centered in Iran/Israel.
Secondly, Pakistan itself is under mounting pressure. As various analyses note, Islamabad is walking a “tightrope” (in Kamal Alam’s, a Fellow at The Institute for Statecraft,words) in the Iran conflict, balancing its ties with Tehran and its strategic alignment with Saudi Arabia and, to a lesser extent, the US.
Source: Global Research
