Three days ago I wrote in this column about a sentence in a government announcement that I thought nobody would quote.
The strikes of the twenty-first, the announcement said, were against hideouts and safe havens “in the border region”. Not in Afghanistan. Not inside Afghan territory.
I argued that the formulation was not an accident — that it was the difference between an operation on one’s own side of a line and an act that engages another state’s sovereignty, and that we had been given the ambiguous version while Parliament had been told nothing at all.
On Thursday morning the information minister posted that Pakistan had conducted precision air and drone strikes against ten locations in Afghanistan.
The word was dropped. There was no debate in between.
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I want to be careful about what I am and am not saying, because this is the kind of column that gets read as opposition to the strikes.
It is not. Eight drones crossed into Pakistani airspace on Wednesday, by the government’s account — four brought down near Torkham, four near Kohat. Six days before that, thirty-one people were killed at a police compound in Kohat in an attack that began during Friday prayers and took twenty-two hours to end. A state that does not respond to that is teaching something worse than the response teaches.
My argument is about the manner, and specifically about who decided that Pakistan is now a country which announces strikes inside a neighbour’s territory.
Because somebody did decide it. That is what changed between Monday and Thursday. Not the targets, not the tempo, not the legal theory — the saying. For three days the state was willing to conduct these operations but not to name where. Now it is willing to name where.
That is a substantive shift in posture, and the entire public record of how it was arrived at is a minister’s post on X.
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Consider what naming the location costs, since it is clearly not free or the earlier formulation would not have existed.
It converts an ambiguous act into an admitted violation of another state’s territorial integrity, which is the thing the Charter’s Article 2(4) prohibits and which Article 51 is the exception to. It puts Pakistan on the record as a state conducting cross-border strikes, in the same month that it has been arguing at the Security Council for the right to do so. It also makes the act reviewable — the UN mission in Afghanistan has already confirmed that the twenty-first’s strikes produced civilian casualties, against a Pakistani claim of twenty-eight fighters killed and an Afghan claim of three civilians dead and four wounded.
None of those consequences arrived by surprise. Somebody weighed them and concluded the admission was worth making.
I would like to know who, and on what basis, and the honest answer is that I have no idea and neither does any other citizen of this country.
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Now the part I find hardest.
Kabul says the drones were not theirs. Zabihullah Mujahid denied the attacks outright and promised that “these shameless acts of aggression and attacks by the Pakistani military regime will be met with an appropriate response” — the second such promise in four days.
I do not believe the denial, and I want to be honest that I do not believe it for reasons that are mostly about track record rather than evidence. The groups that have been killing Pakistani policemen operate from Afghan soil and their leadership lives there; the Taliban have denied a great deal over four years that turned out to be true.
But notice the position that leaves a reader in.
Pakistan says eight drones came. Kabul says none did. No independent party has verified either claim. Pakistan says it struck ten launch and storage sites; nobody has located them, nobody has named the dead, and the assessment that the targeting was “deliberate, precise, calibrated and proportionate” was produced by the party that did the targeting.
Four days ago the same structure produced a factual dispute that the United Nations has now partly resolved against the Pakistani account. Twenty-eight fighters, said Rawalpindi. Three civilians, said Kabul. Civilian casualties occurred, says UNAMA.
That is the first hard data point we have about the reliability of these announcements, and it does not favour the announcements.
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So here is where the week leaves us, set down plainly.
Pakistan articulated a cross-border self-defence doctrine at the Security Council on the sixteenth. It struck on the twenty-first and described the location ambiguously. It was attacked, it says, on the twenty-third. It struck again on the twenty-fourth and described the location precisely. Two rounds in four days, with a reciprocal exchange now running between them.
This has a name. It is not an incident and it is no longer a policy being considered. It is a border war of a limited kind, conducted by aircraft and drones, in which both sides announce and both sides deny, and it is escalating on a rhythm of roughly seventy-two hours.
The National Assembly has not sat on it. No resolution has been moved. No minister has been asked, in the chamber, what the objective is, what would count as achieving it, or what Pakistan will do when Kabul makes good on the response it has now promised twice.
The doctrine said: as and when needed.
We have now learned that “as and when needed” is compatible with a fortnight. We have not learned what it is not compatible with, and that is the only question that was ever worth asking.
[Image: File photo — PAF J-10C jets at a national day parade rehearsal, March 2024. AFP via The Express Tribune]
