Pakistan is now invoking against Afghanistan the very cross-border strike doctrine it publicly rejected when India applied it during Operation Sindoor in May 2025 — and doing so on considerably weaker evidentiary grounds, according to a report published in American magazine The National Interest.

The Doctrine Pakistan Once Dismissed

Operation Sindoor, launched on the night of 7 May 2025, followed a terrorist attack that killed 26 Indians in Pahalgam on 22 April 2025. India targeted nine sites in Pakistan linked to terror outfits Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), including the LeT headquarters at Muridke and the JeM complex in Bahawalpur. The political doctrine articulated after fighting paused on 10 May 2025 was unequivocal: future terror attacks originating from Pakistani soil would be treated as acts of war, with India reserving the right to determine its own response.

Pakistani officials at the time rejected the argument outright, contending that India had no right to act on accusations it could not prove. For three decades, the report notes, plausible deniability had served as the guiding principle of the Pakistani state's engagement with terror networks.

Pakistan Applies the Same Logic Against Kabul

By February 2026, Islamabad had adopted precisely the framework it had condemned. The Pakistan Air Force conducted strikes on Nangarhar and Paktika on 21 and 22 February, targeting Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) camps inside Afghanistan. Pakistani Defence Minister Khawaja Asif declared 'open war' on Afghanistan on 27 February. Pakistan's Operation Ghazab lil Haq — a sustained military offensive — involved air and artillery strikes across eastern Afghan provinces. Pakistani forces also reportedly struck an Afghan university in the Asadabad region in late April.

The Evidentiary Gap

Critically, the legal basis for Pakistan's actions against Afghanistan appears far thinner than India's documented case against Pakistan. A UN Special Rapporteur report from March 2026 found that Pakistan could not provide credible evidence that TTP attacks inside its territory were directed or controlled by Afghan authorities. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has long held that 'the mere tolerance of armed groups by one state does not confer on a neighbouring state the right of self-defence.'

As the The National Interest report observed: 'This is the legal architecture Islamabad dismissed when applied to Sindoor. It is now the architecture under which Pakistan operates.'

The Broader Significance of Operation Sindoor

The report argues that Operation Sindoor's lasting significance lies in its recalibration of the cost calculus around cross-border terrorism. By demonstrating that state support for terror could no longer shelter behind plausible deniability, India effectively set a regional precedent — one that Pakistan, despite its initial rejection, has since internalised and acted upon, albeit without comparable evidentiary justification.

The irony, the report suggests, is that Pakistan's own conduct in Afghanistan has retroactively validated the doctrine it spent considerable diplomatic capital opposing.