Pakistan is increasingly resorting to direct military force against targets inside Afghanistan, a development that analysts say reflects Islamabad's inability to either control the Taliban government in Kabul or construct a viable alternative to it. According to a recent analytical report, the shift marks a decisive unravelling of Pakistan's long-held doctrine of strategic depth — the idea that Afghanistan could serve as a compliant buffer and strategic backyard. Pakistan is now, reportedly, seeking to destabilise the very Taliban victory it once actively supported.

Civilian Deaths and Disputed Targets

The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) has confirmed civilian casualties from Pakistani airstrikes in Afghanistan. In the province of Kunar, the September strikes killed a man, a woman, and a girl, according to the report. Islamabad maintained that its forces had struck militant hideouts and neutralised fighters belonging to the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). However, the identities of those alleged fighters have not been independently verified, while the civilian victims have been documented with names, families, and confirmed locations of death.

The report noted a persistent and troubling asymmetry: Pakistan's military declares its intended targets, while independent monitors document the actual casualties. The September strikes were not isolated incidents — Pakistani military operations have repeatedly resulted in Afghan civilian deaths, from border provinces to the Omid drug rehabilitation centre in Kabul.

Pakistan's Justification Under Scrutiny

Islamabad has consistently disputed accounts of what its strikes hit, insisting the operations target militants. The report, however, argued that after so many documented civilian deaths, Pakistan cannot continue to treat its stated intention as proof of its actual outcome. '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,' the report observed.

It is acknowledged that a strike can kill both civilians and militants simultaneously. But the recurring pattern, critics argue, demands a far higher standard of accountability than Islamabad has so far provided.

The Domestic Political Calculus

The Pakistani army has long justified its outsized role in the country's politics by positioning itself as the sole guarantor of national security. The persistent insurgency in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, fuelled largely by the TTP, is therefore more than an operational embarrassment — it directly undermines the institution's foundational claim to political authority.

Striking Afghan territory, the report argued, serves a dual domestic purpose: it supplies the public with a visible external adversary, gives ministers the language of resolve, and provides generals with a deflection that avoids accountability for their record against the TTP inside Pakistan. 'The advantage is temporary, which helps explain why the strikes recur,' the report stated. '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.'

Strategic Depth in Reverse

The report drew a sharp conclusion about the broader strategic picture: Pakistan's generals are simultaneously fighting a war in Afghanistan — having failed to impose their will on Kabul — and a political battle at home, unable to admit how little control they have achieved over the TTP. Airstrikes, it argued, allow them to pursue both battles at once: punishing an Afghan government that refuses to comply while presenting that punishment to Pakistani audiences as evidence of command and control. 'What they cannot do is make the evidence of their failure disappear,' the report concluded.

This comes amid a broader deterioration in Pakistan-Afghanistan relations since the Taliban takeover in 2021, with Islamabad's expectations of a pliant, friendly government in Kabul having gone largely unmet. The doctrine of strategic depth — a cornerstone of Pakistan's security establishment's thinking for decades — now appears to have inverted, with Afghanistan emerging as a source of strategic liability rather than advantage.

How Islamabad recalibrates its Afghan policy — and whether it can develop instruments of influence beyond military strikes — will likely define the trajectory of this increasingly volatile relationship in the months ahead.