The overnight airstrikes conducted by the Pakistani Air Force inside Afghan territory on February 21-22, mark yet another bloody chapter in the troubled history between the two neighbours.
With credible reports from the United Nations confirming at least 13 civilian deaths in Nangarhar province — including women and children — and further strikes damaging a madrassa in Paktika, the attack represents not a strategic necessity but a desperate attempt by Pakistani military establishment that is grappling with the collapse of its half-century-old rentier economy.
Fifty Years of Milking Afghanistan
For more than half a century, Pakistan's military establishment has treated Afghanistan as a cash cow to be milked for the benefit of its Generals and their foreign patrons. This relationship began during the Cold War when the US funnelled billions of dollars through Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) to fund the Afghan mujahideen against Soviet occupation.
The arrangement proved extraordinarily lucrative for the Pakistani officer corps that positioned itself as the indispensable conduit for American largesse.
But since the US withdrawal in early 2020, Pakistan has grown increasingly desperate for American hand-holding as the country faces bankruptcy and political crisis. This desperation has deep roots.
The Pakistani military constructed an entire institutional culture around what economists call "rent-seeking"—extracting wealth without productive contribution. Afghanistan provided the perfect vehicle: first against the Communists, then against the very Al Qaeda terrorists that evolved from the US-funded mujahideen. Each iteration of conflict brought fresh Dollar inflows, and each Dollar inflow left the Generals wealthier and more entrenched.
The pattern reveals itself with depressing consistency. When the Americans needed supply lines into Afghanistan, Pakistan's military-controlled infrastructure extracted premium payments. When the CIA required cooperation for drone strikes, the ISI demanded intelligence access and operational funding. When counter-narcotics efforts threatened to disrupt the drug trade, military officers allegedly facilitated its continuation.
As documented by the Baloch Advocacy and Studies Centre, six of the nine major drug trafficking routes from Afghanistan pass through Balochistan, moving freely despite — or perhaps because of — the heavy presence of security checkpoints.
An Economic Empire Built on Smuggling and Corruption
The scale of military commercialism in Pakistan defies easy comprehension.
Qambar Baloch, General Secretary of the Baloch Advocacy and Studies Centre, has detailed how the Pakistan Army has built "an illicit, unregulated economy" in Balochistan alone, "driven by border smuggling, drug trafficking, and the misappropriation of public funds".
The numbers are staggering. An estimated 6 to 8 million litres of Iranian petroleum enter Pakistan-controlled Balochistan daily, with approximately 40 percent of the vehicles involved reportedly belonging to the Pakistan Army, its informers, or pro-army death squads. This single smuggling operation allegedly earns the military nearly $1 million per day.
The Pakistan Army is maintaining vast commercial interests across real estate, consumer goods, and agriculture, while functioning with little oversight or accountability. This shadow empire extends to mineral extraction, with the army-run Frontier Works Organisation entering partnerships for copper and gold exploration in Eastern Chagai.
Meanwhile, army officials are reportedly selling American arms intended for use against the Taliban back onto the black market. The irony would be amusing if its consequences were not so deadly: weapons paid for by American taxpayers to fight terrorists have been resold by Pakistani officers to enrich themselves, while the very terrorist groups those weapons were meant to eliminate continue to operate from safe havens along the border.
The Post-American Withdrawal Crisis: Dollars Dry Up
America's withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 fundamentally disrupted this comfortable arrangement. The Dollars that had flowed freely for decades — justifying the military's outsized role in Pakistani politics and society — began to slow down to a trickle.
Pakistan's Defence Minister Khawaja Asif recently acknowledged this new reality with unusual candour, admitting to Deutsche Welle that Islamabad has "lost its traditional sphere of influence in Afghanistan to regional countries including Turkey, the UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and China". His explanation cut to the heart of the matter: "They can spend money, and we cannot".
This admission represents a devastating indictment of Pakistan's historical approach to Afghanistan. For fifty years, the military used American Dollars to purchase influence, fund proxies, and maintain its strategic depth doctrine. When the Americans left, so did the money — and with it, Pakistan's ability to compete with wealthier regional powers.
The Afghan Taliban, whom Pakistan had simultaneously nurtured to trade for the US Dollars and use them as pawns against regional forces such as India, have become mature enough by not entertaining any machinations from Pakistan. Rather, since the US withdrawal, they have proved to be astute negotiators and have entered into long-term gainful partnerships with their neighbours, including India.
This has alarmed the Pakistani Generals for they see it as an end to the manipulative, rent-extracting relationship that they always nurtured with the Afghans.
The Taliban's post-2024 crackdown on drug production — banning poppy cultivation across territory they control — delivered another body blow to the Pakistani military's illicit revenue streams.
The February 2026 Airstrikes: A Manufactured Crisis
It is against this backdrop of shrinking revenues and regional marginalisation that we must understand Pakistan's latest military adventure.
On the night of February 21-22, Pakistani jets struck multiple locations in Nangarhar and Paktika provinces. The Taliban's police command in Nangarhar reported that 18 civilians were killed and eight wounded in Behsud district alone, with five bodies still missing days later.
The UN confirmed receiving "credible reports of civilian casualties" and provided specific details: in Barmal district, an airstrike impacted a madrassa and partially damaged a nearby mosque; in Urgun district, it partially destroyed a vacant private residential house.
The Taliban's Defence Ministry condemned the strikes, accusing Pakistan of "targeting civilian and religious sites" in an attempt to conceal what it called Islamabad's "internal security failures".
Pakistan's rationale follows a familiar pattern. Interior Ministry officials claim the strikes targeted TTP and ISKP hideouts, killing approximately 70 militants in retaliation for recent suicide attacks inside Pakistan. They claimed the operation was "precise and accurate," targeting what Islamabad terms "Fitna al-Khawarij" — a derogatory label for the Pakistani Taliban.
Yet even as Pakistan's military strikes Afghanistan, it simultaneously faces a coordinated uprising in Balochistan, where militants carried out a dozen simultaneous attacks across the province, killing scores of military personnel and kidnapping many more. The Pakistani response to this domestic catastrophe has been predictably dishonest: blaming India for the attacks while lacking either the capability or the courage to confront its eastern neighbour directly.
The Pashtun and Baloch Suffering
The populations paying the heaviest price for the Pakistani military's desperation are the very people who have suffered most throughout this fifty-year tragedy: Pashtuns on both sides of the Durand Line and Baloch in their resource-rich but impoverished province.
Pashtun communities in the former tribal areas have endured decades of military operations, drone strikes, and economic marginalisation — all justified in the name of security, all serving to enrich the officer corps while impoverishing the population.
In Balochistan, the military's commercial empire has systematically dispossessed local communities. According to the Baloch Advocacy and Studies Centre, the army has "acquired prime coastal land in Gwadar" while aggressively promoting investment by outsiders, "further marginalising the local population". The Pakistan Maritime Security Agency and Pakistan Coast Guard — the latter commanded by an army officer —allegedly facilitate illegal trawling by Chinese and Karachi-based fishing vessels, "rapidly depleting marine resources in Balochistan's coastal waters" and devastating local fishermen's livelihoods.
The provincial budget is drained under the guise of security. In recent years, the Auditor General of Pakistan and the National Accountability Bureau have persistently highlighted financial irregularities by the army.
For Baloch and Pashtuns, the message could not be clearer: their lands serve as the military's economic colony, their resources extracted to fund an institution that offers them nothing but surveillance, suppression, and contempt.
The current military operations — whether against Baloch militants or across the Afghan border — represent not a genuine effort to secure these communities, but rather the military's attempt to preserve its extractive privileges against populations that increasingly reject its authority.
Desperate Generals, Enduring Victims
The February 2026 airstrikes on Afghanistan represent the Pakistani military's latest attempt to manufacture the conditions for renewed Dollar inflows. Having spent fifty years extracting wealth from the Afghan conflict, the Generals now find themselves confronting a transformed regional landscape in which their traditional clients have become independent actors, their accustomed revenue streams have dried up, and their domestic opponents grow bolder by the day.
The Taliban have made their position unmistakably clear. By summoning Pakistan's ambassador to deliver a formal protest, by publicly accusing Islamabad of targeting civilians, and by promising retaliation at a time of their choosing, they signal that the old relationship of dependency has ended. Pakistan's defence minister admits as much, however reluctantly.
Yet the army officials persist in their old habits - falling back on the only tool they truly understand: military force. Unable to secure their own territory against Baloch insurgents, they bomb Afghan villages and claim victory. Unable to acknowledge their institution's unconstitutional domination of Pakistani society, they manufacture external crises to justify internal repression.
The victims remain those who have always paid the price for this model of greed: Pashtun villagers on both sides of the border, whose children die in airstrikes meant to protect a smuggling empire; Baloch fishermen, whose livelihoods are destroyed so military-controlled trawlers can deplete their waters; and the people of Pakistan itself, whose country is battling multiple crises while its uniformed elite grows fat on the proceeds of conflict.
Amnesty International has called for a "thorough, independent, and impartial investigation" into the civilian harm caused by Pakistan's strikes, noting that "this is not the first time civilians have borne the brunt of the use of force". Such investigations are certainly warranted. But they will not address the fundamental problem.
An institution that can conceive of no other relationship with its neighbours except extraction, and no other solution to its problems except violence. Until that changes, until Pakistan's military is brought under genuine civilian control, its commercial empire dismantled, and its officers held accountable for their crimes, the people of the region will continue to suffer.
Have you liked the news article?