White Cloth, Two Countries, One War
The ordinary people of Pakistan and Afghanistan are dying for a war they did not make and cannot stop
The Pakistan-Afghanistan story has been written many times. It has been written by foreign correspondents parachuting in from London and Washington with their notebooks and their frameworks. It has been written by think tanks funded by governments with interests in the outcome. It has been written by security analysts who measure the relationship in threat assessments and bilateral briefings. It has been written by diplomats who speak of complexity when they mean impunity.
This piece was not written from any of those positions.
It was written because on February 22, 2026, eighteen members of one family in a village called Girdi Kas in Nangarhar province were killed in a Pakistani airstrike. Five survived. On February 6, 2026, thirty-two people attending Friday prayers at the Khadija Tul Kubra mosque in Islamabad’s Tarlai Kalan neighborhood were killed by a suicide bomber. One hundred and seventy were wounded. In the months between those two events, named Pakistani soldiers from Swabi and Lakki Marwat and North Waziristan were buried in their home districts after dying along a border that has been killing people since long before any of them were born.
None of these people made the decisions that placed them in the path of what killed them. That is the only reason this piece needed to be written. Because that fact, which is the central fact of the Pakistan-Afghanistan relationship as it is actually lived, goes unrecorded in the briefing rooms, the security communiques, and the diplomatic cables that produce the official version of this story.
This piece is the other version. It belongs to Zahir Hussain, who cannot describe what he saw in the mosque garden. To Asadullah, fifteen years old, sitting in a tent at Torkham not knowing what he will study. To Naik Gul Jan from Lakki Marwat, thirty-eight years old, whose name appears in an ISPR statement and nowhere else. To the family in Girdi Kas, of whom eighteen are now dead and five are left to count them.
It is written from Peshawar because Peshawar is where these worlds meet and where the human cost of their collision is most visible to anyone willing to look at it directly, rather than through the lens of whichever establishment’s press release arrived most recently.
The governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan both have spokespeople. This piece is not for them. It is the record of what their decisions have cost the people who never had a vote in making them.
At 1:38 in the afternoon on Friday, February 6, 2026, Zahir Hussain was parking his car outside the Khadija Tul Kubra mosque in Islamabad’s Tarlai Kalan area to attend Friday prayers. The bomb went off before he reached the entrance. The blast threw him against his car door. He survived. What he saw when he walked toward the mosque afterward, he later told CBS News, he could not put into words. “After that, for a while there was horrific silence, then what I saw in the mosque, I don’t have words to explain it.”
Aun Shah was not inside the mosque either. His father was. His father came out with a hole in his stomach.
The mosque’s security volunteers had stopped the bomber at the gate. One of them, already wounded from the attacker’s initial gunfire, shot the bomber in the thigh. The man could not get inside. He detonated where he stood, at the entrance, blowing through the gate, scattering debris across the garden, bringing down part of the structure onto worshippers who had come for noon prayers. By the time rescue workers arrived, thirty-two people were dead and one hundred and seventy wounded, many in critical condition. The Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences declared an emergency and reached full capacity within the hour. The overflow was transferred to hospitals in Rawalpindi.
This was not the first attack on the Khadija Tul Kubra mosque. Three months earlier, in November 2025, a bomber had targeted the same building. The worshippers who came back for Friday prayers on February 6 came back to a mosque they already knew was marked.
The bombing was the deadliest attack in Islamabad since a suicide truck bomb destroyed part of the Marriott Hotel in September 2008, killing sixty-three people.
ISKP, the Islamic State’s Khorasan province affiliate, claimed responsibility on Telegram, releasing a photograph of the attacker. The group stated that it views Shia Pakistanis as legitimate targets. Pakistan’s Defence Minister Khawaja Asif said preliminary findings indicated the bomber had been traveling to and from Afghanistan. The military issued a statement saying the planning, training, and indoctrination for the attack took place in Afghanistan. Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi announced the arrest of four suspects, describing one as an “Afghan Daesh mastermind,” and accused India of funding the attack and providing target information. Afghanistan’s Taliban-run foreign ministry condemned the bombing and denied any connection. India rejected the allegation as baseless.
The thirty-two people who died in the garden of the Khadija Tul Kubra mosque had no part in any of these accusations. They came to pray on a Friday afternoon. They did not come to serve as evidence in a geopolitical argument.
The Soldiers from Waziristan
While the Islamabad bombing of February 6 was the attack that immediately preceded Pakistan’s airstrikes on Afghanistan on February 22, Pakistani soldiers had been dying along the Afghan border long before that single afternoon.
On September 11, 2025, security forces conducted an operation in Lower Dir district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Seven soldiers died in the firefight. ISPR, the Pakistan military’s media wing, published their names in its official statement, as it does for every soldier killed in these operations. Naik Abdul Jalil. Thirty-nine years old. North Waziristan. Naik Gul Jan. Thirty-eight years old. Lakki Marwat. Lance Naik Azmat Ullah. Twenty-eight years old. Lakki Marwat. Sepoy Abdul Malik. Twenty-eight years old. Khyber. Sepoy Muhammad Amjad. Twenty-seven years old. Malakand. Sepoy Muhammad Dawood. Twenty-three years old. Swabi. Sepoy Fazal Qayum. Twenty-one years old. The ISPR statement did not record the district Fazal Qayum came from. He was twenty-one.
In the same period, separate operations in Bajaur and South Waziristan killed twelve more soldiers in a single engagement. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Army Chief Asim Munir attended their funeral prayers in Bannu. Six of the twelve had come from South Waziristan. Four were from Karak. They were young men from border districts, the same terrain where they were fighting and dying, on land their families had lived on for generations.
On December 29, 2025, Major Adeel Zaman, thirty-six years old, from Dera Ismail Khan, was killed leading his troops in an operation in Bajaur district. ISPR said he “laid down his life in the line of duty while leading from the front.” He was buried in his native Dera Ismail Khan.
On December 21, 2025, sixteen Pakistani soldiers were killed in a single TTP attack on an outpost in South Waziristan. The Pakistan Air Force responded four days later with strikes on seven locations in four villages of Barmal district in Afghanistan. The cycle was by then established and mechanical: Pakistani soldiers died along the border, Pakistani jets struck across it, Afghan civilians died in the strikes, the Taliban retaliated, Pakistani soldiers died again.
When the October 11-12, 2025 border clashes broke out, the worst such confrontation since the Taliban took Kabul in 2021, ISPR confirmed twenty-three Pakistani soldiers killed and twenty-nine wounded in a single night. The Taliban claimed fifty-eight Pakistani soldiers dead, a figure Pakistan rejected. Across the week that followed, UNAMA documented thirty-seven Afghan civilians killed and four hundred and twenty-five wounded. In the Spin Boldak clashes of October 15, local sources in Kandahar confirmed at least twenty-nine Afghan civilians killed and one hundred and twenty-two wounded. A district hospital official there confirmed that at least eighty of the wounded were women and children.
The Pakistani soldiers recorded in ISPR statements are not statistics. They are Naik Gul Jan from Lakki Marwat, thirty-eight. They are Sepoy Muhammad Dawood from Swabi, twenty-three. They are Major Adeel Zaman from Dera Ismail Khan, thirty-six, leading from the front. They are the sons of the same border communities that have been absorbing the costs of this unresolved conflict for decades. Their families are in Waziristan and Bajaur and Khyber and Lakki Marwat, communities closest to the wire, communities who live the consequences of decisions made in Rawalpindi and Kandahar most directly and most permanently.
The Pakistan Institute for Conflict and Security Studies documented 2025 as one of the deadliest years in the country’s modern history. Three thousand, four hundred and thirteen people died in conflict-related violence, a seventy-four percent increase over 2024. Civilian deaths at five hundred and eighty were the highest since 2015. Six hundred and sixty-seven security personnel were killed. Pakistan ranked second in the world on the 2025 Global Terrorism Index. ISPR publishes the names every time. What it does not publish is any accounting of whether the strategy that produces these deaths is working, or whether the families left behind in South Waziristan and Bajaur and Dera Ismail Khan were asked whether they consented to it.
Girdi Kas
On the night of February 22, 2026, Pakistani fighter jets struck Girdi Kas village in the Bihsud district of Nangarhar province in eastern Afghanistan. One strike hit a residential home. When the rubble was cleared, eighteen members of one family were dead. Five survived. AFP journalists in Bihsud district saw residents and rescue workers using a bulldozer and shovels to search for bodies under the debris.
The same night, Pakistani jets struck locations in the Bermal and Urgun districts of Paktika province, including a religious seminary and a guesthouse, both reported empty at the time of the strikes. Afghan authorities confirmed at least eighteen people killed across the entire operation, all civilians, including women and children. Pakistan’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting called the operation “intelligence-based selective targeting of seven terrorist camps and hideouts” belonging to the TTP and its affiliates. Pakistan’s own security sources, cited by Geo News, claimed more than eighty people killed across all seven target locations. Amnesty International South Asia said it was “deeply concerned by the reports of civilian casualties” and called for “a thorough, independent, and impartial investigation.” UNAMA raised concern over “credible reports of civilian casualties.”
This was not the first time. Between October and December 2025, UNAMA had already attributed seventy Afghan civilian deaths and four hundred and seventy-eight wounded to Pakistani military forces. In November 2025, Pakistani airstrikes hit a home in the Gurbuz district of Khost province at midnight. Nine children and a woman died. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid confirmed the house belonged to a local man named Waliat Khan. Additional strikes that same night wounded four more civilians in Kunar and Paktika.
In October, during the worst days of the fighting, a Pakistani airstrike in Paktika hit a house where local players had gathered. Three Afghan cricketers died alongside women and children. The International Cricket Council issued a statement of condolence. Afghanistan’s cricket board withdrew from the Pakistan T20I Tri-Nation Series scheduled for November in mourning for the dead.
Cricket players in Paktika. Children in Khost. Eighteen members of one family in Girdi Kas. These are the people the strikes have been reaching.
Pakistan’s stated target in the initial October 9, 2025 strikes was TTP emir Noor Wali Mehsud, reported to be in Kabul’s Abdul Haq Square. Mehsud subsequently released a video confirming he had survived. The target of the February 22, 2026 strikes was TTP leadership and ISKP infrastructure. The mosque bombing on February 6 that triggered the strikes was claimed by ISKP. Pakistan’s Interior Minister identified one of four arrested suspects as an “Afghan Daesh mastermind.” Whether the family of eighteen in Girdi Kas had any connection to Daesh, to the TTP, or to any militant organization is not documented, because the Pakistani military did not document it. What is documented is that eighteen of them are dead.
Pakistan’s military spokesperson Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry told a press briefing in January 2026, in response to Pakistani business groups demanding the reopening of trade, that “blood and business cannot go together.” For the family in Girdi Kas, and for the families of Sepoy Muhammad Dawood and Naik Gul Jan, blood and everything else are inseparable. They are dying inside the same undivided violence. The general who made that statement is not.
What Hussain Shah’s Father and the Family in Girdi Kas Have in Common
Hussain Shah, whose father came out of the Khadija Tul Kubra mosque with a hole in his stomach, is Pakistani. The family in Girdi Kas that lost eighteen members to a Pakistani airstrike is Afghan. They will never meet. The institutions governing both of them have spent four decades ensuring that Pakistani and Afghan grief is directed at each other rather than at the establishments that created the conditions for both.
The Islamabad mosque bombing, for which ISKP claimed responsibility, was used by Pakistan’s military to justify the February 22 strikes on Nangarhar and Paktika. Pakistan’s Defence Minister blamed Afghanistan and India simultaneously, without evidentiary separation between the two claims. The strikes were executed on residential areas in eastern Afghanistan. The people who died in those areas did not bomb the Khadija Tul Kubra mosque. The people who bombed the Khadija Tul Kubra mosque were not the children of the family in Girdi Kas. But the logic of the military response does not require a direct connection. It requires only that Afghanistan remain available as a target and that the Pakistani public be presented with action rather than accountability.
This mechanism operates in both directions. The Taliban government in Kabul uses Pakistani airstrikes on Afghan civilians to consolidate its own domestic legitimacy, presenting the border conflict as evidence that Afghanistan is under external attack requiring continued militarized governance to resist. The Afghan population, which has no vote on how the Taliban governs, is offered the spectacle of resistance in place of schools, functional courts, and the basic structure of a state that answers to someone.
Hussain Shah’s father in an Islamabad hospital. The Girdi Kas family under the rubble in Nangarhar. Sepoy Muhammad Dawood from Swabi, twenty-three years old, buried in his home district after dying in Lower Dir. These are not separate stories. They are one story told from three positions, each produced by the same system, each absorbed by ordinary people who had no say in designing it.
Shahzadgy’s Thirty Years
In October 2023, a widow named Shahzadgy, in her late sixties, was living in Peshawar with her daughter and son-in-law. She had been in Pakistan for decades. When Pakistan’s caretaker government issued its deportation order, police visited her landlord and told him that renting to Afghans meant fines and arrest. She was given no time to prepare. “They told us to go,” she told Al Jazeera. “We spent a great time there with the people but the way the government expelled us, we will never forget, never ever.”
Asadullah was fifteen and had been born in Peshawar. He had never seen Afghanistan. He was in school, learning Urdu and English. When the deportation swept through, he was taken to Torkham. The Taliban had set up a religious school at the crossing to teach expelled children for a few hours each day. “I was getting an education in Urdu and English languages there,” Asadullah told Al Jazeera. “Now I don’t know what I will study here.”
Zaman Gul was forty-five. He had spent thirty years in Pakistan, first in Peshawar, then in Punjab. Forced out in the second wave in April 2025, he spoke from the Omari camp after crossing. “In the end, we only left with the clothes on our backs.”
Malik Javed had lived in Pakistan for over forty years. He has two daughters, nine and seven years old. When deportation rumors spread, he told Amnesty International: “My daughters were heartbroken, crying at the thought of losing their education.”
In Karachi’s Sohrab Goth neighborhood on November 3, 2023, a seventeen-year-old boy was detained in a police raid. He was born in Pakistan. He held a Proof of Registration card issued by UNHCR. He was a minor. His family was denied access to the detention center. He was deported the following day. Amnesty International confirmed that his exact whereabouts following deportation remained unknown.
Khaliq Atifi, an Afghan sports journalist who fled Kabul in December 2021 and was registered with UNHCR in Islamabad, told Human Rights Watch that police checkpoints targeted even documented Afghans. “Even if you have a valid visa, you will still be transferred to the police station, and in most cases, you need to pay a bribe to get released.” Bribes ran between ten thousand and forty thousand Pakistani rupees per encounter.
In Islamabad, informal settlements housing Afghan families were demolished by the Capital Development Authority with, in Amnesty International’s documented finding, “little due process or warning, with homes being destroyed with possessions still inside them.” During the deportation campaign, many women in Afghan-majority neighborhoods slept fully veiled, afraid of night-time raids by male police officers.
Faisal Barakzai, one of those facing expulsion, asked only this: “We just want to live dignified lives, contribute to society, and secure our daughters’ education.”
Pakistan had, as of late 2025, deported 1.7 million Afghans through three phases of the Illegal Foreigners Repatriation Plan, using a caretaker government with no electoral mandate to make a decision of this scale about people who had built their lives in Pakistan across generations. The CSIS noted at the time of the February 2026 bombing that the mosque targeted was likely chosen because harder targets in central Islamabad were inaccessible, given heightened security during an official Uzbek state visit. The Afghans expelled in 2023, 2024, and 2025 were not the bomber. But both the deportation campaign and the bombing are products of the same failed policy architecture that has governed this relationship for forty years and secured nobody on either side of the border.
The Traders, the Trucks, and the Tires
In January 2026, Junaid Altaf, president of the Sarhad Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Peshawar, told Arab News that twelve thousand cargo containers were stranded at border crossings following Pakistan’s October 2025 closure. Pakistani exporters were losing fifty billion rupees, approximately $177 million, every month. Pharmaceutical exports to Afghanistan, cement, fresh vegetables, meat, and rice were suspended entirely. The containers had been stationary so long that, Altaf said, “even their tires are wearing out just from sitting loaded.”
In 2022, Pakistan and Afghanistan exchanged $2.34 billion in goods. By 2024 that had dropped to $1.6 billion. After the October 2025 closures, bilateral trade in the first half of the 2025-26 fiscal year collapsed to $594 million from $1.26 billion in the same period the year before, a fifty-three percent fall in six months, according to official data. The World Bank has documented that Pakistan accounts for 32.37 percent of Afghanistan’s total imports and is the destination for forty-five percent of Afghanistan’s total exports. These are not incidental trade relationships. They are structural dependencies built over decades that serve both populations directly.
Altaf issued a warning that no military press conference has engaged with: “Iran or other countries like Uzbekistan or Turkmenistan will capture this market for the next twenty to twenty-five years, and we won’t get it back.”
The kinnow farmer in Punjab who planted his crop in one political environment is harvesting it in another. The Afghan farmer whose fruits and vegetables feed Pakistani cities has no alternative market of comparable scale. Neither farmer closed the border.
The Wire Through the Village
Zohaib Wazir is thirty-three and from South Waziristan. His family has relatives on the Afghan side of the Durand Line, as Pashtun families have for centuries. Since Pakistan completed its border fence, ninety-eight percent finished by April 2023, he told Radio Free Europe: “We cannot visit them for months. If there is a funeral or a marriage ceremony, we cannot join them.”
Abdul Yousaf, a trader from Kurram district bordering Khost province, described what existed before. “Every day, people from my village went to the Afghan side for work, to drive taxis, or to sell goods.” That daily movement is now regulated, periodically criminalized, and severed entirely during political crises.
The line they live against was drawn on November 12, 1893. Sir Henry Mortimer Durand arrived in Kabul on October 2 of that year with a document to sign with Amir Abdur Rahman Khan, whose financial dependency on British subsidies had been established in advance and was applied as leverage. The resulting line cut through the homelands of the Wazirs, the Mahsuds, the Afridis, the Mohmands, the Shinwaris. No Pashtun community participated in the negotiation. Fifty million Pashtuns live on both sides of that line today. No Afghan government, from the monarchy through the Taliban, has ever formally accepted the Durand Line as a permanent international border. Afghanistan was the only country to vote against Pakistan’s admission to the United Nations in 1947, the objection grounded entirely in this unresolved wound.
Former Afghan Ambassador to Pakistan Janan Mosazai, speaking about Pakistan’s unilateral fence construction, said it would “adversely affect the bilateral relationship” and cause further “popular alienation.” “Putting barriers that cut through communities straddling the Durand Line and aiming to divide a people that have the deepest social, political, and economic ties will not work,” he said.
A woman documented by The New Humanitarian from the Chaman crossing, identified as Gul, crossed secretly in 2024 to visit her daughter in Afghanistan before Eid because legal crossing had become practically impossible. She could not bring her daughter back for a family wedding in Pakistan. She risked arrest to see her own child. She is not a security threat. She is a mother navigating a checkpoint imposed on her community by a negotiation conducted in 1893 and maintained by two governments in 2024 because both find the checkpoint more useful than its absence.
What the Establishments Share
This piece is not about the Taliban. It is not about GHQ. It is about the people whose lives are built in the space between those institutions and destroyed by the decisions they make. But those institutions must be named, because the ordinary people of Pakistan and Afghanistan cannot understand what is happening to them without understanding that it is being done to them, continuously, by establishments that benefit from the continuation of hostility.
Pakistan’s military-intelligence establishment constructed the Afghan Taliban as a strategic instrument through the 1980s and 1990s, using ISI infrastructure and American and Saudi money. The doctrine that emerged required a permanently weak Afghanistan, a buffer against Indian encirclement, a state that could never consolidate enough to press the Durand Line question. The Taliban’s return in August 2021 was the fruit of that doctrine. The TTP’s post-2021 operational freedom on Afghan soil, and the Pakistani soldiers it has been killing in Waziristan and Bajaur ever since, are the consequences of that same doctrine turned against its architects.
The Taliban leadership in Kandahar refused, when Pakistan asked after 2021, to restrain the TTP. Their position has not changed. Afghanistan’s civilian population, governed without elections, without women’s access to education or work, without basic legal protections for minorities, has no mechanism for contesting this. The border conflict is useful to Taliban leadership that needs an external threat to justify internal repression. The families in Khost and Nangarhar and Paktika who have died in Pakistani airstrikes since 2022 did not vote for the government that made them available as a strategic liability.
The Pakistan Institute for Conflict and Security Studies reported 3,413 conflict-related deaths inside Pakistan in 2025. UNAMA attributed seventy Afghan civilian deaths and four hundred and seventy-eight wounded to Pakistani military forces in just the October to December 2025 period. The family in Girdi Kas adds eighteen to the Afghan count as of two days ago. Sepoy Fazal Qayum from Swabi, twenty-one years old, adds to the Pakistani count from September. They are from different countries. They are being killed by the same logic.
The Same Unanswered Question
Hussain Shah’s father came out of the Islamabad mosque with a hole in his stomach on February 6. The name of the man whose house in Khost’s Gurbuz district was destroyed in November 2025, killing nine children and a woman, is Waliat Khan. These two men have never met. Their governments have been conducting a low-grade war with each other for years in the name of security. Neither man consented to the war. Neither man benefits from it. Both are paying with the people they love.
Zahir Hussain cannot describe what he saw in the mosque garden. AFP journalists in Girdi Kas found rescue workers using shovels and a bulldozer to look for bodies under the rubble of a family home. ISPR has released the names of twenty-three soldiers killed in the October 2025 border clashes. The Taliban has released no equivalent record of Afghan civilian deaths, because it does not operate a transparent accounting of harm, and because the families of the dead in Paktika and Khost have no institution to which they can report a death and expect documentation.
Asadullah, fifteen years old, born in Peshawar, sits in a tent at Torkham learning from a religious curriculum that has nothing to do with the Urdu and English he studied in school. He did not draw the Durand Line. He did not create the doctrine of strategic depth. He did not order the deportations. He did not assemble the bomb that detonated in Tarlai Kalan. He is sitting in a tent at a border crossing in winter because the establishments of two countries decided that their institutional interests outweigh his education, his home, and the first fifteen years of his life.
What has been done to him, to the family in Girdi Kas, to Naik Gul Jan from Lakki Marwat who was thirty-eight years old, to the worshippers of the Khadija Tul Kubra mosque, is not complex. It is not ancient. It is not civilizational. It is organized abandonment. The ordinary people of Pakistan and Afghanistan have been organized against each other, abandoned to the consequences of policies they did not design, and handed the bill in the form of bodies, deportation trucks, stranded cargo containers, and funerals in Swabi and Peshawar and Nangarhar that nobody in Rawalpindi or Kandahar attends.
The generals call the situation complex. The emirs call it a defense of sovereignty. The traders in Peshawar and Nangarhar call it the destruction of everything they built. The woman called Gul who crossed the Chaman fence in secret to see her daughter before Eid calls it what it is: a fence through her family.
They are all correct. Only the first two are doing anything to keep it this way.