Ayaz Zafar
Continuing its past cruelties, Pakistan’s military regime carried out airstrikes on civilian residential areas in Helmand’s Garmsir and Kunar’s Shultan districts on October 1 of this year. These airstrikes killed around 14 people, including women and children, and wounded several others. This isn’t the first time. Pakistan’s military regime has, since 2021 and particularly during 2025 and 2026, carried out repeated airstrikes on Afghan soil, targeted civilian infrastructure, and martyred and wounded dozens of innocent Afghans.
This ruthless regime, which dominates Pakistan’s civilian and military decision-making machinery, is trying, through military aggression against Afghanistan, to hide its own failures in numerous cases and keep the consequences of its own bad policies out of sight. This country’s ruling regime faces pressure at home from numerous political and civil movements, which are themselves the product of its own wrong policies and which are growing day by day, their roots reaching right up to the doorsteps of the military class’s own rulers.
Discriminatory treatment between provinces, trampling on ethnic rights, crackdowns on its own citizens, destroying mosques, madrasas, and other religious centers, suppressing civil movements, and other such matters have opened the door, across this geography, to civil movements and ethnic uprisings against the ruling regime.
On top of this, alongside its high level of political chaos, Pakistan is also facing a deep economic crisis. Over the past more than five years, this country’s currency has lost around three hundred percent of its value, inflation keeps climbing day by day, securing basic living needs for the country’s people has become harder than ever before, and the government is drowning up to its neck in interest-bearing debt. According to international media reports, in just the past month alone, the prices of basic goods in this country rose by nearly 12 percent. This and other such factors have placed heavy pressure on Pakistan’s civilian and military government.
Likewise, Pakistan’s military regime’s defense pact with Saudi Arabia under the banner of defending Saudi Arabia, and the pact including Turkey and Saudi Arabia under the sacred title of defending Mecca, is also part of this country’s hope of securing delayed loans and financial funds from Saudi Arabia. This comes even as Saudi Arabia sits at the top of the list of countries Pakistan owes money to.
At the same time, this country is also caught up in the Iran-America-Israel war and is currently in direct conflict with Yemen’s Houthi militia. Under the terms of the pact, Pakistan is obligated to stay loyal to both agreements at the same time, but this country plays a jackal’s game, trying, through military aggression against Afghanistan, to offer illegitimate excuses to the Saudi government and show itself as already occupied.
On top of this, Pakistan’s military regime has a history as a mercenary and proxy militia force, with its service and loyalty rendered to Britain, America, and the West all worth noting. This time too, the military regime has taken up, with America’s backing, the project of organizing and supporting ISIS, the Afghan government’s armed opposition groups, and former Afghan military personnel and Arbaki fighters, to disrupt the stability established in Afghanistan, pursuing its same old wicked goals as before. The military regime is trying to destabilize the entire region through Afghanistan’s insecurity, given the country’s strategic position as the connecting point between Central and South Asia.
These and other such matters are clear grounds for the Pakistani military regime’s blind bombings and military interference in Afghanistan, in violation of all international laws and norms, and this won’t become a closed chapter of history until its account has been settled.
