Shakoor Ahmad Wani

In a recent escalation, Pakistan conducted air strikes inside Afghanistan against what it claimed were terrorist hideouts on October 9, 2025. The attack marked a remarkable escalation in the souring relationship between the two neighbouring countries. Following this there was a heated exchange of fire along the Durand Line with the Afghan-Taliban forces attacking border outposts in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan. The retaliation from Pakistan, on the intervening night of October 11–12, was predictably disproportionate as its army claimed to have neutralised over 200 Taliban fighters and destroyed about 21 hostile positions including Afghan border check posts.

• Shakoor Ahmad Wani |
• September-October 2025 |
• Strategic Analysis

• Shakoor Ahmad Wani |
• September-October 2023 |
• Strategic Analysis

Pakistan is a forbidding place for minorities—confessional, sectarian and ideological. Violence, direct and structural and exacted with eerie regularity has ghettoised minority communities and forced them to flee. Among them, no other community is being subjected to such annihilatory violence as the Hazaras in the Balochistan province. Hazaras are an ethnic group predominantly based in Afghanistan, but also with a sizeable population in Pakistan, with estimates ranging between 650,000 and 900,000.

• Shakoor Ahmad Wani |
• July 2019 |
• Strategic Analysis