Author: Maciej Dachowski

On 27 February 2026, Pakistan declared “open war” against Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, launching air and missile strikes on targets in Kabul and Kandahar. The following day, coordinated Israeli and American strikes against Iran, including the killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, shifted the centre of global attention to the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz, while Iranian counter-strikes against American bases across nine countries in the region opened a direct confrontation between Tehran and Washington [1]. The Pakistani-Afghan escalation almost immediately disappeared from the international agenda. Not because it lost significance, but because it was eclipsed by a conflict of higher strategic temperature.

This asymmetry of attention is not incidental. It is today a central analytical problem. The contemporary international system operates under conditions of parallel crises, each possessing a distinct logic, different actors, and different stakes, yet collectively producing an effect of overload: a situation in which the capacity to manage multiple conflicts simultaneously exceeds the diplomatic, intelligence, and decision making resources of the principal actors. The Pakistan–Afghanistan conflict is a test of that capacity. A test whose outcome is not foreordained.

Origins: the Durand Line and the reversal of the patron–client relationship

The escalation of 27 February did not emerge in a vacuum. Its roots lie in a structural shift that took place after August 2021, when the Taliban’s return to power in Kabul reversed the balance of dependence between Pakistan and the Afghan Islamist movement.

For decades, Pakistan, acting through Inter-Services Intelligence, treated the Taliban as an instrument of strategic depth against India and a tool for influencing Afghan internal affairs [2]. The relationship rested on asymmetry: Islamabad provided shelter, funding, and logistical support, expecting loyalty and control over the political direction of the movement in return. After 2021, this logic ceased to operate. The Taliban, now governing in Kabul, had no intention of playing the role of client. They refused to recognise the Durand Line as an international border, which for Pakistan constitutes a problem of existential character, not so much territorial as constitutional, since it calls into question the territorial integrity of the state in its most fundamental dimension [3].

In parallel, the activity of Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), the Pakistani branch of the Taliban movement conducting an armed campaign against Pakistani security forces in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan, was steadily intensifying. The year 2025 was the most violent in a decade in terms of the number of acts of violence: the death toll rose by 75 per cent compared with 2024 [4]. Islamabad repeatedly accused the government in Kabul of providing the TTP with shelter and operational freedom. The Taliban consistently denied this while taking no measurable action against the TTP on their territory. In Islamabad’s view, Kabul had become a de facto launching pad for terrorism directed at Pakistan, meaning that the state which for decades had served as the Taliban’s patron was now being treated by them as a target.

This reversal of the patron–client relationship is a rare phenomenon in international relations, though not without precedent. Its consequences, however, are particularly destabilising in a region where state borders do not coincide with the boundaries of ethnic communities, and where loyalty to the state has never fully replaced loyalty to tribe, clan, and religious or ideological movement.

The logic of escalation: why now

Pakistan’s decision to move to open armed conflict with Afghanistan in February 2026 is not solely a response to the growing threat from the TTP. It also has an internal and conjunctural dimension.

At the internal level, the Pakistani military, the traditional centre of real power, has for years operated under conditions of competition with civilian political structures and a deepening economic crisis. An external operation allows for the reconsolidation of the armed forces’ position within the political system, the diversion of attention from inflation and indebtedness, and the construction of a narrative of national unity around the threat posed by an external enemy [5].

At the conjunctural level, it cannot be excluded that the timing of the operation, one day before the strikes on Iran, was an element of calculation. Pakistan may have assumed that the Iranian escalation would draw the attention of media and diplomacy away from operations in Afghanistan, reducing the political costs of the operation on the international stage. This mechanism is well known in the literature on parallel conflicts: escalation at one point in the system creates a window of permissiveness at another, because the resources of attention, both media and diplomatic, are limited and competitive [6]. Confirmation of this logic came in the form of Washington’s reaction, which on 28 February, the day it launched its own operation against Iran, expressed support for Pakistan’s right to self-defence, de facto legitimising Islamabad’s actions at a moment when the United States itself was engaged in a military operation of unlimited scope [11].

The context of strategic isolation is equally significant. Pakistan has for years experienced the erosion of its position in the regional security architecture. Relations with Washington underwent a deep cooling after the American withdrawal from Afghanistan. China, while remaining a key economic partner within the framework of CPEC, does not offer a security umbrella in operational terms. Saudi Arabia and Qatar, which as recently as October 2025 mediated between Islamabad and Kabul, are now consumed by the consequences of Iranian counter-strikes on their own territory and lack the bandwidth to serve as intermediaries [12]. Pakistan found itself in a situation where it had to respond to a mounting threat with its own forces and at its own risk, which in the case of a nuclear state with an unstable internal structure generates risks extending far beyond the region.

The nuclear dimension: structural underestimation

Pakistan is, alongside Russia in the context of Ukraine, the only nuclear-armed state engaged in open armed conflict with a neighbour. Under normal circumstances, this fact alone would generate intense analytical and diplomatic attention. In the current environment, dominated by the direct American-Iranian confrontation, it is being pushed to the margins of perception.

The risk of nuclear weapons being used in the Pakistan–Afghanistan conflict remains low. Pakistan’s arsenal, estimated at 170 to 200 warheads, is doctrinally oriented toward India, not Afghanistan [7]. Yet the very existence of this arsenal under conditions of conventional escalation generates indirect risks that should not be dismissed.

First, if the conflict with the Taliban develops into a prolonged campaign, India may conclude that Pakistan is strategically “turned away,” altering the calculus along the Line of Control in Kashmir and opening the possibility of testing Pakistani deterrence under conditions of operational overstretch. Second, a protracted external conflict combined with internal crisis may weaken the coherence of command and control structures over the nuclear arsenal, a risk described in the nuclear security literature as the problem of command-and-control integrity [8]. Third, in an environment where Iran is being attacked in part because of its nuclear aspirations, Pakistan, a state possessing nuclear weapons and waging war, becomes an argument in the debate over proliferation and the selectivity of the Western approach to weapons of mass destruction.

Overlapping wars: the arc of instability and the overload effect

The Pakistani-Afghan conflict does not exist in isolation. It is an element of a broader system of overlapping crises that together form an arc of instability stretching from the Black Sea to South Asia.

What we are witnessing is not a single conflict with multiple fronts, but the superimposition of several wars of fundamentally different natures: the open American-Israeli war against Iran, which since 28 February has struck targets across more than 130 counties in 24 of Iran’s 31 provinces [1]; proxy and irregular wars in Gaza, Yemen, and Syria; a postcolonial war over borders and community between Pakistan and the Taliban; and a conventional war in Eastern Europe. Each possesses a distinct logic and distinct actors, yet they are linked by several mechanisms of coupling.

The first is the finite nature of attention. Diplomacy, intelligence, and the decision making apparatus of the principal actors can service only a limited number of crises at any given time. The direct American-Iranian confrontation automatically reduces the analytical and diplomatic capacities available for the Pakistan–Afghanistan conflict. The same applies to the war in Ukraine, which for over four years has absorbed a substantial share of NATO’s strategic resources and those of Western institutions. It is telling that the UN Security Council convened an emergency session on Iran on 28 February, while the Pakistani-Afghan conflict received no comparable institutional response [13].

The second is the demonstration effect: the use of force by one actor lowers the decision making threshold for others. The strikes by Israel and the United States on Iran, which President Trump openly described as an operation aimed at regime change, may have reinforced the perception in Islamabad that the window of tolerance for military operations was open and that under conditions of global chaos the costs of escalation are lower than under conditions of stability [9].

The third is the fragmentation of the energy market. Iranian counter-strikes against American bases in Persian Gulf states, including attacks on Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia, directly threaten the region’s energy infrastructure. Pakistan, a country chronically dependent on oil and gas imports from the Middle East, is acutely vulnerable to this volatility. On 3 March, the Karachi Stock Exchange recorded a sharp decline and trading was halted for one hour: a consequence of the compounding effects of the Iranian war and Pakistan’s own conflict with Afghanistan [14]. The energy escalation deepens the internal crisis which is itself one of the drivers of the conflict with Afghanistan, creating a feedback loop between global destabilisation and local dynamics.

Poland and middle powers: the imperative of seeing the whole field

From a Euro-Atlantic perspective, the Pakistan–Afghanistan conflict does not occupy the centre of attention and is unlikely to do so in the coming weeks. This is operationally understandable, yet strategically risky.

The escalation in Afghanistan, a country which already before 2026 was the source of one of the world’s largest refugee populations and from which approximately 5.4 million Afghans have returned from Iran and Pakistan since October 2023 [15], may generate a new wave of migration whose trajectory leads through Iran and Turkey to Europe. The destabilisation of the Pashtun belt on both sides of the Durand Line creates conditions conducive to the reconstitution of transnational organisations, including ISIS-K, at a moment when Western intelligence resources in the region are significantly lower than a decade ago [10]. The West cannot, moreover, simultaneously pursue a policy of non-proliferation against Iran while ignoring an escalation involving a nuclear-armed state in South Asia. Doctrinal consistency demands that Pakistan be factored into the broader calculus.

For Poland, the consequences are twofold. First, every additional crisis reduces the resources available for the others. If the Pakistani-Afghan conflict expands, pressure will mount for diplomatic, humanitarian, and potentially intelligence engagement at a moment when NATO is already stretched between Ukraine, the Middle East, and its own defence challenges. The arc of instability from the Black Sea to South Asia is not a metaphor. It is an operational description of the state of the international system at the turn of February and March 2026.

Second, and more importantly, the current crisis exposes a logic that Poland should treat as its own. In a multipolar and increasingly fragmented world, middle powers, too large to afford the absence of an independent policy yet too small to shape the order on their own, are becoming the key stabilising actors. Pakistan is a negative example of this: a middle power that found itself in strategic isolation and was compelled to escalate under conditions in which none of its traditional partners was available. Poland, invited to the G20 summit in Miami, occupies the opposite position: not isolated, but situated at the intersection of key decision making formats.

The central lesson of the Pakistani-Afghan conflict is that the stability of the international system depends to an increasing degree on the capacity of middle powers to coordinate among themselves, especially when the great powers are absorbed in their own conflicts or are themselves generating them. Turkey, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan are states that share with Poland a similar structural situation: location at the junction of spheres of influence, dependence on the stability of trade and energy routes, and the necessity of simultaneously managing relations with multiple actors whose interests are in conflict. That Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan were invited to the G20 summit in parallel with Poland is therefore not a coincidence, but a signal that the criteria of systemic importance are shifting [16].

Polish foreign policy should accordingly treat the arc of instability from the Black Sea to South Asia not as a distant abstraction, but as an operational environment in which building coalitions of middle powers becomes a precondition for effective action. In a world of parallel crises, where great powers are preoccupied with themselves and institutions are overloaded, the capacity to see the whole field, not merely the brightest point on the map, may prove to be the most important strategic asset. The war in the shadow, now being fought between Pakistan and Afghanistan, is a test of that capacity. A test that concerns us as well.

Notes

[1] House of Commons Library, US-Israel strikes on Iran: February/March 2026, CBP-10521, 3 March 2026; Reuters, Israel and US strike Iran targets as Middle East tensions escalate, 28 February 2026.

[2] Ahmed Rashid, Pakistan on the Brink: The Future of Pakistan, Afghanistan and the West, Allen Lane, 2012.

[3] Avinash Paliwal, My Enemy’s Enemy: India in Afghanistan from the Soviet Invasion to the US Withdrawal, Hurst, 2017.

[4] Pakistan Institute for Conflict and Security Studies, Annual Report 2025, Islamabad; ACLED data 2024–2026; Al Jazeera, Pakistan bombs Kabul: Why are Afghanistan and Pakistan fighting?, 27 February 2026.

[5] Husain Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2005.

[6] Barry Buzan, George Lawson, The Global Transformation: History, Modernity and the Making of International Relations, Cambridge University Press, 2015.

[7] Hans M. Kristensen, Matt Korda, Pakistani Nuclear Weapons, 2023, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 2023.

[8] Scott D. Sagan, The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons, Princeton University Press, 1993.

[9] Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics, Palgrave Macmillan, 1977.

[10] House of Commons Library, Afghanistan: Developments since the Taliban takeover, updated 2025; Security Council Report, Afghanistan, March 2026 Monthly Forecast, 2 March 2026.

[11] US Department of State, statement by Allison Hooker, Under Secretary for Political Affairs, 28 February 2026 (via X/Twitter).

[12] Foreign Policy, Pakistan and Afghanistan Are Fighting, Too, 2 March 2026.

[13] UN News, Iran strikes ‘squandered a chance for diplomacy’: Guterres, 28 February 2026.

[14] News24, Iran-Israel war cripples bankrupt Pakistan; Karachi Stock Exchange crashes, 3 March 2026.

[15] UNHCR, Afghan returns update, 13 February 2026; Security Council Report, Afghanistan, March 2026 Monthly Forecast, 2 March 2026.

[16] Cf. Maciej Dachowski, G20, Polska i Azja Środkowa. Co naprawdę oznacza zaproszenie do Miami, Pulaski Commentary, December 2025.