Afghanistan's Opehn Wound

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Afghanistan's Owen Wound

Pakistan Bomb, Taliban Watches and Afghans Die

 When a lorry overturned on the road from Kunar Province to Kabul, it killed an entire Afghan family — parents, children, everyone. The accident was attributed to exhausted roads, an exhausted driver, and the absence of anyone enforcing any rule anywhere. The headlines moved on quickly.

They should not have.

The family was not traveling for work or opportunity. They were running for their lives — fleeing a sustained Pakistani artillery and mortar campaign that has pounded Kunar and neighboring border provinces for two decades, killing and maiming civilians whose only offense is living there. Pakistan justifies the bombardment by claiming that the TTP — Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, the militant group responsible for devastating attacks inside Pakistan — operates from Afghan soil, using the mountains of Kunar as sanctuary. Islamabad has leveled this accusation at every Afghan government in turn: at Karzai, at Ghani, and now at the Taliban.

Whatever the merit of Pakistan's claim, its response — sustained shelling of civilian areas — is collective punishment. And the premise itself deserves scrutiny. Afghanistan is a multiethnic society of Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks, and dozens of smaller communities. The TTP draws from a narrow ideological and ethnic base that commands virtually no organic support across that population. To bomb Afghan border communities as though they are TTP collaborators is not counterterrorism. It is the punishment of people who have nothing to do with Pakistan's internal conflict — people like the family from Kunar, who simply lived in the wrong place.

The Taliban's silence is not neutrality. It is complicity.

The Taliban have responded to Pakistan's bombardment in one of two ways: with hollow condemnations that change nothing, or with silence. This is not surprising. The Taliban owe their return to power in no small part to Pakistan's ISI, which spent years sustaining their insurgency while Afghan civilians paid the price. Biting the hand that armed them is not something the Taliban are prepared to do.

There is also a simpler problem: the Taliban cannot fight Pakistan. They have no air force, no advanced artillery, no military infrastructure capable of confronting a nuclear-armed state. Mullah Yaqub, the Taliban's defense minister, appealing to mosques for support is not a defense strategy. It is a performance — one designed to give the appearance of resistance while ensuring nothing actually changes.

What the Taliban could do — what they have so far refused to do — is negotiate seriously with Pakistan over the Durand Line dispute that underlies this entire conflict, and cease providing any refuge to TTP fighters on Afghan territory. These are difficult steps, politically costly within their own movement. But they are the only steps that might actually stop the bombing. The Taliban have chosen not to take them. Afghans in Kunar continue to die.

Meanwhile, the Taliban govern as though the bombing is not happening.

Universities are shuttered. Women have been expelled from public life — from schools, from offices, from any visible participation in society. Resources flow into madrassas while the physical and economic infrastructure of the country crumbles. The Taliban's priorities are legible: ideological consolidation first, the welfare of Afghans a distant consideration, if a consideration at all. This is not governance. It is control — a regime whose primary purpose is the perpetuation of its own power, draped in religious language.

The people of Afghanistan are not governed. They are managed — kept poor, kept frightened, kept divided — by a movement that has no interest in their flourishing.

The family from Kunar did not die because a driver fell asleep. They died because they had no choice but to get on that lorry. They were displaced by bombs that a neighboring country drops with impunity, abandoned by a government that will not defend them, and forgotten by an international community that has largely looked away.

Their story is Afghanistan's story: a people of extraordinary resilience, ground between forces that have never had their interests at heart — and left to find safety on broken roads, in the dark, with nowhere safe at the other end.

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