Pakistan’s leaders are playing a big role on the global stage, traveling around the world to try to broker peace between the United States and Iran.
But while it plays peacemaker, Pakistan remains locked in a conflict of its own, battling its neighbor, Afghanistan, with no end in sight.
Since Pakistan declared an “open war” on Afghanistan in late February, the two countries have been clashing regularly, despite efforts by China to resolve the dispute by sending an envoy to both capitals and hosting talks last month.
As the violence escalated in March, Pakistan hit Afghan cities and military infrastructure with dozens of airstrikes. While the scale of violence has receded, the fighting is causing casualties on a nearly weekly basis, with hundreds of civilians killed in the last three months.
Neither country appears ready to back down.
“We were like a magnetic force with Pakistan,” Abdul Mateen Qani, the spokesman for Afghanistan’s interior ministry, said in an interview in March. “We now repel each other, and this is not going to get better.”
On a visit to Pakistani forces this month, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif of Pakistan said the campaign against Afghanistan was continuing “with full resolve.”
