Pakistan and Afghanistan traded cross-border attacks overnight, government officials from both countries confirmed to NBC News on Friday, alleging heavy losses on both sides as Pakistan’s defense minister declared “open war” between the two South Asian nations. Tensions between the two coun tries, which share a 1,600-mile border, have been simmering for months as they struggle to maintain a Qatar-mediated ceasefire they reached in October, with occasional cross-border skirmishes. Pakistan, which is struggling with a surge in militant attacks since the United States withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021, says the attackers are using Afghanistan as a base. The Taliban, which returned to power with the U.S. withdrawal, denies harboring militants. The fighting between Afghanistan and Pakistan threatens to further destabilize a region where terrorist groups such as the Islamic State and Al Qaeda are trying to remobilize. The latest violence began Thursday night when the Taliban launched what it called retaliatory attacks on military installations in northwest Pakistan. Residents and government and military officials in Pakistan’s border areas said heavy fighting started around 8 p.m. local time (10 a.m. ET), causing panic among residents. “We had to leave our homes in the middle of the night” as Afghan forces fired rockets and mortar shells from across the border, said Dilbar Khan Afridi, a tribesman fleeing the Tirah Valley, a mountainous region in the Khyber district of Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. Hours later, Pakistan said it had struck military targets in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, as well as Kandahar and Paktia provinces. news Jun 18, 2025 Trump and India's Modi split over U.S. role in Pakistan ceasefire Middle East 27 minutes ago U.S. advises embassy staff in Israel to leave now as risk of war in Middle East looms “Pakistani counterstrikes against targets in Afghanistan continue,” a Pakistani government spokesperson, Mosharraf Zaidi, said early Friday on X. Earlier, he said Pakistan had conducted the strikes “in response to unprovoked Afghan attacks.” There were conflicting claims from the two sides about the damage and casualties they inflicted on each other. Pakistan said 133 Afghan Taliban had been killed and more than 200 had been wounded, with “many more casualties” estimated. Zaidi did not specify where the casualties occurred. He also said 27 Afghan Taliban posts had been destroyed and nine had been captured. Taliban government spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said that eight Taliban fighters had been killed and 11 wounded in Nangarhar province. He said Afghanistan’s earlier attack on Pakistan killed 55 Pakistani soldiers, some of whose bodies were taken to Afghanistan, and that others were captured alive. Nineteen Pakistani army posts were seized, he said. Zaidi denied the claims. The Taliban said the attacks Thursday night were in retaliation for Pakistan’s deadly strikes on Afghan border areas Sunday. Pakistan said that those attacks targeted militants and that at least 70 were killed, while Afghanistan said dozens of civilians were killed, including women and children. Pakistan Defense Minister Khawaja Asif said Friday that since regaining power in 2021, the Taliban had turned Afghanistan into a “proxy for India” — Pakistan’s arch-rival — and made it a gathering place for militants who started “exporting terrorism.” “Our cup of patience has overflowed,” Asif said on X. “Now it is open war between us and you.” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres urged both sides to protect civilians and “to continue to seek to resolve any differences through diplomacy,” U.N. spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said. Zalmay Khalilzad, a former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, also called for a peaceful resolution. Pakistan and Afghanistan have yet to reach a formal agreement after several rounds of peace talks failed in November. “This is a terrible dynamic that must stop,” Khalilzad said on X. “Innocent Afghans and Pakistanis are getting injured or killed.” The latest attacks are a “dangerous escalation” that take the conflict between Afghanistan and Pakistan into “uncharted territory,” said Abdul Basit, a senior associate fellow at the International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore. Frustrated by Afghanistan’s refusal to disown the Pakistani Taliban, or TTP — a militant group Pakistan blames for much of the violence that is separate from but closely allied with the Afghan Taliban — Pakistan is now attacking not just border areas but cities, and not just militants but the Taliban government that is protecting them, Basit said. “I think Pakistani patience has run out. It has been four years now,” Basit said. “They have been trying to convince them, and they have been picking up dead bodies of their men, their officers, of civilians, and now they have come to a state where they’re saying, ‘Enough is enough.’” But the latest attacks have brought the conflict to a new level, he said, and any de-escalation is likely to be temporary “unless a miracle happens.” With the Taliban lacking conventional capabilities such as an air force or missiles, that could mean sending proxies as suicide bombers in Pakistani cities as the end of winter leads into the peak season for attacks, Basit said. “I think summer has arrived early in 2026, and we are looking at a bloody summer,” he said. The conflict between Afghanistan and Pakistan also has implications far beyond the region, Basit said. Tensions between the two countries strengthen global terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, and they are not likely to contain their attacks to South Asia. “If they get strengthened, that undermines U.S. homeland security as well,” he said. The Associated Press and Reuters contributed. ...read more read less