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An army soldier stands guard at a deserted entry point at the Friendship Gate, following the exchanges of fire between Pakistan and Afghanistan forces, at the border crossing between the two countries, in Chaman, Pakistan,

Nuclear-armed Pakistan has a formidable military of 660,000 active personnel, backed by a fleet of 465 combat aircraftBut the Taliban have the option to lean on insurgent groups like the TTP and the BLA to move beyond border skirmishes
KARACHI: Weeks after the Taliban’s lightning offensive in 2021 wrested control of Afghanistan from a US-led military coalition, Pakistan’s then intelligence chief flew into the capital Kabul for talks, where the serving lieutenant general told a reporter: “Don’t worry, everything will be okay.”
Five years on, Islamabad — long seen as a patron of the Taliban — is locked in its heaviest fighting with the group, which Pakistan’s Defense Minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif described on Friday (February 27) as an “open war.”
The turmoil means that a wide swathe of Asia — from the Gulf to the Himalayas — is now in flux, with the United States building up a military deployment against Afghanistan’s neighbor Iran even as relations between Pakistan and arch rival India remain on edge after four days of fighting last May.
At the heart of the conflict with Afghanistan is Pakistan’s accusation that the Afghan Taliban provides support to militant groups, including the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), that have wreaked havoc across inside the South Asian country.
The Afghan Taliban, which has previously fought alongside the TTP, denies the charge, insisting that Pakistan’s security situation is its internal problem.
The disagreement is a reflection of starkly incompatible positions taken by both sides, as Pakistan expected compliance after decades of support to the Taliban, which did not see itself beholden to Islamabad, analysts said.
“We all know that the government in Pakistan supported the Taliban, the Afghan Taliban for many years, in the 90s and the 2000s, and provided havens to them during the period where the US and NATO were in Afghanistan.
So there’s a very close relationship between the Taliban and Pakistan,” said Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili, a political scientist at the University of Pittsburgh and an Afghanistan expert.
“It’s really surprising and shocking to many of us to see how quickly this relationship deteriorated,” she said.
Although tensions have simmered along their rugged 2,600-km (1,615-mile) frontier for months, following clashes last October, Friday’s fighting is notable because of Pakistan’s use of warplanes to hit Taliban military installations instead of confining the attacks to the militants it allegedly harbors.
These include targets deep inside the country in Kabul, as well as the southern city of Kandahar, the seat of Taliban supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada, according to Pakistan military spokesman Lt. Gen. Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry.
The clashes are unlikely to end there.
“I think in the immediate aftermath, I think hostilities will subside. There will be, I hope there will be a ceasefire through mediation. But I do not see these tensions subsiding in the foreseeable future,” said Abdul Basit,  an expert on militancy and violent extremism at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies.
Nuclear-armed Pakistan has a formidable military of 660,000 active personnel, backed by a fleet of 465 combat aircraft, several thousand armored fighting vehicles and artillery pieces.
Across the border, the Afghan Taliban has only around 172,000 active military personnel, a smattering of armored vehicles and no real air force.
But the battle-hardened group, which took on a phalanx of Western military powers in 2001 and outlasted them, has the option to lean on insurgents like the TTP and the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA), moving beyond border skirmishes.
Based in Pakistan’s largest and poorest province of Balochistan that borders both Iran and Afghanistan, the BLA has been at the center of a decades-long insurgency, which in recent years has staged large coordinated attacks.
Pakistan has long accused India of backing the insurgents, a charge repeatedly denied by New Delhi, which has retained a robust military deployment along the border since last May.
Although a raft of countries with influence — including China, Russia, Turkiye and Qatar — have indicated an openness to help mediate the conflict, all such efforts have been met with limited success so far.
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Between credit stress concerns, a hot PPI inflation reading, and tensions between U.S. and Iran, investors have plenty of reasons to stay away from risk assets.
By Krisztian Sandor, James Van Straten|Edited by Stephen Alpher
Feb 27, 2026, 10:09 p.m.

What to know:
Bitcoin slid back below $66,000, erasing most of its midweek gains as major cryptocurrencies and crypto-related stocks fell alongside a broader risk-off move in markets.Hotter-than-expected January U.S. producer price inflation pushed expectations further back for interest rate cuts, while widening credit spreads and sharp declines in private-equity firms point to mounting worries about credit stress.Bitcoin #BTC$65,454.79 fell back below $66,000 Friday in the early U.S. session as mounting macro risks are spooking investors away from risky assets.The largest crypto now has erased most of Wednesday's surge, plunging 3% from around $68,000 in the past few hours to $65,600 in the morning hours. The braod-market CoinDesk 20 Index was 2.3% lower in the past 24 hours, with ether (ETH), XRP (XRP) and solana (SOL) down similar amounts.Crypto-related stocks also followed the move, giving up part of the gains earlier this week. Strategy (MSTR), the largest corporate bitcoin holder, slipped 3%, while Coinbase (COIN) was more than 2% lower. Stablecoin issuer Circle (CRCL), declined almost 5%%, snapping its rebound that saw the stock gaining nearly 50% in a couple of sessions.Miners, increasingly linked to AI infrastructure buildout, performed even worse, with IREN (IREN), Cipher Mining (CIFR), Core Scientific (CORZ) and TeraWulf (WULF) losing 6%-8%.The action occurred as U.S. equity indexes fell, with the Nasdaq down 0.8% and the S&P 500 lower by 0.6%.In the backdrop, there was a mix of risks for investors to get concerned about.A hotter-than-expected Producer Price Index (PPI) inflation reading for last month spooked those who hoped for a continuation in the cooling inflation trend. In January, core PPI rose 3.6% year over year, above the 3.0% estimate, and up from 3.3% previously. Markets are now pricing in a 96% chance of no rate cut for the March 18 Federal Reserve meeting.Concerns about stress in the credit markets also linger, with credit spreads at their widest in four months. Private equity firms KKR (KKR), Ares (ARES) and Apollo Global Management (APO) plunged 6%-7% to fresh lows during the session.On top of that, prediction market odds of U.S. strikes against Iran rose this morning after the U.S. has begun evacuating embassy staff from Israel.Money flows to safe-havensIn fixed income, the U.S. 10-year Treasury yield has slipped below 4% for the first time since November 2024. Precious metals continue to rally, with gold up 1% to above $5,230 an ounce, while silver has surged 4% to trade back above $92. Meanwhile, crude oil jumped 2.3% to above $67 a barrel.
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