Islamabad/Kabul, March 29 Pakistan, despite claiming self-defence in its conflict with Afghanistan, cannot evade strict requirements of international law governing the use of force, particularly in the territory of another nation. The norms necessitate proportional response and clear distinction between military and civilian targets, a report has highlighted.
According to a report in international magazine ‘The Diplomat', there is no principle in international law that allows a state to pursue a perceived security threat by attacking another country’s territory, putting civilian centres at risk of destruction, and subsequently reduce it to security rhetoric. It added that if such reasoning is accepted, the world enters an era in which every nation could simply claim, "We have evidence,” and treat it as a licence to bomb neighbouring countries.
“In recent weeks, Pakistan has intensified its airstrikes on Afghanistan. Civilians, including children, are paying the highest price for the ongoing conflict between the neighbouring countries. Among these attacks, the bombing of a drug rehabilitation centre in Kabul was the most shocking. According to the United Nations, 143 people were killed in that strike and hundreds more were wounded; a figure that reflects nothing less than a human catastrophe,” the report detailed.
Citing the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), the report said that three weeks preceding the attack on the Kabul rehabilitation, Pakistani strikes had killed at least 70 people, injured 478 others, and displaced around 115,000 people in Afghanistan.
“The silence surrounding this escalating conflict is profound and damning. Afghanistan today is suffocating under the harsh and repressive policies of the Taliban on the one hand and facing cross-border attacks on the other. The people of Afghanistan are trapped in a multilayered siege: freedom and security have been taken from within, while from the outside their safety is being dangerously violated,” it added.
According to the report, Pakistan’s current conduct is not accidental but the result of prolonged silence and selective accountability by the international community.
“At the same time, from February 28 until now, the world has been consumed by the war involving the United States, Israel, and Iran; a war that has now entered its fourth week and in which Iran, in response to Israeli and American strikes, has targeted countries hosting US bases as well as Gulf energy infrastructure. In such an atmosphere, Afghanistan has once again been pushed to the margins,” it mentioned.
The report warned that the continued silence of the international community is not merely a failure towards Afghanistan but enabling a system of impunity.
“It is normalising a dangerous standard: that the bombing of medical centres and civilian areas can take place, but because the victims live in an isolated and abandoned country, no serious accountability for those responsible for the attack and killing will follow. That is not only a threat to Afghanistan; it is a threat to the international order itself. Once punishment is removed from the scene, the law begins to lose its meaning,” it noted.
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