How far will escalation at Pakistan-Afghanistan border go?
By Katie O'Malley | October 17, 2025
Pakistan (MNN) — A 48-hour, temporary ceasefire between Afghanistan and Pakistan began Wednesday and is set to expire today.
Deadly clashes at the border surged in the past week after explosions in Kabul and another Afghan province on October 10. Pakistan didn’t officially claim responsibility for those attacks. But it continues to allege that Afghanistan’s government is allowing the nation to be a base for terrorism in Pakistan.
The situation is complicated. Mike Grandy with Unknown Nations explains that Afghanistan’s Taliban-run government is conservative. “But then there’s also very far right conservative movements in Afghanistan, and they cross the border into Pakistan, and they do terrorist activities.”
Both countries are majority Muslim, but for groups like the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (the Pakistani Taliban), there’s a problem that may spur their attacks.
“Some of it has to do with [terrorists seeing] Pakistan as ‘they don’t have Sharia law.’ There’s maybe some revenge for previous things, retaliation. There’s maybe these thoughts that their culture is lost, that they’re not sticking to the strict Islamic fundamentalism that they should,” says Grandy.
Sadly, the border fight between the two nations has been going on for decades. But Grandy says that this week, “It’s a much more confrontational situation as far as bringing in the military and bombing. In the past, it was more border skirmishes or targeting certain areas. But now it’s been much more widespread.”
Third-party mediators like Qatar may be able to help cool the latest escalations, which have affected gospel workers.
“There’s a self-preservation mode that happens. You have to take care of your family, you have to survive,” says Grandy. “So those things [attacks] have an impact on ministry, but they [local Christians] are used to navigating this complicated situation.”
Both Afghanistan and Pakistan have growing Christian movements. Join them in praying simple, Great Commission prayers for more believers to reach others and more people to hear the gospel of Jesus.
“We know the harvest is plentiful and the laborers are few. So what we want to pray is that there’s more laborers, more multiplication,” Grandy says.
Header photo: man in Lahore, Pakistan courtesy of Lumensoft Technologies via Unsplash.
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