Pakistan-Afghanistan Ceasefire Holds on Eid, But Three Crises Are Still Building

The body handover at Torkham on March 20 was a small, practical thing. Pakistani and Afghan forces paused the shooting to collect a dead man from the other side. No statement, no ceremony. Three hours later they stepped back.

That exchange — soldiers holding fire to collect a body — captures where the Pakistan-Afghanistan war stands on day 28 of this Eid. The guns are quiet. They're not gone.

The Eid Truce: What Held and What Didn't

The five-day pause runs until midnight March 24. It was brokered by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey — not the United States, which is fully occupied with its Iran operations. Pakistan's TTP (Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan) announced its own parallel three-day ceasefire hours after the state-level pause, adding a layer that earlier ceasefires had lacked.

Both agreements were catalysed by the same event. Pakistan's airstrike on a Kabul drug treatment hospital in mid-March killed approximately 400 people — the deadliest single strike of the conflict. The outcry gave Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey the political cover to push both governments toward restraint. Kabul was still holding mass funerals when the ceasefire was announced.

This is not the first time Turkey and Qatar have managed this conflict. An earlier ceasefire in October 2025 — also brokered by the same two countries — broke down within weeks. That history matters as March 24 approaches.

The Balochistan Liberation Army didn't observe the truce. BLA fighters attacked the Gwadar port complex on March 20, killing 8 militants and 2 Pakistani soldiers. The separatist conflict operates on its own timeline, unconnected to Eid calendars. Islamabad has three wars on its hands — Afghanistan, the TTP, and Baloch separatists — and only one of them agreed to pause.

Pakistan's Two-Front Economic Squeeze

What changed this week isn't on the battlefield. It's in the finance minister's numbers.

Pakistan's monthly oil import bill is now projected at $600 million. That figure, confirmed by Pakistan's Finance Ministry to the Economic Times, represents a 20% spike in petrol prices since the Iran war began in late February — with prices reaching PKR 321 per litre for regular petrol and PKR 335 for diesel.

The Iran-Pakistan connection is peculiar. Islamabad is actively at war with Afghanistan while simultaneously receiving a diplomatic benefit from Tehran: Iran granted Pakistan safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz, one of the few non-Western countries allowed through. This is the Iran war's selective blockade in action — China, India, Pakistan, and other designated "friendly" nations can move tankers through; Western-flagged or Western-aligned shipping largely cannot.

Pakistan is exploiting this lane. But the underlying oil price is still $107-110 per barrel. And Iran's drones hit the Saudi Red Sea refinery at Yanbu on March 20 — the bypass route India and Saudi Arabia had been using to sidestep Hormuz entirely. That bypass is now compromised. Pakistan's energy options are narrowing even as its access to Hormuz technically remains open.

The government is asking the IMF for relief on petroleum levies and austerity measures are coming. Schools in multiple provinces have already reduced hours due to energy costs. In a country fighting a war on multiple fronts, these pressures compound.

Afghanistan's Economic Box

The Taliban's position deserves more attention than it usually gets.

In late 2025, Afghanistan began pivoting its trade routes westward — through Iran and Central Asia — after Pakistan closed major border crossings including Torkham and Spin Boldak. That pivot was Afghanistan's economic survival plan. Then the Iran war started in late February 2026, disrupting the very alternative routes Afghanistan had spent months building.

The result: Afghanistan is economically squeezed from both sides. Pakistan blocks the east. The Iran war disrupts the west. The Taliban government, already operating without international recognition or development finance, is absorbing these shocks without any external financial cushion.

This economic pressure cuts against the ceasefire's durability. The Taliban has no strong incentive to make permanent concessions — expelling TTP is ideologically unacceptable and would risk TTP defecting to IS-K. But the Taliban also can't sustain indefinite economic strangulation. The Eid pause buys breathing room, not resolution.

What March 24 Looks Like

The ceasefire expires in three days. Several things converge at that moment.

The TTP's three-day truce expires around the same time or slightly before. If TTP attacks resume inside Pakistan — which they historically do — Islamabad will face renewed domestic political pressure to respond. Pakistan's military conducted over a thousand strikes into Afghanistan in 2025 and opened this year at a pace matching or exceeding that. A return to cross-border operations is the default, not the exception.

Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey brokered this truce with genuine effort. The question is whether they have leverage beyond moral suasion. Qatar is now absorbing a projected 13% GDP contraction from the Iran war's destruction of its LNG capacity — Qatar's diplomatic bandwidth and financial muscle are both under strain. Turkey's central bank is attributing its own inflation miss to regional geopolitical pressures. The mediators are managing their own crises simultaneously.

China has publicly endorsed the Turkey-Saudi-Qatar mediation role, calling for dialogue. But Beijing's material leverage on either Islamabad or Kabul is limited. Its stated interest is stability on its western flank — an Afghanistan-Pakistan war is bad for China's Belt and Road investments in the region — but that interest hasn't translated into active pressure.

The UN has called the situation "piles of misery on misery" and documented 66,000 Afghans displaced by the fighting. At least 56 Afghan civilians were killed and 129 wounded in Pakistani cross-border strikes between late February and early March, per UNAMA. These numbers predate the hospital strike.

The Iran Connection

Pakistan's position in the larger regional picture is genuinely difficult.

Before the Iran war began, Iran was one of the few regional actors with standing in both Islamabad and Kabul. Qom trained Afghan religious scholars. Tehran had maintained functional relationships with both the Pakistani state and the Taliban. That role — informal mediator, shared border, economic corridor — evaporated on February 28 when US-Israeli strikes began. Iran's diplomatic bandwidth is now entirely consumed by its own survival.

The loss of Iran as a quiet backstop matters more than it sounds. Pakistan now faces its Afghan war without a regional balancer that could speak to Kabul. Saudi Arabia is a capable mediator but carries different ideological weight in Taliban Afghanistan. Turkey is willing but geographically and politically distant from the Pashtun east.

Pakistan is a nuclear state fighting a ground war with its neighbor while its oil costs spiral upward from a war in which it's choosing to remain nominally neutral. It has F-16s stationed in Saudi Arabia for joint exercises. It receives Iranian Hormuz passage. It's asking the IMF for emergency relief. These things don't sit easily together.

What to Watch

The ceasefire holding through March 24 is the near-term question. Beyond that: whether Saudi Arabia and Turkey can convert this pause into formal talks — or whether this follows the October 2025 pattern and collapses within weeks of fighting resuming.

Pakistan's Finance Ministry meets again before month-end on the IMF petition. If relief is denied or delayed, the economic pressure on the civilian government increases. Military operations are expensive. Wars against neighbours with 40 million people and no exit strategy are more expensive still.

The TTP issued its ceasefire unilaterally. It can end it the same way.

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Sources: Al Jazeera, Washington Post, AP News, The Nation (Pakistan), Economic Times, Times of India, OHCHR, UNAMA, Dawn, CBC News, Modern Diplomacy