Amnesty International’s call to investigate the strike on Kabul’s Omid drug rehabilitation centre as a possible war crime raises grave questions. By examining the ruins, interviewing witnesses and studying satellite imagery, the organisation may reconstruct some of what happened after the munition struck. However, it cannot, from those sources alone, conclusively reconstruct the intelligence picture, the target’s previous use or the military assessment under which the operation was authorised.
Pakistan’s position remains unequivocal: neither a hospital nor a rehabilitation facility was deliberately selected for attack. The intended targets were military installations and infrastructure allegedly used to store ammunition, support drone operations and facilitate terrorist proxies attacking Pakistan. Islamabad has also maintained that precision-guided weapons were employed and that secondary explosions indicated the presence of military materiel.
These claims, like Amnesty’s allegations, deserve independent scrutiny. Civilian deaths cannot be dismissed as an unavoidable footnote to war, and Pakistan should place as much declassified information as operational security permits before any genuinely impartial investigation. All said and done, legality cannot be assessed by treating the impact site as though it existed outside the chain of events that produced the strike.
The inquiry must therefore ask more than whether weapons were visible in selected images taken afterwards. Was military equipment stored inside or alongside a civilian-labelled compound? Were the Taliban authorities allowing military assets, ammunition or terrorist-support facilities to operate near civilians? Any credible examination must consider these questions together rather than placing the entire evidentiary burden on the state responding to attacks.
Similarly, no investigation can make light of the fact that terrorist violence in Pakistan has risen sharply since the Taliban returned to Kabul. Terrorist attacks in Pakistan have increased from 658 in 2022 to 2,425 in 2025, while attacks attributed to the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan grew more than sevenfold over the same period. Pakistan endured 3,413 conflict-related deaths last year, including 580 civilians and 667 security personnel, while the number of suicide attacks rose by 53 per cent.
The TTP is not an imagined threat devised to excuse policy failures. It is a UN-designated terrorist organisation, with a long record of targeting civilians, police, soldiers, schools and religious figures. Islamabad has repeatedly demanded verifiable action against its sanctuaries, training networks and logistical infrastructure across the border. Kabul’s denials have not stopped the bombings, ambushes or suicide missions.
The central question, then, cannot be confined to why Pakistan eventually acted. It must also include why Afghan territory was permitted to become a staging ground for violence against a neighbouring state despite years of diplomatic warnings and international counterterrorism obligations.
Human rights are indivisible. They belong to Afghans caught in military action, but also to Pakistanis killed by terrorists dispatched from sanctuaries across the border. Scrutiny that begins only when Pakistan responds, while treating the preceding campaign of violence as background noise, produces neither accountability nor peace. *