Array
«It’s a pity both sides can’t lose,» Henry Kissinger (in)famously quipped in 1988 about the Iran-Iraq War but he might be saying the same thing from the afterlife about the fight now brewing between Iran and Pakistan.
Early Thursday, the Pakistani Air Force hit «militant hideouts» in Iran with multiple airstrikes, reportedly killing nine. A statement from Islamabad’s foreign ministry described the attack as «a series of highly coordinated and specifically targeted precision military strikes.» That’s Pakistani-speak for «we lobbed bombs in the general direction of the enemy.» Really, Thursday’s airstrikes were in retaliation for Iranian missile attacks on similar «militant hideouts» in Pakistan on Tuesday — but stick a pin in that detail because I’ll get back to it in a moment.
The local advocacy group HalVash «shared videos showing a mud-walled building destroyed and smoke rising over the strike immediately after,» according to the AP, which in that neighborhood could have been anything from just a mud-walled building to a mud-walled building sheltering terrorists.
In between the tit-for-tat strikes, Islamabad recalled its ambassador from Tehran and sent Iran’s ambassador in Islamabad packing.
