Why Does Every Neighbour Hate Pakistan?

On the 31st of July, 2026, a Pakistani military spokesman stood before cameras in Pakistan's capital of Islamabad and rejected a recent somewhat extraordinary United Nations report. According to the UN, fighting between Pakistan and its neighbor Afghanistan had killed 499 Afghan civilians and wounded another 1, 216 between October 2025 and the end of June 2026. But Lieutenant General Ahmad Sharif denied this, insisting that Pakistan had struck only terrorist hideouts and infrastructure and that those killed were militants rather than civilians. Whether or not this account was credible, the wider situation was not in dispute. Pakistan and Afghanistan, whose governments had once appeared almost inseparable, were now bombing one another. Pakistan's own defense minister had already publicly described the confrontation as an open war. Now, if you follow the news, this is, let's say, not Pakistan's only neighborly disagreement. In fact, Pakistan has only four land neighbors, India, Afghanistan, Iran, and China, and yet somehow three of exchanged fire with it in the past few years. Two have fought full-scale wars against it, and only one has not fired a single bullet in Pakistan's direction. And that's China, which has spent decades accusing Pakistan of supporting Uyghur militants. Not exactly a triumph of regional diplomacy. Now, like with our previous video about Iran, we repeat, hate is perhaps an excessively strong word. It would be absurd to claim that ordinary Indians, Afghans, Chinese, and you know what, you already know all of this. So, let's just jump in. And as always, we'll rank each neighbor according to how likely it would be to lift a finger in Pakistan's defense. Now, before we get into it, first the mandatory preamble. Pakistan is neither a small nor strategically irrelevant country. It has a population of roughly 250 million people, making it the fifth most populous country on Earth. It possesses nuclear weapons, one of the world's largest standing armed forces, major ports on the Arabian Sea, and control of the lower Indus Basin. It actually sits right where South Asia, Central Asia, Western China, and the Middle East begin to overlap. On a map that looks like an excellent position, it means Pakistan can theoretically connect China and Central Asia to the Indian Ocean. It also means that the country sits beside the energy producing states of the Persian Gulf, all while bordering the enormous Indian market.