[3][1] The Bajaur Campaign may have been a proxy conflict of the Cold War, as it has been alleged that the Afghans and the Pakistanis were actively receiving support from the Soviet Union and the United States, respectively.

Following Khan's forced resignation from the Afghan prime ministerial position, Afghanistan and Pakistan began talks for rapprochement in an effort that was jointly supervised by American president John F. Kennedy and Iranian King Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

Due to these large, illicit territorial claims over the western regions of Pakistan—roughly corresponding with the modern-day Pakistani provinces of Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa—relations between the two countries soured, and Afghanistan started funding proxies and initiated regular skirmishes with Pakistan along the border.

In the late 1950s, the Royal Afghan Army, with artillery support, attacked the Pakistani village of Dobandi and subsequently crossed the border and occupied a strategically vital railway link in Chaman−Quetta.

The incursion prompted a large Pakistani offensive, following which the Pakistan Army retook the pass and pushed Afghan troops back to the border after a week of heavy fighting.

[9] Relations between the two states severely deteriorated in 1951, when Saad Akbar Babrak, an Afghan national, assassinated the then Prime Minister of Pakistan, Liaquat Ali Khan, in Rawalpindi during a public rally.

Between 1960 and 1961, Royal Afghan Army troops along with thousands of Pashtun tribesmen from Afghanistan crossed the extremely porous Pakistan–Afghanistan border and entered the semi-autonomous Bajaur Agency of Pakistan in an effort to annex the region.

[15] In September 1960, Afghan tribesmen and some regular troops under civilian cover entered the area of Dir as part of the wider Bajaur Campaign to help Nawab Jahan Khan against the Pakistan-backed opposition.

[19] Pacha Gul was advised to go before an aerial counteroffensive could be triggered against his forces for serving as an agent for Afghanistan and providing resources worth of 170 million Afghanis, cash, and arms to the Bajaur tribesmen which were to incite a uprising against Pakistan.