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Since the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947, which led to the creation of independent India and Pakistan, the latter has endured multiple military defeats at the hands of the former. Characterised by military adventurism and political revisionism, Pakistan’s national and security policies have consistently revolved around India.
Merely months after independence, Pakistan revealed its questionable strategic inclinations by deploying tribal militias into Kashmir, sparking the first conflict between the two states. Almost twenty years later, the 1965 war erupted, again provoked by Pakistan’s incursion across the ceasefire line. These encounters proved humiliating for Pakistan, yet they pale in comparison to the profound setback of losing East Pakistan. Despite forfeiting around 15% of its land and more than half of its population, Pakistan exhibited a striking form of resilience—not through strength, but through denial. This enduring tendency to operationalise denial, combined with its consistent strategy of employing proxy warfare, has forced India to reassess its security doctrine concerning its volatile neighbour—from one of deterrence to a strategy aimed at raising the costs of Pakistan’s provocations.
Despite enduring immense international condemnation for its egregious human rights violations and persecution in East Pakistan—actions that intensified the secessionist uprising—Pakistan maintained a policy of constructing narratives for domestic audiences. Even today, many within the country remain unaware of the extent of the atrocities committed by their state against their former compatriots. In stark contrast, Pakistan glorified the sinking of the INS Khukri by the PNS Hangor as a defining victory, enshrining it within national and military legend. The loss of the Khukri was indeed historically significant, marking the first occasion since the Second World War that a submarine sank a warship in combat, and it inflicted a considerable blow to India, which lost 18 officers and 176 sailors in the incident.
Despite the Pakistani establishment’s deliberate distortion of events, the reality remains that Pakistan suffered losses in blood, territory, and prestige due to the Indian Army’s ferocious 13-day campaign on both its western and eastern fronts—most notably, the Indian Air Force’s powerful operation which included bombing Dhaka’s Governor House during an active meeting. This strike dealt a decisive blow to Pakistani morale, prompting Lt. Gen. A.A.K. Niazi, commander of the Eastern Command (in what is now Bangladesh), to request a ceasefire from Indian Army Chief General Sam Manekshaw. On 16 December 1971, Pakistan formally signed the instrument of surrender and was compelled to hand over approximately 93,000 soldiers to Indian forces. A similar pattern of narrative manipulation and denial resurfaced during the 1999 Kargil conflict—shortly after both nations had become nuclear powers—when the Indian Army successfully retook all positions initially captured by Pakistani infiltrators. Predictably, rather than conceding strategic defeat, Pakistan portrayed the episode as a display of bold resistance.
Commencing in the 1980s, Pakistan’s acute deficiency in strategic depth and its lack of conventional parity with India compelled it to revise its security doctrine and adopt the strategic utilisation of radical groups. Its active participation in the Afghan Jihad during this period—under the broader US-led initiative against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan—provided the essential framework for implementing this proxy warfare strategy. Subsequently, Pakistan’s military-intelligence establishment fuelled a violent insurgency in Kashmir, orchestrating numerous terrorist attacks across the valley and other parts of India over the following decades. For an extended period, India adhered to a policy of conventional military superiority, strategic restraint, and diplomatic engagement to enforce deterrence—driven by factors such as Pakistan’s use of plausible deniability, the nuclear status of both nations, and global pressure for caution.
Over time, two clear patterns became evident. The first was that efforts towards diplomatic reconciliation and peace talks were repeatedly undermined by cross-border terrorism. The Kargil conflict occurred shortly after the landmark Lahore Declaration signed by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and his Pakistani counterpart Nawaz Sharif; the 2001 Agra Summit between President Pervez Musharraf and PM Vajpayee was swiftly followed by the horrific attack on the Indian Parliament; and the comprehensive peace initiative led by PM Manmohan Singh and President Musharraf—commonly referred to as the ‘Manmohan-Musharraf formula’—was derailed by the devastating 2008 Mumbai terror attacks, among other instances. Secondly, India’s response—marked by diplomatic disengagement, presentation of incriminating evidence against the Pakistani establishment at global multilateral platforms, and advocacy for coordinated international action—was met with bureaucratic inertia, geopolitical contestations, procedural delays, and widespread international indifference. Even a seemingly straightforward matter, such as the United Nations listing of Masood Azhar—leader of Jaish-e-Mohammad, responsible for the 2001 Parliament attack, 2016 Pathankot attack, and 2019 Pulwama attack—was obstructed for over a decade due to Chinese vetoes. India even agreed to Pakistan’s proposal for a joint investigation into the 2016 Pathankot attack, only for the Pakistani findings to label it ‘another false flag operation fully facilitated by the Indian army solely to blame Pakistan’.
Owing to Pakistan’s continued deception and denial, coupled with international inaction, a discernible shift has occurred in India’s strategic approach in recent years. Rather than focusing on deterrence—which would necessitate fundamental changes within Pakistan’s political and security structures—India appears to have moved towards a strategy centred on punitive cost-imposition. This shift began to surface following the 2016 surgical strikes in response to the Uri attack, gained further momentum with the Balakot air strikes after the Pulwama incident, and has now culminated in full force with the recent Operation Sindoor. Collectively, this trajectory signifies a doctrinal and operational transformation across several dimensions.
In the immediate aftermath of the horrific terrorist attack in Kashmir’s Baisaran Valley on 22 April, which claimed the lives of 25 Indian civilians and one Nepali national, India demonstrated its intent to retaliate by suspending the historic 1960 Indus Waters Treaty—long regarded as a symbol of cross-border cooperation and remarkably resilient through past conflicts. Within two weeks, this diplomatic rupture was followed by a series of precision strikes targeting nine terrorist infrastructure bases across Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. India described these strikes as ‘measured, non-escalatory, proportionate, and responsible,’ asserting both its necessity to act after decades of provocation by the Pakistani establishment and its desire to avoid full military escalation. The ensuing four-day cross-border aerial engagements and artillery exchanges along the Line of Control brought the adversaries to their closest point of all-out war since Kargil in 1999, revealing several critical developments. Firstly, India’s unprecedented escalation signalled not only its ability to strike Pakistan but also its readiness to incur risks and bear potential costs. Secondly, the operation and India’s accompanying message—that any attack on its soil would be treated as an act of war—effectively dismantled the false distinction between Pakistan’s state apparatus and its proxy militants, stripping Islamabad of plausible deniability. Lastly, this military action is reinforced by diplomatic efforts to impose global economic consequences on Pakistan, demand accountability for embedded terrorist figures and infrastructure, and shape the international narrative to reflect India’s grief, resilience, and zero tolerance for terrorism.
Hence, India’s shift in security doctrine towards Pakistan—from deterrence to punitive cost-imposition—has not emerged from impulsive power projection but from decades of painstaking efforts to secure accountability and reconciliation with a state that treats proxy terrorism as a strategic imperative. This recalibration stems from the realisation that, rather than deterrence, the objective must be to impose escalating costs that render Pakistan’s strategic use of terrorism increasingly unviable. With its economy in rapid decline and dependent on international financial bailouts, the waning public credibility of its military, and a series of internal security challenges, Pakistan’s continuation of cross-border terrorism against India is now yielding steadily diminishing returns.
In the aftermath of India’s Operation Sindoor on May 7, which targeted militant infrastructure in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, a familiar cycle of accusations and denials has resumed. Pakistani officials immediately labelled the operation a strike on civilians insisting that places of worship, and religious schools, were among the many targets.
Particular attention has been drawn to Markaz Subhan Allah in Bahawalpur, a facility long known as the headquarters of the Deobandi militant group Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM).
It was here, notably, that Masood Azhar, the proscribed group’s founder, reappeared in December 2024 after years of purported house arrest, a stark reminder of how Pakistan’s most dangerous extremists often operate with impunity, even when officially designated as threats by the international community.
This narrative may resonate in some quarters of the international community, but it masks a deeper, long-running reality which is that many of Pakistan’s religious seminaries, or madrassas, have long played a central role in incubating violent extremism. While not all madrasas are complicit, thousands have served as ideological and operational feeders for some of the region’s most dangerous militant groups.
The connection between Pakistan’s madrassa network and its decades-old strategy of cultivating proxy groups is well documented. And yet, it remains largely absent from current discourses on terrorism globally. To understand the roots of regional instability and why efforts to counter terrorism often flounder, the international community needs come to terms with this institutional reality.
An Infrastructure of Indoctrination
Since the 1980s, after President General Ziaul Haq thrust Pakistan into the frontline of global jihad against Soviet Communists in Afghanistan with the support of United States and Saudi Arabia, the country’s intelligence services, particularly the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), have cultivated relationships with a range of militant groups. As the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan folded in the late 1980s, Pakistani Army, having adopted the doctrine of “strategic depth,” the notion that non-state actors could serve as force multipliers in conflicts with neighboring states, redirected these Afghan Jihad returnees to Kashmir. Moreover, an umbrella of Kashmir-centric anti-India groups, such as Hizbul Mujahideen (HM), Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT), and Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM), were created to sustain the insurgency in Kashmir. It is instructive when Former President General Pervez Musharraf acknowledged as much in 2010 admitting how Pakistan had supported militant groups to “pressure India.”
But the more pressing question is how Pakistan’s military and its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) continue to sustain such a vast militant ecosystem. The answer lies in the decades-old nexus between militant outfits like Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, and a wide network of religious seminaries (madrassas) that serve as sources of both ideological indoctrination and recruitment.
While madrassa system of education is not new to Pakistan, but their explosive growth over the last few decades has altered the country’s educational and religious landscape. From just a few hundred at independence in 1947, their numbers have ballooned to more than 30,000 today, a conservative estimate, with nearly half of these operating without state oversight.
While some offer basic religious instruction, many propagate an austere, puritanical version of Islam, often influenced by Saudi Wahhabism and Deobandi orthodoxy — that fosters sectarian intolerance and glorifies armed struggle. For instance, many of these madrassas, as highlighted by M. W. Malla (2020), have relied on curriculum which emotively glorifies “jihad – Islamic holy war – through vivid imagery for whom alif (A) was meant Allah, be (B) meant Bundook (Gun), jim (J) meant jihad, and ha (Ha) meant hathiyar (arms) and likewise.”
A Pipeline to Militancy
In theory, madrassas are meant to provide education and social support to the underprivileged. However, in case of Pakistan, a significant proportion of these Islamic schools serve as gateways to radicalization. The situation is compounded by lack of governmental oversight. For instance, while the officially registered madrasas, numbering nearly 17500 as per governmental statistics, cater over 2.2 million students, millions more are enrolled in the unregistered ones. Consequently, orphaned and impoverished children, often with no other schooling options, are drawn into a closed system where anti-Western and anti-Hindu narratives are presented as divine truth. Recruitment for jihadist groups often begins in these classrooms.
Incidentally, some of the most prominent Islamic religious seminaries of Pakistan such as Jamia Ashrafia in Lahore, Dar-ul-Uloom Banori Town in Karachi, and Jamia Haqqania Akora Khattak have been repeatedly linked to known extremist organizations. Take the case of Jamia Haqqania, which has been referred to as the “University of Jihad” and its former Vice Chancellor Maulana Samiul Haq as the “Father of Taliban.” Much of the Haqqania network leadership and cadre, which is part of Afghan Taliban, has received their religious training from these institutions with a number of them currently surving in the transitional government of Taliban in Afghanistan.
Even as international pressure has mounted, reform efforts have faltered. It is instructive how Pakistan’s current government quietly abandoned the 2019 requirement for madrassas to register with the Ministry of Education, a modest reform that aimed at bringing religious seminaries under state oversight. The reversal came in December 2024, as part of a political bargain with Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Islam (Fazl), Deobandi religious party led by Maulana Fazlur Rehman, to secure the party’s support for a constitutional amendment that expanded the powers of the military establishment while curbing the judiciary’s independence. Pakistan’s leaders have often found it easier to co-opt these groups than to challenge them — a compromise that comes at significant cost.
Beyond the Madrassa
The culture of radicalization in Pakistan does not stop at religious schools. State-run public schools often include textbooks that promote intolerance, framing India and the West as existential threats. Clerics like Maulana Abdul Aziz, once the head of Islamabad’s infamous Lal Masjid, openly issue calls to violence. He has faced little accountability despite repeated clashes with the state.
This radical ecosystem is self-reinforcing. With 39 percent of Pakistan’s population living below the poverty line, many families have little choice but to send their children to madrassas that offer free food and shelter. But the pattern is not limited to the poor. In recent years, Pakistan has witnessed recruitment by extremist groups among the educated elite, including medical students and professionals drawn to the ideology of ISIS and its affiliates.
This widening appeal underscores that extremism in Pakistan is not simply a problem of poverty or illiteracy — it is one of systemic indoctrination and strategic tolerance. The madrassas are just the most visible node in a much broader network of radicalization.
The Global Dimension
That Pakistan has managed to sustain this infrastructure with relatively few consequences is, in part, a reflection of international inconsistency. During the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, Islamabad was seen as a necessary, if difficult, partner. More than $33 billion in U.S. aid flowed into Pakistan post-9/11, even as evidence mounted that its military continued to support insurgent groups like Afghan Taliban, LeT, HM and JeM.
What is more problematic is how China, too, despite vying for the global leadership and having endured terrorism in its Xinjiang province, has largely refrained from pressuring Pakistan. This is being justified by its investment in the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and its geopolitical competition with India. Moreover, while the state patronage of funding conservative religious education from Gulf countries has gone down, the role of religious groups has continued to foster this ecosystem.
In addition, in terms of global oversight, even the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the global watchdog on terror financing, has struggled to enforce long-term compliance. Though Pakistan was removed from the FATF’s “grey list” in 2022, much of the underlying infrastructure remains intact.
A Familiar Playbook
The claims that India’s recent strikes targeted civilian infrastructure follow a well-established script. In 2019, following the Balakot airstrikes, it denied that any militant camp had been hit, despite independent verification of the target’s history as a JeM facility.
What makes Operation Sindoor different is not the nature of Pakistan’s response, but the context in which it occurs. Militant violence inside Pakistan has surged, with a 79 percent increase in attacks in 2023 alone. Many of these attacks have been carried out by groups the state once sheltered. The Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), now re-empowered by the Taliban’s return in Afghanistan, has turned its guns inward.
In effect, Pakistan is now haunted by its own proxies, groups once deployed as strategic assets have grown autonomous and hostile. The madrassas that fed them remain largely untouched, a sign of the state’s reluctance, or inability, to dismantle the very apparatus it helped create.
The Consequences of Denial
The madrassa-militancy nexus is not the only reason for instability in South Asia, but it is a critical one.
As long as Pakistan continues to shield this infrastructure behind religious rhetoric and claims of victimhood, genuine counterterrorism cooperation will remain elusive.
For the international community, the lesson is clear: treating Pakistan as a willing partner while ignoring its internal contradictions only delays the reckoning. Madrassa reform, state accountability, and a broader ideological shift are not just domestic imperatives for Pakistan, but they are regional and global necessities.
Until then, any claims of targeting civilians in strikes like Operation Sindoor must be weighed against a broader, uncomfortable truth: some of the very institutions Pakistan defends as sacred have long functioned as sanctuaries for those who preach and practice violence.
Over the past couple of decades, Pakistan has steadily lost favours it once enjoyed with key allies, including the US, for its incessant instrumentalization of terrorism as state policy. As the post 9/11 world increasingly adopted global norms on no tolerance for terrorism, Pakistan remained stuck in its tactics of viewing militant networks as strategic assets, particularly deployed against India. Embarrassingly exposed time and again, the country currently finds itself amid multiple crises at once, from a precarious economic state to existentially threatening insurgencies, all exacerbated by a severely weakened global standing. This was laid bare during its recent hostilities with India, following the blood-curdling Pahalgam attack of April 22, as countries that have traditionally aligned with Pakistan refused to come to its aid.
Pakistan’s role in the proliferation of global terrorism began with its alliance with the CIA in arming the Afghan Mujahideen against the USSR in the 1980s. However, this policy of using militant proxies for geopolitical ends was soon institutionalized by the Pakistani establishment which then deployed the same tactics to undermine India, and specifically stir up Islamist militancy in Kashmir. Even as it projected itself as a US ally in the global war on terror, it continued to shelter and support radical elements, reflected in its infamous distinction between ‘good Taliban’ and ‘bad Taliban’. The primary reason why it covertly backed the Afghan Taliban was again as to secure an allied Islamist regime in Afghanistan as a counter to India. This could not be concealed for long and the US, frustrated by Pakistan’s duplicitous designs, significantly cut down on its economic and military aid to the country, in addition to distancing itself diplomatically.
On the other hand, the continuous terrorist attacks in India, evidentially linked to Pakistan, such as the 2001 Parliament attack, 2008 Mumbai attacks, 2019 Pulwama attack, among others, tarnished the latter’s global reputation as the epicentre of terrorism. In recent years, even Muslim majority nations such as the Persian Gulf countries, particularly Saudi Arabia and UAE, have shifted their foreign policy rationale from religion and ideology-based alignment with Pakistan to a more forward-looking cooperation based on the imperatives of economic pragmatism, regional stability and security, and the emerging new world order, with India.
Similarly, the Organization of Islamic Countries (OIC) has, in the past few years, demonstrated its respect and willingness to engage with India, much to the distaste of Pakistan. The first and quite heavy blow came when the forum invited India’s then Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj as a ‘guest of honour’ in its 2019 meeting in Abu Dhabi, despite Pakistan’s objections. The next year, in a departure from its usual stance, the OIC declined to have Kashmir on its agenda, reflecting Pakistan’s deteriorating standing in the forum and India’s increasing global clout. Although amid the recent military escalations between the two neighbours in the wake of the Pahalgam terror attack, the OIC appears to have favoured Pakistan’s narrative on Kashmir, inciting censure from India, it remains questionable how long it is going to last, given Pakistan’s free-falling economic, security and diplomatic situation as well as the organisation’s history of snubbing the country’s requests more often than not.
Destabilizing Pakistan’s strategic calculus and exacerbating its internal crisis is its once intimate ally- the Afghan Taliban. Since returning to power in August 2021, an event that was looked at with much optimism and triumph in Islamabad, the Afghan Taliban have turned sour with their neighbour that accuses them of supporting the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) or the Pakistani Taliban. The TTP has recently emerged as the most potent insurgent group within the country, in addition to the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA), launching relentless attacks on security forces and civilians, and increasingly establishing proto-state pockets in Pakistani territory. The loss of the Afghan Taliban as a reliable ally against India despite years of covert and risk-laden backing certainly constitutes an existential setback for Pakistan, made worse by the growing engagement between the Afghan Taliban and India.
The decades of Pakistan’s instrumentalization of terror have left it in a position that it itself finds difficult to get out of. Not only has the sponsorship of terrorism backfired on its own people as it ranks 2nd in the Global Terrorism Index 2025, but the years of neglect of its internal issues has bred insurgencies that have attacked even Chinese workers and projects, jeopardizing its most strategic partnership. As Pakistan suffers from alarming inflation, dropping currency and foreign exchange reserves, and dependence on IMF bailouts and bilateral loans, its internal security crises have not only weakened it politically but also economically by staving off any potential investment.
Therefore, in order to prevent its own unravelling, Pakistan must take stock of the shifting geopolitical landscape wherein nations prioritize stability, economic cooperation, and counter-terrorism over religious or ideological affiliations. Its continued backing of terror has already cost it irreparably, both internally and externally. Unless it radically recalibrates its geopolitical strategy, one that has no space for militant proxies, the future seems grim for the country.
In the aftermath of the Pahalgam massacre, the fingerprints of Pakistan’s proxy militant infrastructure were all but unmistakable. For decades, the military establishment in Rawalpindi has relied on asymmetric warfare through its proxy militant networks to provoke India while shielding itself behind the veneer of plausible deniability. The latest attack in Jammu and Kashmir’s Pahalgam on April 22, killing 26 civilians, followed a familiar script—designed not only to stir unrest in the region but also to bait an Indian response that could be leveraged for domestic political consolidation.
But this time, the playbook seems to be unravelling.
The Pakistan Army, under the leadership of General Asim Munir, seemed to have calculated an anticipated Indian retaliation with such a provocation that could be choreographed into a nationalistic rallying cry in its aftermath. Such manufactured moments of crisis have historically served the military’s purpose of reasserting its primacy in the country’s political and national security discourse. However, the sociopolitical terrain of Pakistan today is no longer the same as it was during previous confrontations.
India did respond to the Pahalgam attack with a calibrated military operation. On the night of May 7, under Operation SINDOOR, Indian armed forces targeted the infrastructure of long-operating terrorist groups, including Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), and Hizbul Mujahideen (HM), across nine places in Punjab and Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir (PoJK). It was precise, strategic, and aimed at sending a clear signal: India will not tolerate cross-border terrorism and retains the right to act pre-emptively against threats originating from Pakistani soil.
Far from uniting Pakistan behind its army, the attack and subsequent Indian response have only magnified the deep fractures that lie within the country. While the government attempted to stage a performative show of national unity, the absence of solidarity from Pakistan’s historically marginalized ethnic groups has been glaring. Neither the Baloch nor the Pashtun communities—both of whom have long endured the brunt of the military’s repression and counterinsurgency operations—showed any overt inclination to stand with the state or the generals now appealing for unity. Instead, a suicide blast killed seven Pakistan Army soldiers in Balochistan on the very day of Op Sindoor.
At a time when Pakistan has effectively become a ‘Punjabistan’, given the dominant control that Punjab exerts over key state institutions, including the military, as well as disproportionate hold over to national resources, this raises a stark question: in the event of an escalated military confrontation with India, who will fight for Pakistan?
The Limits of the “External Enemy” Narrative
The Pakistan Army has always thrived on the construction of an “external enemy,” most prominently India, to maintain its unrivalled influence over national affairs. Whether in times of political upheaval or economic crises, the spectre of Indian aggression has been cynically deployed to suppress dissent, justify military budgets, and delegitimize civilian political actors. But the effectiveness of this narrative is fading, especially when the legitimacy of the military itself is in question.
The ongoing human rights violations, extrajudicial killings and state-enforced disappearances in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan have damaging the trust people had towards the army. The Baloch insurgency continues to simmer, with growing calls for outright independence, something that was earlier limited to internal autonomy. The Pashtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM) has exposed the military’s brutal tactics in tribal regions, and although the movement is often silenced through intimidation and arrests, its underlying grievances remain potent. Alongside this, the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has also increased the intensity of their armed insurgency, with hundreds of attacks in the last few years.
In such a climate, the attempt to whip up nationalist fervour around an India-Pakistan confrontation appears hollow and self-defeating. The ethnic periphery, long disenfranchised and suppressed, sees little reason to rally behind a state apparatus that has never treated them as equal stakeholders in the Pakistani project.
A Calculated Indian Doctrine
India, for its part, has signalled a significant shift in its approach to cross-border terrorism. “While earlier responses were largely diplomatic or defensive, India’s actions following the 2016 Uri attack, culminating in the 2019 Balakot airstrikes, marked a shift toward a more proactive and pre-emptive counterterrorism strategy. Now the post-Pahalgam strike under Op SINDOOR is different in both scale and message. New Delhi’s intent is now unambiguous: there will be no tolerance for Pakistani state-sponsored terrorism, and any provocation will invite proportionate, and possibly pre-emptive, military action.
By targeting terror infrastructure and avoiding civilian casualties, India walked a fine line, reflective of its doctrine of minimising collateral damage, to ensure on its part that this response does not spiral into a full-blown war. This strategic restraint while establishing its deterrence arc is designed as a demonstration of maturity and not as a sign of weakness.
What complicates matters for Pakistan is that this shift in Indian posture arrives at a moment of acute internal fragility. Its economy is in tatters, inflation is high, and the IMF continues to hover over its fiscal policy decisions. Politically, the country remains in turmoil following a deeply controversial general election, widely seen as manipulated by the military establishment to sideline populist leader Imran Khan, who remains jailed since 2023. Protests, arrests, and media censorship have become routine. Interestingly when on a day India undertook its cross-border strikes on terror assets, Pakistan Army secured a Supreme Court adjudication that allows it to try the civilians in military courts.
In this context, a military misadventure with India risks not only a humiliating defeat but also a domestic backlash that could irreparably damage the army’s authority.
Escalation Without Strategy
The temptation for Rawalpindi to escalate, either through additional proxy attacks or border skirmishes, remains high. While it has increased its cross-border shelling targeting civilians, which has killed over a dozen border residents of Jammu and Kashmir, a move of direction escalation would be nothing but deeply unwise. “By now, it should be clear to Pakistan just how vulnerable it remains, especially after India followed up with a coordinated drone strike across nearly nine cities, including the neutralization of an air defence system in Lahore on May 8, in response to attempted attacks by Pakistan’s armed forces on Indian military installations in the Northern and Western sectors.
For one, the geopolitical climate is no longer conducive to Pakistan’s old strategy of continuing to use terrorism as statecraft. The Financial Action Task Force (FATF), though it removed Pakistan from its grey list in 2022, remains watchful and it should be seen as a forgone conclusion that this continued patronisation of terror groups will put it back as a nation of terror sponsors. The international opinion following Pahalgam massacre which was condemned globally, with major powers acknowledging India’s right to defend itself from such terror elements, is an eye opener to that end, bringing swift international condemnation and furthering its diplomatic isolation. Pakistan’s Gulf allies, increasingly aligned with India on economic and strategic fronts, are unlikely to bail it out in the event of another full-scale crisis. Their post-Pahalgam opinion is a testament of this reality.
Moreover, China, Pakistan’s all-weather friend, has grown weary of instability. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), once hailed as a transformative initiative, has stalled due to security concerns in Balochistan and beyond. Beijing is unlikely to support any adventurism that could jeopardize its investments despite some of the Chinese strategic hawks seeking China’s declare its commitment to defend Pakistan sovereignty in any eventuality.
Thus, escalation without a clearly defined strategic goal would amount to national self-sabotage. The army must instead reckon with its internal legitimacy crisis, reassess its use of proxies, and confront the reality that its traditional levers of control are weakening.
A Moment of Reckoning
The fallout from the Pahalgam massacre and now Operation Sindoor marks a turning point, not only in Indo-Pak relations, which remain perennially fraught, but also in Pakistan’s internal balance of power. The military’s attempt to engineer a patriotic revival through orchestrated conflict seems to be backfiring, revealing a brittle state hollowed out by decades of ethnic suppression, institutional decay, and misgovernance.
What Pakistan needs is not another external confrontation but an honest reckoning with its domestic contradictions. It must initiate a political process that includes, rather than marginalizes, its ethnic peripheries. It must reorient its security doctrine away from India-centric paranoia toward genuine internal stability. And above all, it must curb the military’s ability to unilaterally dictate the nation’s trajectory through violence and manipulation.
Until then, the question will continue to haunt Rawalpindi’s corridors of power: if not the Baloch, not the Pashtuns, not even the disillusioned urban middle classes—then who will fight for Pakistan?
Pakistan has dozens of terrorist organisations which operate from its soil and export terrorism to rest of the world. These organisations have a financial ecosystem that has survived the international scrutiny and multiple operations from international agencies to stop terror financing.
Pakistan has five broad categories of terrorist organisations: (1) Globally oriented; (2) Afghanistan-oriented; (3) India-oriented; (4) Domestically oriented; and (5) Sectarian (anti-Shia).
The India-oriented terrorist organisations include: Lashkar-e-Taiba (LET) formed in the late 1980s; Jaish-e-Mohammed (JEM) founded in 2000; Harakat-ul Jihad Islami (HUJI) formed in 1980; Harakat ul-Mujahidin (HUM) was established in 1998; Hizbul Mujahideen (HM) was formed in 1989.
According to a study paper “Pakistan Army and Terrorism; an unholy alliance” done by Amsterdam based, European Foundation for South Asian Studies (EFSAS), Amsterdam, “Pakistan… plays a key role in funding these terrorist organizations. As per reports, the yearly expenditure of ISI(Pakistan’s intelligence agency) towards the terrorist organizations runs between 125-250 million USD, covering salaries, cash incentives for high-risk operations and retainers for guides, porters and informers.”
An internal report of Pakistan governments Financial Monitoring Unit(FMU) , titled “National Risk Assessment on Money Laundering and Terrorism Financing 2017” has details of how terror groups are generating funds in Pakistan. This report was never made public but excerpts of these reports were quoted by Noor Zahid and Madeeha Anwar in a Voice of America report published in 2017. The duo exposed the funding of Pak terror groups in a report titled ‘Pakistan Terror Groups Get Rich From Crime, Money Laundering’
According to Zahid and Anwar, “Waves of crime in Pakistan — including extortion, smuggling and kidnapping for ransom — are major sources of terrorist financing for extremist groups in the country. “Main sources of income of terrorists in Pakistan include foreign funding, drug trafficking, kidnapping for ransom, extortion from business, vehicle snatching,” according to the 45-page confidential report by FMU, which is an intelligence service department within Pakistan’s Ministry of Finance.
“The report, which had not been released publicly, says over 200 local and international terrorist organizations generate billions of Pakistani rupees to fund their activities. Annual operational budget of terrorist organizations is from 5 million rupees [about $48,000] to 25 million rupees [about $240,000],” the report said, according to The News website, which published these excerpts.
‘Terrorism Monitor’ of Jamestown Foundation revealed in December 2024 another important facet of terror funding in Pakistan. It said, “Terrorist groups in Pakistan frequently use high-denomination currency to finance their operations. Permitting a large number of high-value notes to be in circulation makes it easy for bad actors to transfer considerable amounts of money without a digital footprint, making illicit activities easier to conduct.”
The relatively high availability of such bills in circulation in Pakistan is due to the country’s underutilization of electronic payment systems, it added.
According to this report, Tunda, a notorious bomb expert for Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) who reportedly masterminded more than 40 bombings in India had told the Indian law enforcement agencies after his arrest with huge amount of Pakistan currency that large denomination bills were “kings who could do anything for them.”
“Pakistani denominations currently in circulation include 10-, 20-, 50-, 100-, 500-, 1,000-, and 5,000-rupee notes. It is noteworthy that Pakistan, which makes up 3 percent of the world’s population, accounts for 7.1 percent of the world’s unbanked adults,” says this report.
According to a research brief prepared by US Congressional Research Service in 2023, “Although Pakistan’s 2014 National Action Plan to counter terrorism seeks to ensure that no armed militias are allowed to function in the country, several United Nations- and U.S.-designated terrorist groups continue to operate from Pakistani soil.”
Islamic Charities
Almost all the terrorist organisations have set up Islamic charities as their fronts in Pakistan. These charities operate globally. In fact, USAID had funded many of these charities, revealed a recent report by the Middle East Forum, a US based think tank revealed. In addition the ‘Zakat’ collected from common people during the month of Ramadan by these charities are also funnelled to fund these terrorist organisations.
Since the 1980s, Pakistan has had a system of compulsory collection of zakat, relying on a state-administered zakat fund and zakat councils at federal, provincial and district levels. In 2024, the average zakat giver paid about 15,000 Pakistani rupees with over 50 million Pakistanis contributing. The total funds generated in Pakistan through Zakat was over 600 billion Pakistani rupees in 2024. A large chunk of this money goes for oiling the terror infrastructure established by Pakistani state and their proxy terrorist groups.
In a turn of events that lays bare the enduring proclivity of Pakistan’s military-intelligence apparatus for perfidious adventurism, the subcontinent has once again been plunged into the vortex of tragedy and retribution. On 22 April, the scenic tranquillity of Pahalgam in Jammu and Kashmir was shattered by a heinous act of terror—an attack carried out by assailants of Pakistani provenance, leaving in its wake a trail of innocent blood, most of it that of unsuspecting tourists.
This egregious violation of human sanctity provoked an unequivocal and resolute response from New Delhi. In a swift Cabinet Sub-Committee review chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on 23 April, the Indian government charted a bold course of action, announced by India’s Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri. Among the arsenal of retaliatory instruments under consideration, it was the suspension of India’s obligations under the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) that emerged as the most telling—and symbolic—rebuke to Islamabad.
This abrupt departure from what has long been a pillar of regional diplomacy signals a watershed moment—both literally and metaphorically—in South Asia’s geopolitical tapestry. For more than six decades, the IWT has served as an improbable exemplar of bilateral cooperation, a rare artefact of amity amidst a chronically discordant relationship. That India should now suspend this treaty reflects a fundamental recalibration of its strategic posture, particularly vis-à-vis Pakistan’s sustained dalliance with proxy terrorism. But before one delves into the ramifications of this audacious move, one must first examine the edifice of the Indus Waters Treaty—its origins, its operational architecture, and the significance it has come to assume in both geopolitical and existential terms.
A Riverine Pact Forged in Discord
Conceived in the crucible of Cold War anxieties and brokered under the watchful eyes of the World Bank, the IWT was inked in 1960 after an arduous nine-year negotiation. At the heart of the agreement lay the equitable distribution of the six rivers of the Indus basin—the Indus, Jhelum, and Chenab in the west; and the Ravi, Beas, and Sutlej in the east.
In what can only be described as an act of magnanimous restraint, India ceded exclusive control over the three Western rivers—comprising nearly 70% of the total water volume—to Pakistan, while retaining dominion over the three Eastern ones. This asymmetry, while glaring, was accepted in the spirit of regional stability and the hope that water, the most elemental of life’s resources, might also irrigate the parched soil of subcontinental peace. But alas, that noble aspiration has withered. Successive regimes in Islamabad have weaponised non-state actors, cultivating a cottage industry of jihadist terror that has repeatedly spilled across the Line of Control and stained Indian soil with blood. And yet, even amidst war and vitriol, India abided by the treaty, honouring its commitments with a stoic discipline that belied the provocations it endured. This forbearance, however, is not inexhaustible.
The Cost of Generosity
To understand the magnitude of India’s concession, consider the numbers. The Eastern rivers—Ravi, Beas, and Sutlej—over which India has unfettered rights, collectively yield about 41 billion cubic metres of water annually. The Western rivers, gifted to Pakistan, deliver nearly 99 billion cubic metres—more than double the volume under Indian control. This hydrological largesse has become the very artery of Pakistan’s survival. In a nation where agriculture constitutes over 25% of GDP and sustains approximately 70% of the populace, water is not a mere resource—it is an existential imperative. The Indus basin fuels its farms, powers its turbines, and feeds its people. To perturb this flow is to imperil the nation’s economic equilibrium and societal cohesion.
And yet, Pakistan’s security establishment has long treated this precious accommodation as a given—immutable, untouchable, and immune to the vagaries of geopolitical conduct. This misplaced confidence has emboldened it to pursue a duplicitous doctrine—of nurturing militant proxies even as it benefited from the benevolence of Indian water diplomacy.
The Straw That Broke the Canal
By suspending the IWT, India is sending a message steeped in symbolism but not lacking in substance. This is not merely an outburst of indignation—it is a calibrated policy shift. The message is unequivocal: India shall no longer subsidise its adversary’s antagonism with strategic concessions. If Pakistan insists on fomenting unrest through insidious means, it must also be prepared to forfeit the privileges accorded to it under treaties predicated on good faith.
One may argue, with some justification, that India’s current water infrastructure lacks the immediate capacity to divert or fully harness the Western rivers. The requisite reservoirs, barrages, and canal systems for such a hydrological overhaul are still under development. But in geopolitics, perception often precedes practice. The very act of invoking the treaty’s suspension has rattled the strategic calculus in Islamabad and laid bare the fragility of its assumptions.
For decades, Pakistan has operated on the belief that India’s strategic restraint—especially in the hydrological domain—was sacrosanct. It misread India’s civility as weakness. That illusion has now been spectacularly shattered.
A Faustian Bargain That Failed
What, then, has Pakistan gained from its Faustian pact with terror? Has its strategy of bleeding India through a thousand cuts yielded dividends? On the contrary, the costs have been profound and self-defeating.
Far from “liberating” Kashmir or coercing India into negotiations on its own terms, Pakistan finds itself internationally isolated, diplomatically suspect, and economically anaemic. Worse still, the terror groups it once mentored have now metastasised, turning their guns inward and threatening the cohesion of the Pakistani state itself. The logic of proxy warfare—premised on the deniability of violence and the expendability of cannon fodder—has unravelled. In its place stands a polity riddled with extremism, plagued by economic fragility, and mired in geopolitical ignominy. The international community, once indulgent of Pakistan’s strategic anxieties, now views its double game with growing exasperation.
The Geopolitical Ripple Effect
India’s suspension of the IWT, while unilateral in action, has multilateral implications. It signals to the world that New Delhi is prepared to reframe the contours of South Asian diplomacy. Water—long considered sacrosanct—can no longer be divorced
To paraphrase the ancient wisdom of the East, one cannot bathe twice in the same river—because the water has moved on, and so has time. Pakistan, too, must now move on—from the shackles of militancy, from the dogmas of military overreach, and from the delusion that duplicity can be a permanent policy.
If it fails to do so, history may not be as forgiving as the Indus once was.
Pakistan today finds itself in the throes of a deep and multifaceted crisis. A collapsing economy, political volatility, and a fraying internal security order have combined to expose the limits of the state’s resilience. Armed ethnonationalist movements in Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, along with a resurgence of transnational jihadist violence, now pose grave challenges to internal cohesion. Compounding this crisis of the state’s systemic dysfunction is the unprecedented erosion of public trust in the military — historically the most powerful and stable institution in the country.
In any functioning democracy, such systemic dysfunction might prompt serious institutional introspection. But Pakistan is not a conventional democracy. Its generals continue to dominate the national security and foreign policy apparatus, leaving little room for recalibration — particularly on matters where the military has long maintained primacy, such as its regional policy.
On April 15, General Asim Munir, Pakistan’s current Army Chief and undoubtedly its most powerful figure, delivered a politically charged speech aimed at salvaging the military’s diminished public standing.
Instead of reflecting on the domestic failures under his tenure, Munir fell back on a familiar script by invoking Kashmir as the nation’s unfinished cause, a “jugular vein”, which will be supported till the very last end. But this time, he cast Pakistan’s long-standing support for insurgency in Jammu and Kashmir through a more overtly communal lens, framing it within a polarizing Hindu-Muslim binary. Far from an offhand remark, this rhetoric not only distracts from Pakistan’s internal problems but also serves to reaffirm Islamabad’s continued reliance on militant proxies as instruments of foreign policy.
Disturbing, though not surprising, the consequences of General Munir’s provocative speech seemed to unfold just days later, with militants carrying out a deadly attack in Pahalgam, a popular tourist destination in Jammu and Kashmir’s Anantnag district.
Early reports indicate the armed assailants, mostly non-locals of Pakistani origins, having singled out victims based on their religious identity before launching a brutal massacre that killed at least 26 civilians and injured many more. The synchronicity between the timing of the speech and nature of the attack are difficult to dismiss as mere coincidence. Instead, they raise serious concerns about the ongoing connection between Pakistan’s powerful military establishment and the extremist groups it has long been accused of supporting behind the scenes. The group claiming responsibility, The Resistance Front (TRF), is widely recognized as a rebranded version of Lashkar-e-Taiba — a U.N.-designated terrorist organization with deep ties to Pakistan’s security establishment. TRF’s reinvention is widely viewed as a strategic manoeuvre to shield Islamabad from international censure, including scrutiny by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF).
The timing of the attack, so closely following General Munir’s speech, raises troubling questions. For decades, militant violence in Kashmir has often followed inflammatory statements from Pakistani leaders or shifts in the geopolitical landscape. The latest attack appears to follow this pattern, and its motive fits a familiar logic: force India back to the negotiating table by stoking instability.
There are three interconnected factors that may underscore how Pakistan’s fingerprints appear evident. First, the Pakistan Army’s public legitimacy is at its lowest point since the country’s founding in 1947, largely due to its deep and controversial involvement in domestic politics. Second, the Shehbaz Sharif-led government has repeatedly reached out to New Delhi to revive bilateral talks—an initiative that India has, quite justifiably, conditioned on Islamabad halting its support for terrorist networks targeting Indian interests. Third, since India’s 2019 constitutional reorganization of Jammu and Kashmir, the region has steadily transitioned from a “terrorism” flashpoint to a “tourism” revival story, leaving Pakistan’s decades-old Kashmir narrative and its attempts to internationalise the so-called dispute adrift.
The timing of the attack coinciding with U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance’s visit to India adds a provocative layer. It recalls a grim precedent: in March 2000, during President Bill Clinton’s visit to India, Pakistani-backed militants massacred Sikh villagers in Kashmir — Chittisinghpura massacre —an act widely seen as an attempt to draw global attention to Islamabad’s agenda. The parallels are hard to ignore.
But the most damning aspect of Pakistan’s strategy is that while it is increasingly self-defeating, it refuses to abandon this strategy despite its violent backfire. Militant blowback has rendered vast stretches of its own territory—particularly in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan—effectively beyond the reach of the central government, now largely controlled by Islamist extremists and Baloch nationalist insurgents, respectively. Extremist networks once deployed for strategic depth have turned inward, contributing to Pakistan’s domestic instability. According to the 2025 Global Terrorism Index, Pakistan now ranks as the world’s second most terrorism-affected country, surpassed only by Burkina Faso. Terrorism-related fatalities in Pakistan rose by 45 percent in 2024 alone.
Yet, despite these devastating costs, both in lives lost and in national stability, Pakistan’s military and political leadership remains either unwilling or unable to break with its long-standing policy of using militant proxies as instruments of regional strategy. This stubborn adherence to an outdated and corrosive doctrine has hollowed the state from within. The massacre in Pahalgam is not merely a cross-border atrocity; it is a symptom of a state trapped in its own delusions — one that continues to use extremist violence as a tool of policy even as it undermines its own survival.
While global powers have rightly condemned this latest act of terrorism at Pahalgam, expressions of outrage are no longer sufficient. The international community must adopt a firmer stance—one that combines diplomatic pressure, targeted sanctions, and enhanced monitoring of Pakistan’s financial and security networks. Islamabad must be made to understand that impunity is no longer an option as cost of inaction is steep.
For too long, Pakistan’s proxy war playbook has been tolerated as a regional irritant, which it is not. If this pattern continues unchecked, the risk of broader destabilization in South Asia — and the possibility of an escalation — will become all too real. The world must act before this proxy war metastasizes into something far more dangerous.