✍ Shamshad Ahmad Khan – Pakistan’s former foreign secretary
With a lingering suspicion that India had never reconciled to the Sub-Continent’s partition, we have been living since independence in the shadow of India’s hostility and belligerence. This fear was not exaggerated when Pakistan saw Sikkim, Goa, Hyderabad, Junagadh and Kashmir falling to Indian avarice. This fear is not exaggerated even today as Pakistan faces India’s continued hostility and cold-blooded realpolitik. The two countries still remain locked in an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation on the Line of Control in Kashmir as well as on the frozen landscapes of the Siachen Glacier. To make things even worse, India continues to assert itself as a regional hegemon asserting itself as no less than a ‘primus inter pares’ (first among the equals). This reality itself is a poignant reminder of this region’s emergence as a most dangerous place on earth.
As we fulfilled our obligations in the post 9/11 US-led war on terror, we saw the US developing a new ominous equation with India at the cost of Pakistan’s legitimate security interests. This is how India-Pakistan conflict found surreptitious induction into the murky Afghan theatre. India did not understand that Afghanistan is an area of fundamental strategic importance to Pakistan and India’s subversive presence in its backyard was a serious threat to Pakistan’s legitimate security interests. India thought it could take advantage of the global anti-terror sentiment to transform Kashmir into an issue of terrorism. After the engineered attacks on the Kashmir State Assembly building on October 1, 2001, and Indian parliament building in Delhi on December 13, 2001, Pakistan was blamed for both incidents without any investigations or evidence.
In a blatant show of brinkmanship, India moved all its armed forces to Pakistan’s borders as well as the Line of Control in Kashmir. In mounting an unprecedented war hysteria, the Indian leadership ignored the gravity of its implications. South Asia was dragged into a confrontational mode that served no one’s interests, not even India’s. Intense diplomatic pressure by the US and G-8 countries averted what could have been a catastrophic clash between the two nuclear states. A cease-fire at the LoC in November 2003 led to the resumption of the stalled composite dialogue in January 2004. The January 6, 2004 “Islamabad Agreement” between President Musharraf and Prime Minister Vajpayee became the basis for a new bilateral approach. Whether we meant it or not, we gave a solemn undertaking not to allow our territory for any cross-border terrorist activity in future.
India exploited it as our acceptance of India’s allegations of Pakistan’s involvement in alleged cross-border activities. Since then, India spared no opportunity to implicate Pakistan in every act of terrorism on its soil, including the Samjhota Express assault in 2007 and Mumbai attacks in November 2008 and has kept the dialogue process hostage to its policy of keeping Pakistan under pressure. This was also the time when President Obama had publicly acknowledged the need for a Kashmir settlement. But after the Mumbai attacks, the ‘K’ word abruptly disappeared from Obama’s dictionary. As it got a sympathetic ear in the US and elsewhere in the world on the issue of what it alleged Pakistan-sponsored terrorism, India smelt blood thinking that now was the time for a “kill.” In its calculation, it could bring Pakistan to a point where it would surrender on the Kashmir cause.
India was mistaken. The Kashmir issue is not merely a territorial dispute. It represents the unfinished agenda of the June 3, 1947, Partition Plan of India. It is about the inalienable right of self-determination of the people of Jammu & Kashmir pledged to them through UN Security Council resolutions. If the turbulent history of this region had any lessons, world powers’ engagement in this region should have been aimed at promoting peace and stability. They should have been taking steps to encourage India-Pakistan dialogue for peaceful settlement of their outstanding disputes. The policymakers in world’s major capitals, should also have been eschewing discriminatory policies in their dealings with India-Pakistan nuclear equation, the only one in the world that grew up in history totally unrelated to the Cold War. But this never happened.
The US not only signed a multi-billion-dollar military pact with India in 2006 but also entered into a preferential nuclear deal with it in 2008 introducing an ominous dimension to the already unstable region. The situation rapidly aggravated with nuclear and military disparities in the region as a result of global double standards. The situation was further complicated by a complex new regional configuration of power with growing Indo-US nexus that gave India a strategic ascendancy in the region with an unprecedented nuisance potential in Afghanistan against Pakistan’s legitimate strategic interests. After Narendra Modi’s coming to power in 2014, the overall security complex in South Asia suddenly exacerbated with increasing India-Pakistan warlike conflictual stand offs. His sole objective was to destabilize Pakistan and ‘weaken’ its armed forces.
The notorious Memogate (2011) and Dawn Leaks (2016) represented modern version of Byzantine intrigues by Pakistan’s corrupt ruling elites against the armed forces which over the decades had emerged as the only cohesive force in the country against external and internal threats. While the ‘Memogate’ solicited Washington’s intervention to put the Pakistani army on the spot, the Dawn Leaks sought to show the army in a bad light with Modi always threatening it of a military ‘surgical strike’ across the Line of Control. Modi’s cold-blooded realpolitik blaming Pakistan for everything that went wrong on its own side of the border or across the Line of Control in disputed Kashmir kept Pakistan under relentless pressure. We saw an ominous pattern of staged acts of ‘terrorism’ that India blamed on Pakistan which curiously coincided with high-level visits from the US to the region.
President Clinton’s visit to the region in March 2000 was marred by the Chattisinghpura massacre of Sikhs in Kashmir which India blamed on Pakistan. But the US never accepted India’s accusation. In fact, President Clinton, in an introduction to his Secretary of State Madeline Albright’s book titled ‘Mighty and the Almighty’ in 2006 accused “Hindu Militants” of perpetrating the act. The latest similar act staged at Pehelgam orchestrated with Vice President JD Vance’s visit to Delhi on April 22, 2025, was attributed to Pakistan without any evidence. Moditva was again at its peak, bringing the two countries to the brink of another deadly conflict. This time, it almost triggered an Armageddon. Pakistan initially chose restraint, showing a level of maturity but responded fiercely when India launched missile strikes on May 7 in what it called “Operation Sindoor.”
While India’s media spun tales of Pakistan begging for mercy, the reality was just the opposite. By the morning of May 10, thanks to Pakistan’s Air Force, India’s defense was a sitting duck. No operational air bases, no functioning S-400s and their prized BrahMos missiles were reduced to ashes. After the 4-day military scuffle, Indian officials were on their knees pleading with Saudi Arabia and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio for a ceasefire. Meanwhile, Indian media kept churning out fake narratives faster than Bollywood scriptwriters. But the world knew who was banging and who was begging. In the end, it was an inconclusive conflict the two countries fought.
Ironically, the only winner in this India-Pakistan conflict was President Trump whose presidency inspires no confidence for peace or conflict resolution. He’s in fact fighting his own people protesting against his policies. His unwavering support for Israel has already triggered an all-out conflict between Iran and Israel and across the Middle East that could spiral into a world war with all its ramifications for both India and Pakistan which on their part now face a colossal challenge not only to explore mutual convergences resolving their own disputes but also to prepare themselves for a role as a major factor of peace and stability in the region.
