The international community has, for too long, accepted Pakistan’s victim narrative at face value. The reasoning has often been geopolitical.

Every time the world confronts Pakistan with evidence of its support for terrorism, it responds with the same script. It is a victim of terrorism, not a sponsor. Its neighbours are out to defame it. The groups operating from its soil are rogue actors, beyond state control. The script has worn thin. Operation Sindoor, in May 2025, demolished it.

The Indian airstrikes on the night of May 6 to 7, 2025, did not target shadowy hideouts in remote tribal regions. They targeted Bahawalpur, a city of nearly a million people in central Punjab, well within Pakistan’s settled and policed heartland. They targeted Muridke, the sprawling Lashkar-e-Taiba complex on the outskirts of Lahore. They struck nine sites in total, four in Pakistan proper and five in Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir. The locations told their own story. These were not camps that Pakistan had failed to find. These were camps that Pakistan had built.

The Family Business of Terror

Consider the case of Jaish-e-Mohammed, the group whose Bahawalpur headquarters India struck on May 7. Jaish was founded in 2000 by Masood Azhar, a man Pakistan released from Indian custody in December 1999 in exchange for hostages on a hijacked plane. According to multiple accounts cited by Pakistani journalists and Western researchers, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate paraded Azhar through Pakistan after his release on a fundraising tour, and helped him stand up the new outfit.

Pervez Musharraf, who served as Pakistan’s president from 2001 to 2008, admitted in a 2019 interview that Jaish-e-Mohammed had carried out attacks in India on the instructions of Pakistani intelligence. This was not an Indian allegation. This was the former military ruler of Pakistan acknowledging that Pakistan’s spy agency had directed terror operations against a neighbouring country.

Lashkar-e-Taiba, the group whose Muridke complex India also struck, has a similar profile. The Centre for Strategic and International Studies has documented that Lashkar conducts its attacks, including the 2008 Mumbai siege, with the consent and support of the ISI. David Coleman Headley, the Pakistani-American operative who scouted the Mumbai targets, testified that he met with six different ISI officers during his time with Lashkar. American investigators identified one of them, known only as Major Iqbal, as having provided 25,000 dollars in cash and direct operational guidance for the attack that killed 166 people.

What the Strikes Revealed

If Jaish and Lashkar were really rogue outfits operating outside Pakistani state control, the strikes of May 7 should have produced confused and uncertain reactions. Pakistan should have struggled to identify what had been hit, who had died, and why. Instead, the response was immediate and revealing. Pakistan’s military leadership knew exactly what had been targeted, because the targets were on Pakistan’s books in all but name.

In September 2025, a senior Jaish commander named Masood Ilyas Kashmiri appeared at the group’s annual Mission Mustafa conference and openly admitted that Masood Azhar’s family had been killed in the Bahawalpur strikes. Ten members of the family died, including Azhar’s sister, her husband, a nephew, a niece, and five children. Four close aides also died. The location of the strike was Jamia Masjid Subhan Allah, the headquarters of Jaish-e-Mohammed, sitting comfortably inside Pakistani territory, with a UN-designated terrorist living openly within its walls.

The picture this paints is unambiguous. Masood Azhar, listed as a global terrorist by the United Nations Security Council since May 2019, was not in hiding. He was at home, with his family, in a complex protected by the Pakistani state. His brother Abdul Rauf Asghar, also a UN-designated terrorist and the operational head of Jaish, was reportedly killed in the same strike. Pakistan’s posture of plausible deniability has rested for decades on the fiction that men like these are difficult to find. India’s strikes proved that the only people who found them difficult to find were Pakistan’s own authorities.

The Cost of the Charade

The international community has, for too long, accepted Pakistan’s victim narrative at face value. The reasoning has often been geopolitical. Pakistan was a frontline state in the Cold War. Pakistan was a partner in the war on terror. Pakistan held nuclear weapons that demanded careful handling. Each of these arguments contained a fragment of strategic logic. None of them justified the systematic protection of men who killed civilians in Indian cities and villages.

The cost of this charade has been borne by India and by the broader region. Pakistan’s continued sponsorship of terror groups has poisoned the entire South Asian neighbourhood. It has prevented the development of normal trade and travel relations. It has consumed resources that could have built schools and hospitals on both sides of the border. And, most tragically, it has cost thousands of innocent lives across decades of attacks that Pakistan’s intelligence services helped plan, fund, and execute.

Operation Sindoor changed the equation. By striking Bahawalpur and Muridke, India made plain what had always been true. The terrorist infrastructure attacking India operates from inside Pakistan, with the protection of the Pakistani state. The terrorist leadership lives in Pakistani cities, raises families in Pakistani neighbourhoods, and runs operations from Pakistani buildings. The fiction of state distance from these activities has collapsed.

The world now has a choice. It can continue to accept the Pakistani script of victimhood, in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Or it can finally treat Pakistan as what it has long been: a state that uses terrorism as an instrument of policy, and that pays a price every time it does. India has decided which path it will follow. The international community must now decide which path it can credibly continue to ignore.

Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not reflect Milli Chronicle’s point-of-view.

Seen from such a lens, Asim Munir’s use of analogies like ‘dump truck’ or the ‘railway engine’ are not harmless political theatre.

Pakistan’s leaders, both political and military, have long relied on self-serving metaphors to shape the domestic sociopolitical sphere and frame their country’s place in the broader region. Often delivered with a dramaturgical embellishment, these analogies do more than reflect insecurity or national mythmaking. They reveal a deeper strategic mindset in which Pakistan sees value in disruption, leverage through instability, and the cultivation of terrorism as a tool of statecraft.

The latest examples come from Pakistan’s powerful military establishment, which has historically dominated the country’s political and security architecture. It started with Pakistan Army Chief Asim Munir’s interaction with expatriates in Florida, United States, in August this year, wherein he deployed a comparison that captured headlines for its brazenness. “India is a shining Mercedes coming on a highway like a Ferrari,” he said. “But we are a dump truck full of gravel. If the truck hits the car, who is going to be the loser?”

On its surface, such remarks appeared to emphasize resilience: that Pakistan as a lumbering truck may not be glamorous, but it can endure any difficulty and overcome any obstacle. Yet the real significance of this ironical analogy lies elsewhere. It implies that Pakistan retains the capability as well as readiness to cause strategic disruption, even at great cost to itself, and in doing so shape regional outcomes. The metaphor glorifies collision as an equalizer. It suggests that while India surges economically and diplomatically, Pakistan’s relevance lies in its ability to destabilize.

A parallel metaphor that is being increasingly used by the country’s political and military elite describes Pakistan as a “railway engine”, that is portrays it on a slow, traditional, yet persistent mode of progress. The image is meant to frame Pakistan as foundational to South Asian stability, chugging along in contrast to India’s sleek modernization. Implicit in this imagery is the claim that the region’s momentum, direction, and safety can still be both set and derailed by Pakistan’s choices.

Such analogies may seem rhetorical to common masses and yet contain within them a longstanding doctrine of purposeful disruption that Pakistan has employed in the last several decades. It is based on its decades-old strategic worldview wherein it has consistently valorized confrontation, framing India as an existential threat, and more domestically more significant objective of positioning proxy-terrorism as a legitimate extension of state power. 

Such a propagandistic rhetoric has found currency amidst Asim Munir’s sweeping consolidation of authority through constitutional amendments to expanded control over the judiciary, nuclear command, and internal security. This narrative push is designed to reinforce his martial narrative that Pakistan may be economically battered, politically unstable, and diplomatically isolated, but it remains capable of inflicting damage that forces global attention.

As such, while Pakistan’s establishment may dress its messaging in fresh metaphors, the underlying doctrine has barely evolved. Since the 26/11 attacks by ISI supported Lashkar-e-Toiba terrorists in Mumbai, there has been little substantive reckoning within Pakistan about the use of terrorist groups as strategic assets. If anything, the rhetoric of state officials in the years since reveals continuity, not change.

It should be noted that there has been consensus within Pakistani establishment, as exposed by the statements from senior retired generals, political leaders, and religious ideologues, who often reiterate that proxy terrorism can be a “force multiplier” against India. Such an argument has been repeatedly framed as asymmetric necessity given that since Pakistan cannot match New Delhi conventionally, so it must leverage “non-state actors” to disrupt India’s rise even as its own economy falters. It explains why and how terrorist groups like LeT and Jaish-e-Mohammed have been normalized within the socio-political discourse of the country by portraying terrorists as instruments of pressure than what they are: terrorists.

This mindset is reflected not only in Pakistan’s reluctance to prosecute figures like Hafiz Saeed or Masood Azhar, but also in its sustained tolerance of groups that openly espouse cross-border terrorism sold as so-called jihad. And the danger of such rhetoric is not abstract as it has recurrently translated into violence that has spilled far beyond India’s borders. Be it 26/11 attacks of 2008 in India or the 9/11 attacks in the United States in 2001, these showcased how such a mentality that the Pakistani establishment patronises can have devastating human costs.

Just as the 9/11 attacks targeted symbols of American openness and global leadership which the world forever, 26/11 targeted India’s cosmopolitan identity to sow internal discord and disrupt its global economic rise. Therefore, should Pakistan’s leadership continue to present disruption as strategic leverage, as they are doing currently, the risk of mass-casualty attacks would remain unacceptably high.

Seen from such a lens, Asim Munir’s use of analogies like ‘dump truck’ or the ‘railway engine’ are not harmless political theatre. It is a reflection of a national mindset of a country of mismanaged economy, which is unable to compete with rising India in any domain, sees strategic relevance in the threat of sabotage. It is a worldview that sees regional equilibrium not in growth or cooperation but in managed instability maintained through terrorist proxies. And that worldview does not confine risk to South Asia, which is why Pakistan’s analogies matter. 

In such a scenario, while India cannot afford any complacency, it makes it implicit on the international community to acknowledge that South Asian terrorism, especially when linked to state sponsorship like Pakistan’s role, poses a threat transcending national borders.

Nevertheless, two lessons stand out. Firstly, there needs to be greater transnational intelligence synergy at the international level. For instance, given that countries like India, the United States, the EU, Israel, Southeast Asian partners, and Gulf states, have a shared interest in tackling terrorism, they would need to bolster real-time intelligence exchange, establish joint tracking of financing networks, and coordinated monitoring of extremist propaganda.

Secondly, diplomatic isolation of terror-sponsoring frameworks is no longer optional. The world must explicitly differentiate between Pakistan as a nation and Pakistan’s security apparatus as a destabilizing actor and shape policy accordingly. This is because civilian government is a façade in that country as it is overwhelmingly dominated by the military establishment. 

Therefore, the “dump truck” and “railway engine” analogies may have been meant to project endurance, but they expose a darker truth of Pakistan’s military leadership’s outdated belief that regional power can be exercised through disruption and not development. Unless such a mindset is confronted at political, diplomatic, and strategic levels, the international community should rest assured that its risks will not be borne by India alone. 

Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not reflect Milli Chronicle’s point-of-view.