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.

Until Pakistan matches words with actions, its participation in regional counterterror frameworks will remain a facade.

When Pakistan assumed the chair of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization’s permanent anti-terror body, the Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure (RATS), last month, the optics were striking: a state sponsor of terrorism now overseeing a regional network tasked with combating it.

The irony is hard to ignore. For Islamabad’s international posture and domestic rhetoric to carry credibility, its territory must no longer serve as a safe haven for groups trained and funded to strike Indian soil. Yet, the evidence suggests this condition remains far from met.

Pakistan’s enduring militant ecosystem aligns closely with the country’s long-standing military doctrine of “bleeding India with a thousand cuts”—a strategy that leverages proxies and covert militants to impose costs on India while avoiding direct conventional conflict. Under this logic, groups like Jaishe-e-Mohammad (JeM) and Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) serve not merely ideological but strategic purposes. 

If Pakistan is serious about counterterrorism, the persistence of this doctrine is inexplicable. The question remains: why does Islamabad continue to nurture a system that directly contradicts its international obligations and its stated commitment to counterterrorism?

Persistent Militant Ecosystems and Digital Adaptations

Notwithstanding India’s precision strikes on select Pakistani terrorist camps in May 2025, Pakistan’s militant ecosystems remain largely intact. Take the case of Masood Azhar-led JeM, which continues to plan operations, maintain training facilities, and innovate its fundraising mechanisms. Recent investigative reporting reveals that JeM has shifted toward digital-wallet fundraising and is attempting to rebuild as many as 313 terror hubs across Pakistan.

Despite severe losses during Operation Sindoor—which killed more than a dozen members of Azhar’s family and destroyed JeM’s headquarters in Bahawalpur—he remains defiant in his terrorist drive against India.

In a recent speech at a JeM site in Bahawalpur, Azhar announced plans to establish a women’s jihad course, Jamat-ul-Mominat. The 15-day training program reportedly aims to establish female combat units within JeM. If implemented, this can be a critical operational development for JeM, reminiscent of the Islamic State and Boko Haram, both of which have deployed women as suicide bombers and assault operatives.

Further worrying is the public conduct of the sons and successors of designated terror figures. The son of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) chief Hafiz Saeed, for example, has openly defied extradition calls, using public rallies to proclaim that Pakistan will continue to shield his father while praising military operations and urging “jihad.” 

An anti-regime Pakistani journalist recently reported that Talha Saeed has assumed leadership of an LeT-linked mosque in Lahore—signaling a generational shift in the group’s command and control. These are not isolated cases but part of a broader ecosystem in which religious, militant, and political networks overlap with visible impunity. Their continued prominence underscores the depth of Pakistan’s structural complicity and the normalization of militant influence in public life.

The Digital Evolution of Terror Financing

Pakistan’s counterterrorism narrative further collapses under the scrutiny of its financial oversight. While Islamabad touts its cooperation with the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), militant funding has evolved faster than its regulatory mechanisms. Groups such as JeM have reportedly shifted from traditional banking channels to fintech platforms, mobile wallets, and decentralized e-payment systems within Pakistan to sustain operations.

This digital adaptation is not evidence of militant defeat but proof of resilience. Despite a recent implicit warning from FATF President Elisa de Anda Madrazo that Pakistan’s removal from the Grey List in 2022 was not “bullet-proof” and Pakistan’s own finance minister’s admission of rampant unregulated digital transactions, terrorist financing remains largely unchecked. The shift into digital ecosystems allows militant organizations to operate under the radar, with minimal state interference or consequences.

Paradoxical Cover from the United States

Pakistan’s growing diplomatic and economic proximity to the United States may paradoxically weaken Washington’s leverage over Islamabad’s behavior. Historically, U.S. pressure has occasionally forced Pakistan’s military-intelligence establishment to rein in militant proxies. But today, the strategic calculus appears to have shifted. 

As Pakistan portrays itself as a “regional counterterror partner” and a reliable economic hub, Washington remains inclined to prioritize a transactional relationship over accountability. These dynamic risks emboldening Pakistan’s military leadership, led by Field Marshal Asim Munir, to maintain its use of jihadist groups as tools of statecraft. Islamabad’s confidence that its strategic importance shields it from meaningful repercussions only deepens the challenge.

The policy risk for India and its partners is that Pakistan will use its SCO-RATS role to deflect scrutiny while continuing asymmetric operations. If training camps are allowed to be rebuilt, if digital funding networks flourish, and if terrorist rallies continue with active state approval, then Pakistan’s leadership in counterterror structures becomes an exercise in hollow symbolism rather than substantive change.

Pakistan’s claim to regional leadership in counterterrorism rests on fragile ground so long as its own territory hosts—and in many cases, protects—the very networks it purports to combat. The U.S.–Pakistan relationship, increasingly transactional and detached from shared security priorities, risks reinforcing Islamabad’s belief that it can pursue dual policies: cooperation abroad and complicity at home. 

Until Pakistan matches words with actions, its participation in regional counterterror frameworks will remain a facade. The question for the international community is not whether Pakistan can change, but whether it wants to.

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

The Indian Air Force carried out the strike in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK), targeting a known Jaish safehouse believed to be harboring senior militant leadership. According to senior defense officials, Rauf Azhar was confirmed to be present at the location at the time of the strike and was neutralized in the attack.

A Symbolic and Strategic Blow

Rauf Azhar, the younger brother of JeM’s founder Masood Azhar, had long evaded justice. He was internationally wanted not only for his role in Daniel Pearl’s brutal murder but also for orchestrating multiple terror attacks against Indian civilians and security personnel.

His death marks a significant blow to the Jaish-e-Mohammed network, which has been responsible for numerous terror incidents, including the 2019 Pulwama attack that killed 40 Indian paramilitary troops.

The Legacy of Daniel Pearl’s Case

Daniel Pearl, the South Asia bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal, was abducted in Karachi, Pakistan, while investigating links between British extremist Richard Reid and Al-Qaeda. Days later, a gruesome video of his beheading was released by his captors.

While Omar Saeed Sheikh was arrested and convicted in the case, global intelligence agencies consistently pointed to Abdul Rauf Azhar as the shadow figure who coordinated Pearl’s kidnapping and death from behind the scenes.

Despite multiple requests from the United States and Interpol for his arrest, Rauf Azhar remained shielded under Pakistan ISI’s “strategic depth” policy—where certain terrorist elements are quietly tolerated.

Global Implications

The operation comes at a time of heightened tension between India and Pakistan following the Pahalgam terror attack, which killed 26 civilians. It is also a stark reminder of the lingering impunity enjoyed by some terror masterminds within Pakistan’s borders.

India’s strike and the death of Rauf Azhar has drawn attention globally. Human rights activists and observers of counterterrorism policy have long criticized Pakistan for not doing enough to curb terrorism emanating from its soil. With this operation, India has filled that vacuum of accountability.

The Broader Message

By targeting one of the key orchestrators of one of the most heinous crimes against journalism in recent history, India has signaled a shift toward assertive counter-terror operations across borders when provoked.

While Islamabad has yet to issue an official statement, intelligence sources suggest that security has been beefed up around JeM installations and family members of Masood Azhar.

This operation is being viewed not only as a military success but also as a moral reckoning. Daniel Pearl’s memory—and the legacy of free press—has found a measure of long-overdue justice.