It was the evening when the guns fell silent. A ceasefire by a ceasefire – in haste by Washington, as many people in the West, but India denied – the missile -and -drain clashes between India and Pakistan that had reached the brink to South Asia. British journalist Pierce Morgan, ever eager to incite, gathered a panel: two Indians, two Pakistanis, including a former foreign minister, who had just surfaced.
After this everyone was very familiar. Pakistani guests denied participation in the initiative terrorist attack – not only this one, but all others were returning in the early 1990s. Instead, he put himself as victims, suggesting that India was aggressive, allegedly orchestrating attacks in West Pakistan. The show has a global following, and the Pakistani panelists fully knew it.
I looked with increasing discomfort. After more than three decades in journalism – many of them cover Kashmir – I have heard this script before. But knowing what I know, I have seen what I have seen, it is not just misleading. This is an insult to the truth.
The Pahalgam massacre, where families were closed in a broad daylight, had no discrepancy. It followed a seriously familiar playbook – one wrote not in the Meadows of Kashmir, but in the war room of GHQ Rawalpindi. Along with ISI, the Pakistani Army has long used terror, which has used terror as a proxy, orchestrating attacks, refusing participation. Some of my British colleagues in media and academics struggle with it, often fall back on the story “both sides”. But the victims and criminals are not the same. I remember some moments that bring this reality into fast relief:
Afghan in Srinagar city
It was early in the 1990s. A small, easily missed PTI The report claimed that Afghan militants infiltrated Kashmir for the first time. It sent waves through Indian intelligence. My photographer colleague, Neeraj Paul, and I tracked a lead for a part of downtown Srinagar. We blindfolded, bundled in a van, and took to meet the leader of the Afghan group.
He was small, stressful and masked with a handkerchief. Two pistols shone in his hands. He confirmed that he was an Afghan and was pushed into Kashmir by handlers of camps run by the Pakistani Army. But before we could go ahead, his colleagues immediately whisper. After moments, 30 to 40 gunmen came out of the back of the walls and opened fire in the sky. Neeraj and I felt that we would not make it alive. The commander asked us to leave – he was no longer in the mood to talk.
Later that day, I visited the joint inquiry cell ‘Papa 2’. I knew an army colonel that I was told that they had sent a team in search of some intruders. When I said that we were trapped in the crossfire, he was visually relieved.
The man who knew too much
Rapid forward for 2011. A federal court in Chicago. Pakistani-American David Coleman Headley, long, composed, speaking in a flat American accent, bare the truth behind the 2008 Mumbai attacks.
It was not just Lashkar-e-Tabiba, he said. The Operation was funded and directed by the ISI. He named an ISI officer – “Chief Iqbal” – as a person who gave him $ 25,000 for Monitoring Mission to Mumbai. Headley explained how the target was handled, how his reconnaissance was coordinated with Pakistan. Evidence: Email, phone intercept, travel records.
Sitting in court, I saw whispering and as years of doubt that the oath settled into testimony. This was one of the moments when the fog of geopolitics rose, and the hand behind the curtain was suddenly visible to everyone.
Gunman
Farooq Ahmed, or Saifullah, was once trained in a terrorist camp in Pakistan and took up arms in Kashmir. Years later, he stood for elections in Srinagar, urged the young Kashmiris not to make their mistake. “There was no one to stop me,” he said. “Now I want to be that voice.”
Men like him – some improvement, some captured, some have gone – confirm one thing: The Road to Terrorism runs through Pakistan’s military campus. Therefore, looking at that post-seesefire panel, with Pak panelists in Daniel mode, felt that history was erased in real time. But this is more than television spin. It is about memory. This is about the truth.
Support for Khalistani movement
Set Kashmir separate for a moment. Pakistan’s military support for the Khalistan movement was just calculation and corrosive. In 1997, during a visit to Lahore to report for a global channel, I was shown around a Khalistani Industration Center, where a Sikh father-son couple told me that they had put bombs in Punjab until prickly wires were revealed. I met many men who served a jail sentence for the flights of Indian Airlines kidnapped in 1981 and 1984, including their leader Gajinder Singh, whose attendance in Pakistan has always been officially denied. After closely covering both Sikh and Kashmiri Rebellion, I have no doubt that the deep state of Pakistan has long used these movements as a tool to bleed India, inspired by an incredible passion with a revenge of 1971. Even David Headley accepted it outright, in his Chicago testimony.
It brings us by 12 May. That evening, Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed the nation – not with bureaucracy restraint, but with raw spirit. The country was still soaked in blood in Pahgam. His speech was suffering from grief, fierce, firm. Operation Sindore, he announced, India’s reply. “Every terrorist and every terrorist organization now knows what is meant to strike our people,” they threatened. Modi revealed that Pakistan came to the table only after being a military and morally hit. The disadvantage from India’s sharp vengeance was not only surprising; This was, in his words, disastrous. Modi’s speech was more than a policy statement. This was a message – for Indians and the world – that terror will no longer be considered as a regular tragedy. These attacks went into Pakistan more than ever, not only targeted the soldiers of the foot, but the roots of the infrastructure of terror.
Is Rawalpindi listening?
Nevertheless, for those of us who have seen long, penetrating history of Kashmir, a familiar inequality. Will this response be enough to stop the generals of Rawalpindi, who have long seen terror as strategic depths?
Pahalgam was not a separate incident. It is part of a bloody continuity – from Uri to Pulwama, in 2001, from the Parliament attack from Mumbai to 2008. All the same fingerprint: Pakistan. And a cool, running war – low -taut, high -laid – this is since 1989.
Modi’s voice developed his previous address. After the URI in 2016, he reminded Pakistan that the true fight should be against poverty and illiteracy. After Balkot in 2019, he hit a raga of unity. But this time, the warning was clear: “If Pakistan does not work against terror, it will destroy itself.”
There is tragedy, attacks like initiatives occur because memories fade. Mumbai became blurred, then urged. Uri faded, then Pulwama came. Now it is Pahalgam – a brutal reminiscent that the enemy across the border is crooks, unaware and efficient in refusal.
A long term plan
It leads to a conclusion that I have held for a long time: surgical strikes, such as Balakot and now Operation Sindoor, hold the headline, but their effect is fleeting. If India really wants to uproot terror a breeding and exporting machinery, short -term vengeance should be anchored in a long -term principle. The real challenge lies in Pakistan’s power structure – not its people who are busy surviving, but its military and the twin columns of Mulla, who suffer from Kashmir. If the Pakistani army really wants to destroy the terrorist network, it can erase Lashkar-e-Tabiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed–Globally nominated terrorist outfits-in one day. But this will not happen.
Learn from Mossad and CIA
Under the national security banner, both Israel and America regularly eliminates threats: no resentment, no morality. In 2018, Mossad agents stole Iran’s nuclear archives from Tehran warehouse; In 2020, Iran’s top nuclear scientist was assassinated, allegedly by an AI-Assisted remote weapon; In 2024, Hamas leader Ismail Honeyh was closed in Tehran. In 2020, the US killed General Kassem Solimani with a drone near Baghdad. There are dozens of similar secret operations conducted by CIA and Mossad. India can consider such an accurate strategy – but it requires Mossad -level intelligence and willpower where it really hurts.
Pakistan is not a monolith. Its Punjabis dominate, while Baloch, Scindis, Muhajir and Pashtun boil with displeasure. India should invest from here – judiciously. Indian support is already suspected in Balochistan; True or not, it is the right nerve to press.
And I strongly believe that in the national interest, we should quietly return to Democratic actors within Pakistan, who hate the army but toe their line to toe to survive politically. Many of them have met in London and Washington – they are waiting for a change. Finally, more than missiles are required to eradicate the roots of terror. It demands patience, accuracy and a vision that is in the headlines. Allow the guns to explode in silence.
(Syed Zubair Ahmed is a London -based senior Indian journalist who has three decades experience with Western media)
Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author
