The enduring tragedy of the Indian subcontinent is not the partition itself but the malignant nature of the state that emerged on our western flank. For nearly eight decades the Indian strategic establishment and the global community have wrestled with the enigma of Pakistan without fully accepting the terrifying reality that stares us in the face. The fundamental error lies in treating the Pakistan Army as a conventional military force with legitimate security concerns rather than what it truly is which is a radicalised armed syndicate that has elevated terrorism to a state religion. This is not a matter of a few rogue elements or a temporary tactical deviation but the inevitable result of a country born out of the poisonous Two-Nation Theory which posited that Hindus and Muslims could not coexist. The Pakistan Army became the self-appointed custodian of this hate and over the decades it has carefully nurtured an ecosystem of extremism that has now metastasized into a threat that no amount of diplomacy or dialogue can ever sanitise.
To understand the depth of this rot one must look past the starched uniforms and the Sandhurst-style etiquette that Pakistani Generals display in Western capitals. These are merely costumes worn to deceive a gullible world while the soul of the institution is dark and committed to a medieval fantasy of conquest. The transformation of the Pakistan Army from a professional fighting force into the armed wing of a jihadist ideology was not an accident but a deliberate project engineered by the dictator General Zia-ul-Haq. It was under his watch that the very genetic code of the Pakistani soldier was rewritten. The motto of the army was altered to explicitly include Jihad as a central tenet which erased the line between defending a nation and fighting a holy war. This was the moment when the professional soldier died and the ideological zealot was born. The officers passing out of their academies today are the children of this doctrine who have been fed a steady diet of historical revisionism and religious supremacy that paints India not just as a geopolitical rival but as a theological enemy that must be destroyed.
This indoctrination has created a military machine that operates on a logic completely alien to modern statecraft. In any normal country an army exists to protect the state and its people but in Pakistan the state exists solely to feed the army and its delusions of grandeur. They have realised that they cannot defeat India in a conventional war for the humiliating defeats of 1948 and 1965 and the dismemberment of their country in 1971 destroyed that fantasy forever. Instead of accepting reality they chose the cowardly path of asymmetric warfare. They decided to bleed India with a thousand cuts by weaponising the most violent and sociopathic elements of their society. The Inter-Services Intelligence or ISI became the conductor of this orchestra of death by training and equipping groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed to slaughter innocent civilians in Mumbai and Kashmir and Delhi. This was not a strategic necessity but an ideological imperative for a force that views peace with India as a betrayal of its very reason for existence.
The world often makes the mistake of thinking that these terrorist groups are proxies that can be turned on and off like a tap. The terrifying truth is that there is no longer any meaningful distinction between the puppet master and the puppet. The ideology of the terrorist has seeped into the mess halls and the headquarters of the Pakistan Army itself. When a uniformed force uses nuclear blackmail to shield terrorists from punishment it ceases to be an army and becomes a criminal enterprise holding the world hostage. They have turned their entire country into a geopolitical suicide vest where they threaten to blow themselves up along with the region if their demands for relevance and money are not met. This is the geopolitics of a madman and it is fuelled by a deep-seated insecurity about their own identity. Pakistan has no history and no culture and no heritage that is distinct from India so they must manufacture a synthetic identity based entirely on not being Indian and on hating everything that India stands for.
This hatred is the opium that the Pakistan Army feeds its population to keep them distracted from the fact that their country is crumbling around them. The generals live in opulence and own vast business empires and send their children to study in the West while the ordinary Pakistani is left to rot in a society radicalised by the very hate the state has manufactured.
The Army needs the spectre of an eternal Indian enemy to justify its stranglehold on power and its obscene share of the national budget. If peace were to break out tomorrow the Pakistan Army would lose its relevance and its power would evaporate. Therefore, they have a vested interest in keeping the fires of conflict burning and in ensuring that the radicalisation of their society continues unabated. They have created a monster that feeds on human blood and they are willing to sacrifice their own children to keep it alive.
The Indian response to this existential threat has been far too patient for far too long. We have allowed ourselves to be bound by the rules of civilised nations while dealing with a barbarian entity that respects no law and no border. The time for strategic restraint is over because restraint is viewed as weakness by a bully who only understands the language of force. The recent shift in Indian policy towards punitive retribution and surgical strikes is a welcome change but it must only be the beginning. We must stop deluding ourselves that there is a moderate faction within the Pakistani establishment that we can work with. There are no moderates in a system built on hate. Every handshake with a Pakistani general is a betrayal of the soldiers who have died defending our borders and the civilians who have been massacred in our cities. The only way to deal with such a foe is to impose such a heavy cost on their misadventures that the pain outweighs the ideological satisfaction they derive from killing Indians.
We must also mercilessly expose the duplicity of the Pakistan Army to the international community which still clings to the naive hope that Rawalpindi can be a partner in peace. The world needs to see that the headquarters of global terrorism is not in some cave in Afghanistan but in the plush offices of the General Headquarters in Rawalpindi. The generals who sip tea with American diplomats are the same men who sign the death warrants of innocent people across the world. They are the arsonists masquerading as firefighters and until the world ostracises them and sanctions them and treats them like the pariahs they are the bloodshed will not stop. India stands as the on…
Extremism in Pakistan Army
