Asim Munir: The ‘man of peace’ whose blood-soaked uniform is getting dry-cleaned by Western media

Today is 22 April. Exactly a year ago, Pakistan carried out one of the most heinous crimes against humanity as its hand-held terrorists infiltrated from across the border, entered Kashmir and massacred 26 unarmed civilians at Pahalgam’s Baisaran Valley. The victims, all of them Hindus but one, were asked to recite an Islamic verse. The three terrorists, armed with M4 carbines and AK-47s, shot them on the spot from point blank when the victims were unable to recite the Kalma. Some were butchered in front of the very eyes of their loved ones.

To recount the horror is necessary. This wasn’t just another terror attack. Faisal Jatt (alias Suleman Shah), Habeeb Tahir (alias Jibran), and Hamza Afghani, all Pakistani nationals, were the perpetrators of the crime hatched in Pakistan, giving lethal shape to the narrative of bigotry and hatred spewed just six days prior to the terror attack by Asim Munir, the toast of America and right now the world’s favourite ‘peacemaker’.

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Pakistan, the mothership of global terrorism, is enjoying its moment in the sun. It has an extra spring in step. It believes it has the Americans in the bag and the Chinese in its corner. And who can blame it? Field Marshal Asim Munir, having dealt decisively with the pesky Imran Khan challenge and converting a hybrid civilian-military regime into a formalised Praetorian state, has legally and strategically anchored the military as the ultimate sovereign, rendering the civilian government a decorative entity.

For Munir himself, the US-Iran war has been a moment of supreme opportunity. And he has shown admirable tactical agility to emerge as the essential architect of regional peace. The Pakistani general has the US president practically wrapped around his little finger. In a remarkable symbiotic relationship, both Trump and Munir are ‘using’ each other to gain leverage from the war.

For Munir particularly, this has been a profitable venture. Western media and analysts are dwelling on his “unlikely peacemaker” status, marvelling at how Munir has ‘put Pakistan back on the diplomatic map’ by ‘outmaneuvering India on the world stage’.

Munir’s back-channel access in Tehran and Washington, his agility in shuttling between Riyadh and Beijing, and Pakistan’s supposed transformation from an “international outcast” to the “indispensable broker” is being discussed in breathless tones.

Suddenly, the Pakistani dictator’s running of a tight security state is a skill. In this framing, the very traits that have enabled draconian crackdowns at home — a tightly controlled military-intelligence apparatus, suppression of political opposition, and the shrinking of democratic space documented by rights groups and even some Western media reportage— are repackaged as proof that he can “deliver” when Washington needs an intermediary in a crisis.

That selective amnesia aligns neatly with immediate American interests: stabilising the Strait of Hormuz, securing a time-bound ceasefire, and outsourcing the dirty work of talking to Tehran to a partner who is structurally unaccountable and therefore more “reliable.”

As Professor Happymon Jacob writes in India’s World, “The West needed a willing mediator with access to Tehran and a clean chain of command unbothered by the noise of democracy, the heckling of the streets, and the constraints of due process. Saudi Arabia needed a reliable contractor, China needed a predictable partner, and Tehran wanted a mediator. The Pakistan Army offered all four at once.”

But Munir does all this, and more. To understand his unique symbiotic relationship with Trump that has led to Western media’s moral laundering of Munir’s many sins, we need to get the reciprocity right.

As I type this column, Trump has announced a unilateral ceasefire because Iran refused to even send a delegation to Islamabad. For the last few days leading up to the deadline on Wednesday, Trump has been claiming that he won’t extend the pause in hostilities and will bomb Tehran ‘back to stone age’ if the Iranians didn’t agree to a deal on his terms before Wednesday.

The Iranians didn’t blink. Trump did. Of course, Trump can’t be expected to admit that he has no cards left, so he did what American presidents habitually do, use Pakistan as a clutch to claim that he’s holding fire because Iranians are fractured. The world sees through the charade.

The Iranians made it clear that they won’t talk under duress or threats, and at the very least expects Washington to lift the blockade on Strait of Hormuz to resume talks. Iran believes it has the better cards. “Trump’s ceasefire extension means nothing” because “the losing side cannot dictate terms.”

This places the onus on the US President to make a compromise because the Iranian regime is holding firm and displaying greater ability to withstand pain than Trump, for whom rising gas prices and falling popularity at home require urgent intervention.

While Trump doesn’t want to get stuck in a long battle of attrition, he also cannot be seen capitulating before Iran’s demands. The US President has inflicted a thorough military defeat on Iran but suffered an even greater strategic setback. Stuck in a rut and with no good options left, Trump has taken recourse to blusters and incendiary rhetoric, the efficacy of which is questionable at best and at worst, reeks of despondency.

This is where Munir came in. Earlier this month, London-based Financial Times revealed in a report that it was the White House that wanted a ceasefire, and “for weeks the Trump administration was leaning on Islamabad to convince the Iranians to agree to a pause in fighting where it would reopen the Strait of Hormuz.”

That situation hasn’t changed even after a two-week pause. Trump is still reliant on Munir to find an exit from an ill-judged war. If anything, his desperation has become more intense.

For Munir, busy in shuttle diplomacy, this presents a unique chance to place himself and his country as an ‘indispensable interlocutor’ between Washington DC and Tehran, and move the global narrative on Pakistan from a diplomatically isolated state that orchestrates mass‑casualty terror attacks on Indians to a mediator that can untie knots with agility and speed and place itself unfailingly at the centre of unfolding security arrangements.

German media outlet DW declared that “Pakistan is receiving accolades for persuading both Washington and Tehran to pause military actions.” Western think-tank figures and chancelleries are speaking reverentially of Pakistan defying “skeptics and naysayers.” The New York Times reports that before Trump announced the ceasefire, he made two crucial phone calls — first to Benjamin Netanyahu and then to Munir.

In his latest Truth Social post, Trump singled out Shehbaz Sharif and Munir as the men at ‘whose request’ he’s extending the ceasefire. Trump’s ‘favourite Field Marshal’ won’t mind being used by the US President who is seeking to escape the self-made pickle. It is the specific utility of genuflection and courier services that Munir provides while seeking funds, loans and relevance in return.

Consequently, in Washington circles and Western media ecosystem, Munir is now the architect of Pakistani foreign policy, a man who ‘grasped the personality’ of Trump and built what analysts called institutional trust between Islamabad and the White House.

It is not my case that Pakistan is not playing a role in facilitating the ceasefire. It obviously is motivated by factors ranging from self-preservation, geopolitical and geoeconomic crises to Munir seeking external legitimacy for his repressive rule at home.

What we must note is the West’s moral laundering of Munir, a framing which systematically dry-cleans the sins of Munir against a body of evidence that would, if applied to any state adversarial to Western interests, have generated sustained condemnation rather than celebration.

At Munir’s command, Pakistani military airstrikes killed hundreds of civilians in Afghanistan, including girls, schoolchildren and patients in a Kabul rehabilitation hospital in the weeks immediately preceding the ceasefire discussions; Munir's inflammatory anti-Hindu speech on 16 April last year, his dog whistling on Kashmir and its evident operational connection to the Pahalgam massacre six days later; and Munir's issuance of nuclear threats against India from American soil in August 2025, threats that were met with silence by the Trump administration and largely unremarked upon by Western media pundits.

At a dinner with a Pakistani community in Florida in August last year, his second visit in as many months to the US, Munir, by then quite used to being on great terms with the US President, declared: “We are a nuclear nation. If we think we are going down, we’ll take half the world down with us.” He also threatened to obliterate with “10 missiles” any dam India constructed on the Indus river and offered a widely quoted analogy: “India is shining like a Mercedes, coming on a highway like a Ferrari, but we are a dump truck full of gravel. If the truck hits the car, who is going to be the loser?”

What was significant was not the nuclear sabre-rattling, however reckless. It was the total absence of any US government response. No prizes for guessing if Putin had issued such a threat. The duplicity becomes even more evident if we consider how Western punditry would have handled the issue had any Iranian general issued nuclear threats against a democratic nation from the soil of a neutral country while Iranian forces were conducting airstrikes on Afghan hospitals.

In Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Media (1988), Noam Chomsky and Edward S Herman introduced the concept of ‘worthy’ and ‘unworthy’ victims to describe the differential coverage in Western media of civilian casualties in conflicts aligned with or opposed to American foreign policy interests

Munir’s case offers a textbook example of this structural inequality. Civilian casualties in Kabul or Pahalgam, victims of Munir Doctrine, are not relevant. Sustained coverage in the world’s most influential ecosystem depends on the identity of the perpetrator and the perpetrator’s relationship to Washington's current strategic needs.

The pattern is simple: civilian deaths matter when the perpetrator is geopolitically inconvenient to Washington; they don't matter when the perpetrator is geopolitically useful. Nuclear threats are an urgent global concern when issued by Russia or Iran; they are unremarkable when issued by a Pakistani general from a Florida dinner table.

Indian tourists murdered by Pakistani terrorists after being asked to prove their religion are noteworthy only insofar as the incident may spark India-Pakistan tension that might require American crisis management. The bigotry that produced the massacre, the military hand that activated it, the general who delivered a sermon six days before the incident are details that ‘complicate’ a simple story.

Munir is a violent sociopath, a radical Islamist bigot, but not a fool. He knows what to do when opportunities present themselves, as it has now for him. He will never face scrutiny in the Western media because the structural imperatives run entirely in the other direction.

(Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)