Pakistan’s long shadow of jihadism makes peace with India impossible

Last month, a senior foreign correspondent for a major international broadcaster asked me what it would actually take for peace between India and Pakistan. Not another temporary ceasefire. Not another carefully staged diplomatic handshake. Real peace. My answer was simple. Pakistan must stop terrorist groups responsible for mass-casualty attacks. Groups like Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba are designated by the United Nations and much of the international community. Pakistan treats them like sports teams. Everything else flows from there. India ultimately wants good relations with Pakistan. Most Indians do. But no country can build lasting peace with a gun permanently pointed at its head.

That is the uncomfortable reality sitting at the heart of South Asia’s crisis. Before discussions about strategic doctrines, regional balance, covert operations, or nationalist rhetoric can even begin, there remains the unresolved issue that some of the world’s most notorious militant organisations emerged, operated, or found shelter within Pakistan’s orbit over decades. Until Pakistan fully confronts that legacy with clarity rather than ambiguity, trust will always remain fragile.

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That is why Senator Sherry Rehman’s post on X on May 18, 2026, was so striking. In the post, she argued that the so-called “Doval Doctrine” had become a “spectacular failure” and accused India of attempting to destabilise Pakistan “through a thousand cuts”.

There is a serious debate to be had about India’s regional strategy and the dangers of covert escalation between two nuclear powers. There are also legitimate concerns surrounding hyper-nationalist rhetoric on both sides. But Pakistan risks undermining its own position when criticism of India crosses into outright historical revisionism. Lies will not help anyone.

India is not viewed internationally as an engine of international terrorism. Pakistan is. That reputation was not invented by propagandists sitting in television studios in New Delhi. It developed over decades because of militant networks, proxy warfare, the Taliban era, Kashmir militancy, extremist infrastructure, and repeated international allegations involving elements of Pakistan’s security establishment. NATO camped out in Afghanistan for twenty years while Pakistan’s proxies made Western troops, diplomats, aid workers, and civilians bleed. The world has not forgotten that reality. Pakistan may dislike it, but denying it outright only deepens international scepticism.

The Abbottabad raid remains one of the clearest examples of this credibility problem. After the operation that killed Osama bin Laden, narratives quickly surfaced suggesting Pakistan had secretly cooperated with the United States. Pakistani strategists briefed Seymour Hersh, once one of America’s most formidable investigative journalists. Almost nobody bought it. The story never truly landed internationally because it contradicted the visible humiliation the raid inflicted upon Pakistan’s military and intelligence establishment. The world was effectively being asked to believe that Pakistan had both harboured the world’s most wanted terrorist near a major military academy and simultaneously orchestrated one of the greatest intelligence deceptions in modern history. The narrative collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions.

That matters because it revealed a broader strategic problem that still exists today. Pakistan often appears uncertain about its audience. Is the messaging intended for domestic consumption? Gulf allies? China? Western governments? International media? Because the further Pakistan moves toward revisionism and selective memory, the harder it becomes to build genuine trust abroad.

That is unfortunate because Pakistan does have a legitimate case to make in several areas. The country has suffered enormously from terrorism itself. Tens of thousands of Pakistanis have died in bombings, insurgencies, sectarian attacks, and extremist violence. Entire communities were devastated. Schools were attacked. Markets were destroyed. Pakistan’s military campaigns against militant groups were bloody and costly, and at times the state itself appeared under existential pressure. No serious observer can dismiss the scale of Pakistan’s suffering or the counterterrorism experience it accumulated through that trauma.

But acknowledging Pakistan’s suffering does not require the world to abandon historical memory.

The stronger argument for Pakistan is not denial. It is reform. If Pakistan genuinely wants to reposition itself internationally, then the focus should be on demonstrating that it has learned catastrophic lessons from decades of instability and strategic ambiguity. It should present itself as a state committed to economic modernisation, regional trade, diplomatic maturity, and the irreversible dismantling of militant ecosystems regardless of who once viewed them as useful. That argument is credible because it aligns with Pakistan’s own long-term interests.

There are signs that parts of Pakistan’s establishment understand this. The growing emphasis on Gulf investment, Central Asian connectivity, trade corridors, and economic stabilisation suggests recognition that perpetual hostility with India cannot remain the organising principle of Pakistan’s future. Pakistan’s geography gives it enormous strategic potential. It could become a commercial bridge between the Indian subcontinent, Central Asia, China, and the Gulf. But no country becomes a trusted regional hub through strategic gaslighting. Trust is built through consistency, transparency, and credibility.

At the same time, India should not assume it is immune to scrutiny. The belief that Pakistan could simply be isolated, psychologically broken, or permanently contained has clearly not delivered the clean strategic outcome some imagined in New Delhi. There is a strong argument that US President Donald Trump’s team gave Pakistan a diplomatic lifeline during Operation Sindoor when it might otherwise have faced far greater international pressure. But Pakistan weakens its own case when it attempts to invert the entire history of jihadi militancy and portray itself solely as the victim while framing India as the principal architect of regional terrorism. That narrative simply lacks international credibility.

South Asia does not need competing national mythologies. It does not need two nuclear powers endlessly rewriting history to suit present political needs. What the region requires is strategic realism and a degree of honesty from both sides about the failures that have defined India-Pakistan relations for decades.

Perhaps Senator Rehman’s comments do reflect something important beneath the warped rhetoric. Perhaps parts of Pakistan’s political establishment are finally recognising that old doctrines, proxy wars, and permanent hostility have failed to deliver stability or prosperity for either side. If so, that recognition is welcome. But if Pakistan truly wants to move forward, then trust must become central to its strategy. Revisionism and outright distortion will not heal old wounds. They will deepen suspicion. The world is far more likely to support a Pakistan that openly acknowledges its difficult past while demonstrating meaningful reform than one that attempts to out-argue its own history.

The penny may finally be dropping in Islamabad and Rawalpindi. The question now is whether Pakistan chooses credibility and reform — or whether it continues trying to rewrite the very history that damaged its reputation in the first place.

(The author is a strategist in international relations and economic development. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)