When Pakistan burns within, Bharat must brace for another terror attack

When the Jaffar Express was hijacked by Baloch insurgents on March 11, 2025, a former Indian diplomat who had spent years dealing with Pakistan told me something chilling: “A major terror attack in Bharat was around the corner.”

He was right. Barely six weeks later, 26 tourists were massacred in Pahalgam after being identified, on religious grounds, as Hindus.

This week, I was reminded of that prediction while reading Sushant Sareen’s recent analysis of Pakistan’s “cornered military” gambling on a “short war” with Bharat. His central argument deserves attention: Pakistan’s military establishment today is under unprecedented internal pressure. As Sareen notes, “A sudden spike in insurgent attacks in the restive province of Balochistan has forced Pakistan’s military-dominated hybrid regime to confront the gap between its middle-power ambitions and ground realities.”

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The crisis is visible everywhere. The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) continues to bleed the Army. The Baloch insurgency has become better organised, more daring and deadlier than ever. The Taliban regime in Kabul has transformed from a strategic asset into a strategic liability. Terror groups once nurtured by Rawalpindi have turned their guns on the Pakistani state. Even Pakistan-occupied Kashmir is witnessing an unprecedented wave of public anger. For an institution that has long projected itself as Pakistan’s ultimate guardian, this is as much a security threat as it is an existential crisis. And history tells us that whenever Pakistan’s military is cornered at home, its instinctive reset button is to orchestrate a terror strike on its immediate eastern neighbour. Nothing unites Pakistan’s fractured polity more effectively than the spectre of “Hindu Bharat”. External confrontation becomes the antidote to internal collapse.

This instinct is deeply rooted in Pakistan’s strategic culture. As author C. Christine Fair writes in Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army’s Way of War, the Pakistan Army believes domestic fault lines are not failures of the Pakistani state but products of Indian interference, even if imagined. Internal divisions, according to this worldview, remain “potential rather than active” until and unless they are exploited by New Delhi. “By insisting that these cleavages would not otherwise pose a problem, the Pakistan Army is able to retain its conventional focus against India while seemingly attending to the domestic threat.”

In other words, blaming Bharat has become a sort of institutional doctrine for Pakistan. Even after the catastrophic defeat of 1971, when more than 93,000 Pakistani soldiers meekly surrendered to the Indian Army, resulting in the creation of Bangladesh, Pakistan’s establishment looked outward instead of inward. Lt Gen AAK Niazi, in his 2009 book The Betrayal of East Pakistan, criticised West Pakistan’s political elite but still devoted considerable attention to blaming East Pakistan’s Hindu population for misleading the local Muslims in the name of Bengali nationalism. Even the Hamoodur Rehman Commission — a judicial inquiry set up by the Pakistan government on December 26, 1971, to investigate the causes of the 1971 Bharat-Pakistan war and the circumstances that led to the secession of East Pakistan — couldn’t stop itself from attributing significant responsibility to Bharat’s alleged influence over East Pakistan’s “over one and a half crores of Hindus”, who, unlike those in West Pakistan, “continued to remain behind in East Pakistan”. Rather than confronting structural failures, military excesses and political miscalculations, external conspiracy became a substitute for self-reflection.

The habit of blaming external factors for internal failures has only hardened with time.

This tendency to look for an external excuse comes easily to Pakistan, given its self-proclaimed identity as the “qila-e-Islam” — the fortress of Islam — that came into existence in opposition to “Hindu Bharat”. The Pakistan Army, seeing itself as the defender not only of the country’s territorial borders but also of its ideological frontiers, thus takes up the role of being simultaneously the state’s army and Allah’s army. No wonder, as Brigadier Saifi Ahmed Naqvi writes in the Pakistan Army’s 1994 Green Book, the highest motivation for a Pakistani soldier is to fight “for the cause of Islam”. The ideals of jihad, Ghazi and Shaheed remain woven into the military’s institutional ethos.

Author Maria Rashid, in Dying to Serve: Militarism, Affect and the Politics of Sacrifice in the Pakistan Army, exposes another dimension of this culture of martyrdom. She documents how martyrdom occupies a central place in the military imagination, “but no one is prepared for disability”. She writes, “You see everything changes for that person. His standing in life, his position in the house. Marital conflict is common. With time, family support diminishes, and sometimes the family can break up, especially if there are no children.”

Even more revealing is her observation that public enthusiasm for war in Pakistan is significantly greater when the adversary is Bharat than when the Army is fighting fellow Muslims. Battles against the TTP or Baloch insurgents create ideological discomfort. A confrontation with Bharat instantly restores ideological clarity. Governance failures become civilisational/religious conflict. Military setbacks become a defence of Islam.

That is precisely why cross-border terrorism serves multiple purposes for Pakistan’s establishment. It diverts attention from internal crises. It reunites a divided polity. It restores the Army’s relevance. Above all, it reinforces the ideological narrative on which the military’s dominance rests.

Compounding the danger is another enduring feature of Pakistan’s strategic culture: The Pakistani establishment’s remarkable capacity to believe its own propaganda. Victories are exaggerated, defeats are buried, and strategic failures are repackaged as triumphs. The propaganda surrounding Operation Sindoor is a recent example, with claims of spectacular Pakistani success persisting despite overwhelming evidence of severe damage inflicted by Indian precision strikes. Pakistan may also be tempted to believe that its diplomatic standing has improved over the past one year. Renewed American engagement, continued Chinese backing and Islamabad’s recent geopolitical relevance, especially amid the Iran war, may create the illusion that it has enough powerful ‘friends’ to shield it if another terrorist outrage triggers an Indian response.

Christine Fair captures another aspect of the Pakistani military mindset that explains its tendency to indulge constantly in military and terrorist misadventures. She writes, “For Pakistan’s men on horseback, not winning, even repeatedly, is not the same thing as losing. But simply giving up and accepting the status quo and India’s supremacy is, by definition, defeat. As a former chief of army staff explained to me in 2000, Pakistan’s generals would always prefer to take a calculated risk and be defeated than to do nothing at all. Pakistan’s army will insist on action at almost any cost, even that of presiding over a hollow state. After all, if the Pakistani state were to make such concessions to India, it would no longer be a state worth presiding over. By seeing victory as the ability to continue fighting, Pakistan’s army is able to seize victory even from the jaws of what other observers would deem defeat.”

That mindset explains decades of Pakistani behaviour. It also explains why Pakistan repeatedly embraces risks that appear irrational to everyone else.

Bharat, therefore, cannot afford complacency. Intelligence coordination, border management, counter-terror preparedness and rapid-response capabilities must remain at peak readiness, especially at a time when Pakistan is besieged by a series of internal reverses and when Bharat is undertaking the Amarnath Yatra. Equally important is deterrence. Pakistan’s establishment must remain convinced that every act of cross-border terrorism will invite swift, certain and painful consequences.

Peace is always desirable. But peace with an establishment that repeatedly externalises its domestic failures and derives legitimacy from perpetual hostility towards Bharat cannot rest on wishful thinking or another round of Track II romanticism. It must rest on credible deterrence, constant vigilance and strategic clarity.

There is an old military adage: if you want peace, prepare for war. Few countries illustrate its enduring relevance more starkly than Pakistan.

(The writer is the author of ‘Bharat Rising: Dharma, Democracy, Diplomacy’ and ‘Eminent Distorians: Twists and Truths in Bharat’s History’. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)