On April 16, 2025, India experienced a deadly terrorist attack in the Pahalgam area of the broader Jammu and Kashmir region, with authorities suspecting that the perpetrators may have passed through Kishtwar to Tajmou and reached Baisaran via Kokernag in southern Kashmir, carrying out one of the most lethal attacks on civilians in the valley in recent years.
The Resistance Front, a splinter group of Lashkar-e-Taiba, has claimed responsibility for the terrorist attack in Pahalgam that has cost the lives of 26 citizens, including two foreigners. This terrorist attack occurred a few days after the chief of the Pakistan army, General Asim Munir, described Kashmir as the “jugular vein” of his country, using this analogy to imply that Pakistan considers Kashmir an integral geographical and cultural part of its territory, a part that slightly protrudes from the main body of the country but is essential for the country to continue to have a voice. The voice from which Pakistan seeks to draw political and religious power.
Of course, the Indian people found Asim Munir’s statement provocative and inappropriate. However, the chief of the Pakistani army continued undeterred with his hate rhetoric against India, stating that Pakistan would continue to stand by the people of Kashmir in their struggle against Indian occupation. Additionally, he called on Pakistani citizens to tell stories to their children so that they do not forget that “they are different from Hindus.”
On April 17, Randhir Jaiswal, the official spokesperson of the Ministry of External Affairs of India, dismissed Pakistan’s statement that it considers Kashmir its jugular vein, asking “how can the jugular vein be in a vein that someone is deliberately cutting, making it bleed continuously.”
The relations between India and Pakistan have never been friendly and worsened after the abrogation of Article 370 of the Indian Constitution on August 5, 2019, which revoked the special status of Jammu and Kashmir and divided the region into two parts.
The issue that arises now is what is really happening with the Pakistani army, which constantly creates turmoil in its neighboring countries, as it is not only responsible for these incidents in Kashmir but has also been continuously organizing attacks for many years, sometimes taking responsibility for them and sometimes not, both in Bangladesh and Afghanistan.
Regarding the battles it has initiated against its neighbors, the Pakistani army has engaged in four wars with India: first in 1947-48, second in 1965, third in 1971, and fourth in the Kargil War in 1999. Pakistan has lost all four wars. For the first time, the Pakistani army took responsibility for the Kargil War against India. The army chief, General Asim Munir, in a speech given on September 7, 2024, during an event for Pakistan’s defense day, made special mention of the Pakistani soldiers who had died in various conflicts with India, including the Kargil War, a topic he had carefully avoided in official statements for over two decades. However, this time Munir did not hesitate to state that “the Pakistani community is a community of brave men who understand the importance of freedom and its cost. For this reason, in 1948, 1965, 1971, and in the Kargil War in 1999, thousands of soldiers sacrificed their lives for the country and Islam.” Unlike his predecessor, the humble pragmatist General Qamar Javed Bajwa, Asim Munir, known for his aggressive stance and appetite for risk, seems to be reviving the doctrine of “managed escalation,” a strategy that uses carefully calculated acts of violence as a tool of political pressure.
To understand why Pakistan resorts to such actions, we must examine the internal situation of the country at this moment. Pakistan today is a deeply unstable state. It is economically paralyzed, politically nebulous, and socially fragmented. In this context, the adventurism of the Pakistani army in Kashmir becomes a political tool as it serves as a means for the army to divert the people’s dissatisfaction from the socioeconomic situation of the country. Very often, the influence of the Pakistani army extends beyond its constitutionally defined responsibilities. There have been many instances in Pakistan’s history where the army has intervened in the country’s political affairs, suspending democratic governance and acting as a powerful force within the state, a “semi-autonomous state within a state.”
Additionally, the Pakistani army has engaged in numerous border conflicts with Afghanistan along the Durand Line, as well as numerous attacks on civilians in Balochistan, often in coordination with Iranian security forces. Furthermore, the Pakistani army has participated in international military engagements and terrorist attacks.
Since the 1960s, the Pakistani army has supported Arab states during Arab-Israeli conflicts. Additionally, it collaborated with the United States during the first Gulf War in the early 1990s. Regarding the atrocities committed by the Pakistani army in Bangladesh, Bangladesh demanded that Pakistan issue an official apology for the genocide it perpetrated against the people of Bangladesh in 1971, a genocide in which three million people were killed according to Bangladeshi authorities. Of course, Pakistan usually attempts to distort reality as it reports only 26,000 civilian casualties. The genocide in Bangladesh is the only genocide in modern times that stemmed from a deliberate policy of suppressing the democratic aspirations of the people. Now, Pakistan and Bangladesh have experienced significant improvement in bilateral relations since the transitional government, led by Nobel laureate Mr. Yunus, took power in Bangladesh after protests that forced former Prime Minister Hasina to take refuge in India in 2024. It is now clear that Pakistan and Bangladesh find common political ground in the dominance of Muslims over Hindus in the region.
Subsequently, regarding the actions of the Pakistani army in Afghanistan, on December 25, 2024, the Pakistani army carried out airstrikes before dawn on multiple targets in the Paktika province of Afghanistan. Afghan officials stated that the attacks killed at least 47 terrorists and injured another 23.
“The Pakistani side must understand that such arbitrary measures are not a solution to any problem,” wrote Enayatullah Khorasani, spokesperson for the Afghan Ministry of Defense, on the social media platform X. “The Islamic Emirate will not leave this cowardly act unanswered and considers the defense of its territory an inalienable right,” he added, referring to Afghanistan by the name given by the Taliban government.
Members of the Pakistani army often violently abduct young boys, at the onset of their teenage years, from their families who lose all trace of them. Subsequently, while the boys are vulnerable, exposed in some desolate location far from their homes, they are continuously raped, destroying their dignity, sense of self-respect, and hope for a future. When all hope is lost and the young person is ready to commit suicide, the Mullah appears, presenting Allah and faith in the Quran as a lifeline for the shattered individual. The military personnel, along with the religious officials, play a role in violently destroying the individual’s psyche, using the two sides of the same coin: despair and faith. The individual who had just lost everything now finds a new purpose in existence: to kill infidels in the name of Allah, without any fear or rational restraint about dying themselves in the process. Why does this extreme method of rape remain a taboo subject in the Pakistani army, which many know about but no one speaks of? For the same reason that no one denounces the rapes occurring to women in the North Korean army. Because we are talking about people who, due to the trauma they have suffered, are now empty human vessels who have lost all sense of humanity and can now carry out functions indiscriminately.
Concluding the analysis of the Pakistani army, it is difficult to be optimistic that it will not commit atrocities again since it is an entity formed against the concept of human respect. And before we consider that such a thing happens only to desperate, poor, provincial youths who are recruited to staff the Pakistani army, let us also think of the European girls who voluntarily go to Dubai to participate in party boats. The most dangerous thing that turns a person into either an empty vessel or a war machine is the loss of self-consciousness, and unfortunately, both materialism and religious fanaticism achieve this loss of consciousness in the best way possible.
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