Pahalgam, Asim Munir, and the West’s Selective War on Terror

Credit By: SONAM MAHAJAN

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• 22 Apr 2026

If Pahalgam has proved anything, it is that Pakistan’s greatest strategic asset is not Lashkar or TRF. It is the world’s ability to look away

The Pahalgam massacre was not just another terror attack in India. It was an operational statement, delivered with a brutality calculated to be remembered and with timing calibrated for maximum political effect. Twenty-six civilians were killed at Baisaran meadow near Pahalgam in Kashmir within minutes, almost all of them tourists. They were not caught in crossfire; they were selected.

Eyewitness accounts suggest the terrorists identified victims by religion, demanded religious recitations, and executed those who could not comply. Hindus were targeted, a Christian man was also killed, and one local died as well, reportedly after attempting to intervene, though the precise sequence remains unclear. The method was the message: to convert a tourist meadow into a killing field, and to remind India that the vocabulary of fear can still be imposed at will.

The group that claimed responsibility called itself The Resistance Front (TRF), a name chosen carefully to sound local and politically organic. Yet TRF is widely recognised as a Lashkar-e-Taiba proxy, part of Pakistan’s familiar practice of rebranding terrorist infrastructure without dismantling it. India’s National Investigation Agency traced digital trails and forensic leads to safe houses in Muzaffarabad and Karachi, with intercepts and material evidence pointing to handlers operating from Pakistani soil.

Pahalgam mattered because it struck at the one trend New Delhi had been quietly trying to nurture: the return of ordinary life to Kashmir. Tourism had become more than an economic story. It had become a strategic indicator. By targeting civilians in a high-visibility setting, the perpetrators were not merely seeking casualties. They were seeking to puncture the idea of normalcy itself.

Today, 22 April 2026, marks the first anniversary of that attack. Anniversaries are usually meant for closure, for reflection, for the language of ‘never again’. But Pahalgam offers no such comfort. The meadow may have returned to its deceptive calm, yet the architecture that enabled the massacre remains intact, adaptive, and politically useful to the same establishment that has long treated terrorism as a lever rather than a liability.

If Pahalgam was meant to shatter a fragile normalcy in Kashmir, it was also meant to remind the international community that Pakistan’s proxy doctrine has not disappeared; it has merely learned to survive scrutiny.

That was precisely what made the timing so pointed. The attack coincided with US Vice President JD Vance’s visit to India, a moment intended to reinforce strategic convergence but instantly overshadowed by bloodshed. It came only days after Pakistan’s Army Chief, General Asim Munir, revived the old jihad-era vocabulary by calling Kashmir Pakistan’s jugular vein. In South Asia, such phrases are rarely rhetorical indulgences. They function as signals, directed not only at domestic audiences but also at the ecosystem of proxies and sympathisers that has long taken its cues from Rawalpindi.

Then came Pakistan’s other familiar reflex. Around the same time, the Jaffar Express incident in Balochistan was quickly framed by Islamabad as an India-backed operation, despite no credible evidence or international validation.

What was even more revealing was the candour with which parts of Pakistan’s commentariat discussed the likely consequences. Najam Sethi, among others, suggested on television that such incidents often produce escalation elsewhere, implying retaliatory pressure in Kashmir. It was said casually, as though terrorism were a weather pattern rather than a crime. That casualness reveals something fundamental about Pakistan’s strategic culture. Even for the most liberal-sounding Pakistani voices, cross-border violence is not an aberration; it is an instrument.

The Western framing that followed was revealing in its own way. Donald Trump claimed the crisis had brought India and Pakistan to the brink of nuclear war. New Delhi has little reason to accept such melodrama. Yet even if one were to take Washington’s alarmism at face value, the question becomes unavoidable: if Pakistan-backed terrorism can plausibly trigger escalation between two nuclear-armed states, why is Pakistan still treated as a responsible stakeholder rather than as the most persistent source of strategic risk in the region?

India’s response was measured, precise, and rooted in law enforcement and military strategy. The Cabinet Committee on Security approved steps aimed at degrading the infrastructure behind cross-border terrorism, including targeted action against camps in mainland Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied territories. Operation Sindoor was launched with the explicit objective of dismantling training and planning networks that enable attacks like Pahalgam.

It is at this point that the diplomatic ritual begins. Western capitals issue the standard condolences and condemnations. The words are correct, even necessary. But they are also predictable, because they come with an unspoken caveat: Pakistan would still remain a partner, a channel, an interlocutor. In Washington, lawmakers and security officials have acknowledged Pakistan-linked involvement in Pahalgam, even as the same American establishment continues to cultivate Islamabad for regional diplomacy, counter-terror cooperation, and broader strategic bargaining.

This is the paradox South Asia has lived with for decades. Pakistan’s relationship with terrorism is treated internationally as an inconvenient detail, not a defining feature. The underlying assumption is that terror sponsorship can be placed in one compartment, while Pakistan’s usefulness can be placed in another, and that both compartments can coexist without moral contamination.

Pakistan has learnt to exploit this indulgence. It manufactures crises, denies responsibility, and then offers itself as the indispensable mediator. Even when its own proxies are implicated, Islamabad manages to present itself as a stakeholder in stability rather than the architect of instability. The world, especially the West, keeps playing along, partly out of habit, partly out of fear, and partly because Pakistan has perfected the art of appearing too dangerous to isolate.

The broader pattern is easy to recognise. Pakistan rarely confronts internal violence as a consequence of domestic failures, provincial alienation, or ideological radicalisation. It prefers to reframe insurgency as a foreign conspiracy. This is why Baloch anger must be ‘R&AW-sponsored’, why the Pakistani Taliban must be ‘someone else’s project’, and why every internal fracture must somehow lead back to India. The habit does not merely absolve the state. It also keeps the Kashmir theatre permanently available for activation.

New Delhi’s view, by necessity, is different. Terrorism is not a bargaining chip. It is a moral and legal rupture, a direct assault on the state’s obligation to protect its citizens. That distinction matters because it shapes how a society understands legitimacy. When terror becomes negotiable, it becomes normalised. When it remains anathema, the state retains moral clarity, even when its responses are forceful.

Yet the international order often blurs this line. The West speaks endlessly of a rules-based system, but its rules become flexible when confronted with strategic convenience. Pakistan’s tolerance of terror proxies is criticised in speeches, and quietly accommodated in policy, because Islamabad is still seen as useful: for managing Afghanistan, hedging against China, or maintaining regional access.

The subtext is hard to miss. Terrorism is unacceptable, except when punishing it becomes inconvenient.

Pakistan’s internal fragility only makes this strategy more tempting. A state dependent on bailouts, burdened by economic crisis, and fractured by political instability has repeatedly reached for external provocation as a substitute for internal reform. Kashmir serves as both an obsession and a distraction. It can be switched on when inflation rises, when civil-military tensions sharpen, or when provinces begin to question the federal legitimacy.

Pahalgam fits too neatly into this logic to be dismissed as an isolated act of fanaticism. The planning was deliberate, the target selection symbolically loaded, and the religious profiling calculated to deepen communal anxiety. The denials that followed also revealed a lot. They were part of the choreography, designed to preserve distance while keeping the proxy ecosystem intact.

If this sounds cynical, it is because Pakistan’s history invites cynicism. In 1999, Kargil was sold as daring until it collapsed into embarrassment. In 2001, the Parliament attack brought the subcontinent to the edge. In 2008, Mumbai was not merely terror, but a strategic message delivered through Lashkar’s terrorists, calibrated to provoke India while retaining plausible deniability. Even the discovery of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad should have been a moment of national disgrace. Instead, Pakistan responded with indignation and managed amnesia, and much of the world eventually accepted the performance.

That is what makes Pakistan’s denials so confident. Islamabad has learnt that outrage is rarely permanent, and consequences are often negotiable.

The deeper irony is that Pakistan is now being consumed by the forces it once cultivated. The jihadist ecosystem created for Kashmir has metastasised into a national security cancer. Insurgencies in Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa are not foreign inventions. They are rebellions rooted in decades of coercion and exclusion. But admitting this would mean dismantling the mythology that sustains the military’s dominance. So Pakistan’s military establishment does what it always does: externalise blame, accuse India, and attempt to export instability outward.

Even Pakistan’s posture towards Afghanistan reflects this compulsion. Airstrikes across the border and constant interference in Kabul signal a state uneasy with its own borders and its own cohesion. Pakistan does not seek a stable neighbourhood so much as it seeks a neighbourhood unstable enough to justify its militarised politics.

Which brings us back to what Pahalgam truly signifies.

The tragedy is not merely that innocent people were murdered. Terrorism has never struggled to find victims. The tragedy is that Pakistan’s use of terror has been normalised in the international imagination, treated as a chronic condition rather than a strategic crime.

Pahalgam should have forced the world to abandon the convenient fiction that terrorism can be quarantined as a regional irritant. It should have compelled global policymakers to treat Pakistan’s proxy doctrine not as an unfortunate complication, but as an assault on the very counter-terror framework the West claims to uphold.

Instead, the response followed the familiar ritual. Condolences were issued, condemnations drafted, and the conversation drifted back to strategic engagement. Pakistan returned to denial. The West returned to convenience.

And perhaps that is the most sobering lesson of Pahalgam. Pakistan did not merely test India’s security architecture. It tested the international system’s willingness to treat terrorism as a principle rather than a bargaining chip. By now, Islamabad has little reason to fear the verdict.

Because if Pahalgam has proved anything, it is that Pakistan’s greatest strategic asset is not Lashkar or TRF. It is the world’s ability to look away.

(The Author can be reached at: sonamytc@gmail.com)