Pakistan’s Military Leader Has The Most To Gain & Lose From The Pahalgam Terrorist Attack
From India’s perspective, the Pahalgam terrorist attack has Pakistan’s fingerprints all over it, hence why it’s considering at least one surgical strike across the border.
Terrorists massacred 26 tourists who were relaxing in the Baisaran Valley meadow near Pahalgam in the Indian union territory of Jammu & Kashmir (J&K). They specifically targeted Hindus, checking the victims’ IDs and even asking them to pull down their pants to see whether they were circumcised. The terrorists were from “The Resistance Front”, which is an Indian-designated terrorist group associated with the Pakistani-based Lashkar-e-Taiba, itself designated as a terrorist group by India, Russia, the US, and several others.
One of India’s responses has been to hold the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance, which prompted Pakistan to threaten that any curtailment of water to it will be considered an act of war. Pakistan also suspended the 1972 Simla Agreement that ended the third Indo-Pakistani War. Observers now expect that the 2021 ceasefire will soon be annulled. Surgical strikes by India against Pakistan might soon follow after Prime Minister Narendra Modi vowed to “pursue [the terrorists] to the ends of the Earth.”
Amidst the uncertainty over what might come next and whether it could set into motion a possibly uncontrollable escalation that ultimately leads to a nuclear exchange, it’s arguably the case that Pakistani Chief of Army Staff Asim Munir has the most to gain and lose from the latest tensions. Beginning with how he might benefit, the most obvious way is by trying to rally the entire nation behind him, especially in the event of tit-for-tat strikes or worse with India.
The de facto military junta that he leads is very unpopular after many Pakistanis believe that it approved April 2022’s post-modern coup against former Prime Minister Imran Khan, which led to political, economic, and security crises, the latter with regard to the upsurge in Afghan-based terrorism. The last point segues into the other way that Munir could benefit and that’s by tacitly portraying the Pahalgam terrorist attack as a “plausibly deniable” response to last month’s Jaffar Express terrorist attack.
The terrorist-designated “Baloch Liberation Army”, which has a history of specifically targeting Punjabis, was responsible. Pakistan blamed India for backing them, which it has traditionally done every time the group carries out an attack, but India denied the allegation as always. Nevertheless, many Pakistanis might still truly believe that India was involved, hence why Munir could have media outlets and influencers on his establishment’s payroll present Pahalgam as a “tit-for-tat” Hybrid War response.
And finally, Munir might also have calculated that this latest terrorist attack would catalyze a chain reaction in J&K that could lead to another wave of unrest there that in turn destabilizes India. Complementarily, the aforesaid as well as what he could be wagering would be controlled tit-for-tat strikes might be manipulated by anti-Indian media across the world to undermine its perception as a rising Great Power, not to mention to fearmonger about it being an unsafe place for foreign investments.
On the other hand, Pahalgam could also tremendously backfire against Munir, most obviously in the reputational sense if India is able to rally a lot of the world against Pakistan. Its close Chinese and Saudi partners already condemned Pahalgam though they might not participate in any Indian attempt to isolate Pakistan. Putin and the Trump pledged full support for India, however, so their countries might tangibly distance themselves from Pakistan in some way or another out of solidarity with India.
The second way in which Munir might lose out in the aftermath of this attack is if the reported US deep state differences over Pakistan, in which the CIA allegedly backs him while the State Department and the Pentagon supposedly want civilian-led democratic rule, lead to the US more robustly seeking his ouster. After all, the attack happened while Vance was visiting India, which US officials might not believe was a coincidence. It’s accordingly possible that already strained Pakistani-US ties might soon further worsen.
Lastly, the preceding prediction could come to pass if Trump proposes formalizing the Line of Control as the international border as a means of sustainably averting nuclear war amidst possibly escalating tit-for-tat strikes, which Munir would be loath to do. That’s because keeping the Kashmir Conflict unresolved serves to legitimize the military’s de facto rule over Pakistan. Munir’s expected defiance of Trump might thus serve as the pretext for trying to remove him or at least applying more US pressure on Pakistan.
It's anyone’s guess what might soon happen and how the latest Indo-Pakistani crisis will end, but observers shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that it was sparked by the Pahalgam terrorist attack, which was one of the worst in years. It was especially atrocious that the terrorists specifically targeted Hindu tourists too in a clear attempt to provoke retaliatory attacks against Muslims that could plunge all of India into a vicious cycle of violence if that happens.
From India’s perspective, the Pahalgam terrorist attack therefore has Pakistan’s fingerprints all over it, hence why it’s considering at least one surgical strike across the border. Any kinetic action will likely result in at least a symmetrical reaction from Pakistan, if not an escalatory one that could also manifest itself unconventionally, such as if aligned groups stage another terrorist attack. The best-case scenario for world peace is a round or two of controllable tit-for-tat strikes but that can’t be taken for granted.
From what has transpired of inter-departmental emergency meetings convened in Delhi in the aftermath of the Pahelgam carnage, the Indian leadership is not supposedly seriously contemplating any first strike on Pakistan, popular rhetoric aside. Even the decision to put the Indus Water Treaty in suspended animation has more of symbolic significance than anything else, because the Indian government has not rescinded or reneged on this treaty, and any meaningful change in the status quo, where Pakistan is being provided monopolistic exclusive control over waters of the Indus and two of its major tributaries, would entain the construction of dams and irrigation canals which cannot be built in just one day!
What the Indian intelligence agencies fear most, and this concern has reportedly been conveyed to the national executive at the highest levels, are inputs that the Pakistani military establishment perhaps has been meticulously planning to launch an unannounced surprise attack on India at an undetermined moment, and the very recent announcement from Pakistan to the effect that Pakistan views any alteration to the Indus Waters Treaty status quo as an act of war, have raised concerns within the Indian intelligence community that Pakistan might use this precise moment of ambiguity on status of Indus Treaty engendered by the Indian announcement of putting the latter indefinitely in abeyance for the time being, as a pretext for mounting a decisive first strike on India. Nevertheless, in any scenario of a major Indo-Pakistani war regardless of how or why it unfolds at the outset, the chances of a flare up to an unconventional exchange remain very real as pointed out in this article, and not the least because Pakistan does not have a "No first use" nuclear doctrine unlike India. Moreover, in light of the history of Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in the late 1990's which had taken the form of a defacto militant invasion from Pakistani soil under the direct aegis of the Pakistani Army Command during Benazir Bhutto's tenure as the Pakistani premier, and the devastation of human rights as well as the tyrranical stone-aged repression of women reeked in a puritanical Islamist ideology that followed on a diffuse scale throughout Afghanistan soon after, there remains a very plausible fear among the Indian populace about the fate of Indian society in general post a hypothetical military victory of Pakistan which could see large swathes of Indian territory fall under the tyrranical yolk of brutally savage Islamist militant proxies sponsored by Islamabad. It is the general consensus of opinion among India's masses that nuclear weapons ought to be used without any compunctions once such a fate seems imminent, because no tragedy could be worse than having hundreds of millions of humans irreversibly succumb under the yoke of Islamists grounded in paleolithic savagery in whose moral reckoning no degree of atrocity howsoever hideous is off the table so long as it can be justified from the standpoint of contribution to political expansion of Islam. This becones all the more pertinent a consideration since former CEO of the Pakistan government, Parvez Musharraf, has seriously toyed with the option of decapitating nuclear first strikes on India at length in his interviews and communiques.
Pakistan has been receiving more than 150 million acre-feet of water from the Indus , Jhelum and Chenab amounting to 80 percent of the water-flow in the entire Indus river basin; but the catch is that dams and catchment irrigation facilities in Pakistan till date feature the capacity of storing and utilising only about 10 percent of this phenomenal allocation, while the rest simply flows passively seeling aimlessly into the sands of the scorching barren deserts of Sind to fall into the Arabian Sea. As such, any Indian initiative for altering the status quo of the Indus treaty by breaking Pakistan's monopoly on percent share allocation (three major rivers currently earmarked for exclusive use by Pakistan) by way of building dams for part utilisation of the Indus runoff in India, is unlikely to cause significant alteration in the amount of water actually utilised for irrigation in Pakistan, aside from the fact that it would be years before any such change could materialise from construction of new dams by the Indian side. As such apprehensions about the Indus Water Treaty are more of academic than practical significance, they may serve as symbolic manifestations of a political message rather than making any difference to peoples' lives inside Pakistan.
Thank you for this interesting analysis.