The Pakistani allegations reached a crescendo this week following the attack on Bacha Khan University in Charsadda that claimed 21 lives, mostly of students. Although credit for the attack was claimed by the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), Pakistan's military establishment, using prominent journalists and anchors as frontmen, alluded to the "Indian hand" behind the attack, as it did following the assault on the Army Public School in Peshawar last year when some 140 children were massacred by the TTP.
The charges have invited ridicule in the western media that is now all too familiar with Pakistan's dalliance with terrorist groups, which only successive US administrations have winked at for tactical exigency such as access to Afghanistan.
"With more imagination than evidence, Pakistani conspiracy theorists saw India behind both acts of violence on their soil," the Economist noted tartly on Friday, adding that "Pakistan offers no evidence of Indian involvement in attacks on its territory, whereas Indian officials have offered 'actionable intelligence' linking JeM to the air-base attack, and invited Pakistan to send its own investigators."
The Pakistani chorus is led by establishment dupes like Ansar Abbasi, Shahid Masood, Javed Chaudhury - all prominent anchors and talking heads - who typically gloss over Pakistan's long and well-chronicled backing of terrorism while spinning conspiracy yarns about a US-India-Israel alliance out to destroy Pakistan.
More recently, they have seized on purportedly aggressive comments by NSA Ajit Doval and defence minister Manohar Parrikar promising a payback, as evidence of the Indian hand. "Are these attcks the 'pain' tht Indian defence minister had threatnd Pak with?" tweeted Syed Talat Hussain, another anchor who is part of Pakistan's conspiracy brigade, referring to Parrikar's remarks that Pakistan would understand pain of terrorist attacks only when it experienced it.
While the US administration has been circumspect in not publicly embarrassing a notional ally whose help it needs in Afghanistan despite its backing of terrorist groups, American journalists and commentators who have covered the region extensively are calling Pakistan's bluff. In a devastating critique in the New Yorker last week, Dexter Filkins, who covered Pakistan for the NYT for several years, began a story like this:
"Imagine a country that is embroiled in a long and bloody conflict with its neighbor, and each time its democratically elected Prime Minister tries to reach out and make peace, his own army launches an attack to make sure the peace doesn't take hold. You might think you were trapped inside a dystopian movie. Unless, of course, you've been to Pakistan, where this happens all the time."
"For decades, the Pakistani military has backed insurgent groups whose express aim is to cross into India and fight. The ostensible aim of these militant groups, and of the I.S.I., is to bleed India into ceding control over Kashmir. This has never been more than a fantasy, but it keeps Pakistan focussed on something other than its intractable domestic problems, and it justifies the military's bloated budgets," Filkins wrote, noting "that the I.S.I. plays godfather to groups like Jaish-e-Mohammed, which appears to have carried out the Pathankot attack, and Lashkar-e-Toiba, which launched the operation in Mumbai—is beyond doubt."
Only a few liberal Pakistani commentators have had the courage to call out the country's terrorism-backing military, and even they are being pressured into silence. "Most of Pakistan's terrorism problems have roots in our past policy of promoting militant groups like JeM to fight proxy wars. It is now time to undo that historical wrong. One hopes the tipping point has finally arrived." wrote Dawn columnist Zahid Hussain earlier this week.
"Such tipping points remained illusory in the past. Surely, it will not be so easy to wrap up the witches' brew of militants that this country has been turned into," he noted bleakly.
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