The Pakistan Army’s motto is Iman, Taqwa, Jihad fi Sabilillah (Faith, Piety and Jihad in the Path of Allah). It is not surprising that they have been using jihadist terror as a policy since their very inception. Just days before the dastardly Phalgam terror attack in Kashmir, in which 26 Hindu tourists were massacred, Pakistan's Army chief, General Asim Munir, gave a speech that can be seen as a "Call to Action."
According to the Indian media:
"General Asim Munir's speech to overseas Pakistanis openly glorifies Pakistan as a divinely ordained Islamic state, paralleling it with the original Islamic Caliphate. By asserting religious supremacy and the Two-Nation Theory, Munir aligns Pakistan’s foundational ideology with that of ISIS [Islamic State]. He reveals how Pakistan, from its inception, has mirrored theocratic expansionism, making it the ideological progenitor to modern jihadist movements."
The origins of the Kashmir problem lies in the very first operation launched by the Pakistan Army within weeks of their independence in 1947. Army personnel did not directly attack Kashmir. Instead, they circled Muslim tribals from their locations and pushed them inwards, promising rape and loot.
Following the partition of India in 1947, princely states were given the option to join either Pakistan or India.
The princely state of Kashmir, which was ruled by the Dogra king Hari Singh, joined the Indian Union after Pakistan’s armed forces orchestrated an invasion of Kashmir (largely using Pashtun tribesmen). The invading tribal militia committed mass atrocities against the people of Kashmir, including massacres of Muslims and Hindus, and the abduction of non-Muslim women.
It was only when the going got tough for the tribes that the Pakistan Army tentatively chose involvement. Yet even the most critical attacks, such as the attack on Naushera in February 1948, were mostly done by non-military tribal fighters. During those offensives, thousands of Hindus and Sikhs fled the Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (POK) in order to avoid the fate of the thousands of others who were killed. On November 25, 1947, for instance, over 20,000 Hindus and Sikhs were massacred by the invading tribal militia and Pakistani army in the city of Mirpur. This event became known as the Mirpur Massacre.
Following the Pakistani invasion, Hari Singh signed the Instrument of Accession which formalized Kashmir’s legal accession to India. Once Kashmir legally joined India, who then deployed forces to stop the advancing Pakistani military, leading to a full-scale war between the two countries.
In 1948, India sought the intervention of the United Nations. The UN Security Council passed Resolution 47, which required Pakistan to withdraw all of its military personnel and tribesmen from the state prior to holding a plebiscite. That same year, the UN Commission on India and Pakistan (UNCIP) found that Pakistan had instead increased its military presence in Kashmir.
After a 1949 ceasefire, Pakistan remained in control of approximately one-third of the state while the remaining two-thirds were incorporated into India.
Letter of appreciation and disbandment of a force of irregulars that were used in the First Kashmir War.
In 1965, Pakistan tried the same tactic. They launched an invasion called “Operation Gibraltar” in an attempt to ignite rebellion in Kashmir. Again, they infiltrated terrorists into Kashmir and embedded some with Pakistan Army personnel. Officially, these personnel were on leave from their units and thus technically deserters from the army. Once again, they failed to achieve their aim and in the last week of August, they lost the critical Haji Pir Pass when the Indian Army attacked their Pakistan Army positions. What followed was a further humiliation as Pakistan failed to capture Akhnoor and, later, was barely able to defend Lahore. A sure sign of humiliation was the removal of self-declared Field Marshal Ayub Khan in an internal coup.
1965 - The Letter that exposed Pakistan Enlisting criminals for infiltration into Kashmir
A declassified US State Department letter that confirms the existence of hundreds of infiltrators in J&K in 1965 even after the end of the war
In 1971, the Pakistani Army made use of Razakars (Islamic Warriors) to hunt and kill their own Bengali citizens in East Pakistan. Up to 3 million were murdered and hundreds of thousands were raped in what became known as the 1971 Bengali Hindu genocide.
However, it was during the Afghan War against the USSR that the Pakistan Army transformed its use of terror into a fine art. Pakistan became the pipeline for supplying men and material to the Taliban as they fought the USSR. Unsurprisingly, after the USSR withdrawal, the first Taliban government was established with the firm backing of the Pakistan Army, which would continue to exert control over the Taliban. The late 1990s also saw a large number of Afghan and other foreign fighters eliminated by the Indian Army in Kashmir. These were the Taliban fighters who were diverted to Kashmir by the Pakistan Army.
The 1999 IC-814 plane hijack saw a Pakistan intelligence operative from their diplomatic mission in Kathmandu hand over a gun to the hijackers. The flight ultimately landed in Kabul, where three terrorists were handed over by India. All three of them ended up in Pakistan, under the protection of the Pakistan Army. Amongst them, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh was involved in the kidnapping and gruesome murder of American journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002. The second, Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar, created the terrorist organisation Al Umar Mujahideen and settled down in Muzaffarabad in Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir. The third one, Masood Azhar, founded the terror organization Jaish-e-Mohammed (JEM). He runs the terror outfit from his headquarters in the city of Bahawalpur, which was destroyed in India's recent Operation Sindoor against terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan.
During this period, a large number of Pakistan Army personnel, including very senior officers themselves supported radical Islamic terror outfits. The most prominent amongst them was Lt Gen Hamid Gul, the chief of Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) spy agency from 1987 to 1989, when the US-backed Afghan jihad against the Soviet Union was in its last stages. Islamists hail Gul as the "Godfather of the Taliban" who led the Taliban mujahedeen, or Islamic warriors.
Lt Gen Hamid Gul sitting on the stage while Hafiz Saeed, chief of the terror outfit Lashkar ‘e Taiba addresses a crowd during a public rally.
Osama Bin Laden, al-Qaeda’s founder, was hidden away in the garrison city of Abbotabad by the Pakistan Army. The U.S. operation to kill him was planned and executed without any involvement of the Pakistan Army whatsoever because the Americans did not trust Pakistanis. On the other hand, they feared that the Pakistan Army might move bin Laden away if they got even the slightest hint of an impending operation. The biggest proof of this is the fact that the only person prosecuted for this operation in Pakistan was the one who helped the U.S. trace Bin Laden’s location. Shakil Afridi, a Pakistani doctor who helped in the hunt for bin Laden by trying to collect DNA from the al-Qaida leader and his family members, was convicted of treason and sentenced to 33 years in prison.
The Pakistan Army has realized the futility of even engaging in open warfare with India because every time they tried to do so, they faced defeat and humiliation – such as in the India-Pakistani war of 1971. Thus, they have perfected the art of using terror as their chosen instrument. It is wrong to apportion any blame on the civilian leadership of Pakistan because they exist at the mercy and benevolence of the Pakistan Army, who are the true rulers of the country. Apparently, political process is manipulated at will by the army who holds the power of the gun.
In the early part of this century, Pakistan created what they called the "Border Action Teams" (BATs) for quick and violent raids on the Indian Army across the Line of Control. While the core of the BATs was SSG (Special Services Group) commandos, the working hands were terrorists. The direct linkage between and Pakistan Army and terrorists cannot be clearer.
More recently, Indian intelligence agencies identified the presence of several high-ranking Pakistani military and administrative officials at the funeral of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) terrorist Abdul Rauf, who was neutralized in Operation Sindoor.
Pakistan's Army is perhaps the world’s largest terrorist organisation and deserves to be treated as such. Options before the free world include designating Pakistan as a State Sponsor of Terrorism, placing sanctions of all generals of the Pakistan Army and their equivalents in the Pakistan Air Force and Pakistan Navy, and insisting on the complete disbandment of terror infrastructure by Pakistan's Army as well as a corresponding reduction in size of Pakistan Army to not more than 150,000 men. Not only will this result in drastic reduction in terror around the world but also help Pakistan’s population by ensuring that the limited funds available to them are used productively, and not on terrorism.
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