THE ASIAN INDEPENDENT UK
Bal Ram Sampla
Geopolitics
There is a Pakistani proverb that goes: ‘The thief who cries the loudest is the first to point at an innocent man.’ Nowhere in modern geopolitics does this ring truer than in Pakistan’s conduct on the world stage — a nation that has perfected the art of playing victim while wielding the knife.
The latest episode should surprise no one. Drones launched from Afghan soil struck Islamabad, Quetta, and Rawalpindi. Before the dust had settled, Pakistani commentators and YouTube warriors were already pointing their fingers — not at the Taliban they helped nurture, arm, and shelter for decades — but at India. No evidence. No proof. No logic. Just reflex.
This is not a new playbook. This is Pakistan.
I. THE MONSTER IN THE MIRROR
The Taliban is not India’s creation. It is Pakistan’s. The ISI — Pakistan’s powerful military intelligence — spent decades cultivating, training, funding, and directing the Taliban as a tool of ‘strategic depth’ against India and Afghanistan alike. The logic was brutally simple: keep Afghanistan weak, keep a friendly regime in Kabul, and use Afghan territory as a launch pad if India ever pushed too hard on the eastern border.
That strategy has now detonated in Pakistan’s face. The very drones falling on Pakistani cities were launched by the regime Islamabad helped install. The TTP — Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan — conducting suicide bombings in Peshawar and Lahore was trained in camps Pakistan once celebrated as ‘freedom fighter’ bases. You do not get to breed serpents and then express shock when they bite.
Blaming India for the Taliban’s drone strikes is not just dishonest — it is an insult to basic intelligence. But Pakistan has never let facts get in the way of a useful narrative.
II. THE DRONE HYPOCRISY
Let us talk about drones, since Pakistan has suddenly discovered moral outrage about them. During Operation Sindoor, Pakistan eagerly deployed Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drones — precision-strike unmanned aerial vehicles — against Indian positions. Islamabad accepted this military hardware with open arms, no hand-wringing, no lectures about sovereignty.
But when Afghan-launched, crude, locally assembled drones fall on Pakistani cities? The outrage is deafening. The hypocrisy is breathtaking. Pakistan is perfectly comfortable with offensive drone warfare — as long as it is the one doing the striking.
Welcome to the receiving end. The international community is watching, and it remembers.
III. A MASTERCLASS IN DENIAL: THE TRACK RECORD
Pakistan’s history of denial would be almost comic if the consequences were not so deadly. Consider the evidence:
Mumbai, November 2008. Ten Pakistani-trained Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists slaughter 166 people in India’s financial capital. Pakistan’s first response? Denial. Its second response? More denial.
It took years of international pressure, the testimony of surviving terrorist Ajmal Kasab, and intercepted communications before Pakistan even acknowledged the obvious.
The planners — including Hafiz Saeed — continued to walk free on Pakistani soil for over a decade.
Osama bin Laden.
The world’s most wanted terrorist. Found not in a cave on some remote Afghan mountain, but in a large, purpose-built compound in Abbottabad — a garrison town, walking distance from Pakistan’s premier military academy. Pakistan claimed it knew nothing. The United States, which conducted the raid without telling Islamabad, clearly did not believe them. Neither does the world.
Pathankot. Uri. Pulwama.
Each terror attack on Indian soil linked by evidence, testimony, and intelligence to Pakistani-based groups. Each time, the same cycle: denial, delay, deflection. ‘Give us the evidence,’ they say. When evidence is provided: ‘This evidence is fabricated.’ When fabrication becomes impossible to claim: silence.
The pattern is not coincidence. It is a doctrine.
IV. KASHMIR: THE ETERNAL CARD
Through every crisis, every embarrassment, every self-inflicted wound, Pakistan returns to one well-worn instrument: Kashmir. It is the card that is played when nothing else works, the argument that is deployed when evidence runs dry, and the cause that is invoked to rally domestic sentiment and seek international attention.
The Simla Agreement of 1972 — signed by both India and Pakistan — bound both nations to resolve Kashmir bilaterally. Pakistan signed it. Pakistan agreed to it. Pakistan then spent the next five decades systematically violating its spirit by internationalising the dispute at the UN, the OIC, the Human Rights Council, and every multilateral forum it could access.
Now, with Afghan drones landing on its own cities and a homegrown Taliban insurgency bleeding its army dry, Pakistan is already finding ways to link its Afghanistan crisis to Kashmir. Watch for it. It is coming. ‘India is destabilising us from both sides,’ the narrative will go. No proof will be provided, because none exists. But proof has never been a requirement.
Pakistan treats Kashmir not as a humanitarian concern — if it did, it would not have used Kashmiri militancy as a proxy warfare tool — but as a geopolitical lever. That lever is now rusting from overuse, and fewer nations are willing to pull it.
V. CRYING OVER SPILT MILK
There is something almost Shakespearean about Pakistan’s current predicament. A nation that built its foreign policy architecture on the use of militant non-state actors as strategic weapons now finds those weapons pointed at itself. A military establishment that trained jihadists to fight its neighbours now sends its soldiers to die fighting those same jihadists.
A government that sheltered the Taliban now begs for international help as Taliban drones circle its capital.
This is not bad luck. This is consequence. Decades of decisions — made deliberately, defended proudly, exported aggressively — have returned home. The chickens, as they say, have come home to roost. And they arrived by drone.
The international community, including Pakistan’s closest allies, has grown visibly weary. China, which has invested billions in CPEC infrastructure in Pakistan, has privately expressed frustration at the security situation. The Gulf states, once reliable patrons, have diversified their regional relationships. Even Turkey — happy to sell drones — is no guarantor of Pakistan’s long-term strategic position.
VI. WHAT HISTORY RECORDS
History is patient. It does not accept excuses, does not forget convenient amnesia, and does not grant absolution simply because a nation has learned to cry loudly and point elsewhere.
The record is clear: Pakistan created, sheltered, and deployed militant groups as instruments of state policy. It denied evidence when evidence was overwhelming. It internationalised disputes it had agreed to handle bilaterally. It pointed at India whenever its own contradictions became too painful to acknowledge. And it wrapped all of this in the language of victimhood, Islamic solidarity, and anti-imperialism.
Now its own creation is shelling its cities. And the response — remarkably, predictably — is to blame India.
The world has seen this film before. It knows the ending. The only question is whether Pakistan’s own citizens, watching drones fall on their homes, will finally ask the question their government has spent decades trying to suppress:
Who actually built this fire?
References
1.https://thedefensepost.com/2026/03/14/pakistan-afghan-taliban-drone-attacks/
2.https://en.dailypakistan.com.pk/14-Mar-2026/the-skies-above-islamabad-why-the-talibans-drone-stunt-signals-desperation-not-strength
3.https://www.indiatvnews.com/news/world/taliban-claims-drone-strike-on-military-facility-in-islamabad-pakistan-scrambles-fighter-jets-2026-03-13-1033711
4.https://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/2026/03/14/four-injured-as-afghan-taliban-drones-intercepted-over-pakistan-says-ispr
5.https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/14/pakistan-strikes-afghan-base-after-its-president-warns-red-line-crossed
