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- Mar 11, 2013
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On 6 July 2007, Pakistani police discovered an anti-aircraft gun ominously positioned along the secret flight path of then-President General Pervez Musharraf. His plane had just taken off from the tightly secured Chaklala airbase in Rawalpindi. That such a weapon could be placed along a classified route, despite the intense surveillance and secrecy, underscores the endemic rot within Pakistan’s national security establishment.
It wasn’t the act of a lone actor—it was a symptom of a state devoured by its own clandestine organs. The mystery behind the leaked itinerary remains unresolved, but what it reveals is the true character of Pakistani politics: a theatre of uncertainty, sabotage, and internal treachery among its own intelligence services. Civilian intelligence, military intelligence, and the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI)—each mistrusts the other, each entrenched in its own fiefdom, each accountable to no one but its own corrupt hierarchy.
At the heart of this chaos lies the Pakistani deep state: a malignant nexus of military overlords, rogue bureaucrats, and radical clerics, all operating behind a façade of legality. This clandestine web, kept alive by state patronage, has devoured every democratic impulse in the country.
What should be institutions of public service have been warped into a machinery of repression, profiteering, and religious indoctrination. Military-owned corporations, privileged elites, and cynical politicians have built an empire out of the blood of ordinary Pakistanis. Democracy is mocked, its charade paraded through rigged elections that merely crown the Army’s chosen vassals.
The constitution mandates that civilian governments answer to the people. In Pakistan, however, power is arrogantly hoarded by the generals in Rawalpindi, who orchestrate the rise and fall of prime ministers like stage managers scripting a farce.
The civilian seat in Islamabad is a decoration, nothing more. Since the era of General Zia-ul-Haq, democracy has been a hostage to the Army’s ambitions. Elections are not contested but choreographed; candidates do not win but are installed, provided they surrender strategic autonomy in domestic affairs, defence, and foreign policy.
Any attempt by a civilian leader to tilt the balance toward democratic accountability is met with swift and ruthless retaliation. Nawaz Sharif learned this lesson twice. His efforts to curtail the ISI’s overreach and empower the civilian Intelligence Bureau invited the wrath of the military elite. What followed was not mere political friction—it was war between two states within a state.
His government was sabotaged, his integrity dismantled through media trials, and his political career was terminated not by public will but by a judicial verdict engineered by military pressure. The Panama Papers investigation became the perfect tool for institutional vengeance. Sharif, convicted and disqualified in 2017, has never ceased to call out the Army’s invisible hand in his ouster—an orchestration echoing the 1999 bloodless coup that first ejected him from power.
His crime? The audacity to seek peace with India. Sharif believed in diplomacy, in building bridges in Kashmir—an unforgivable offence to the Army, whose relevance depends on eternal conflict. The generals thrive in war. Peace, to them, is a threat, not a goal.
Pakistan’s military views insurgency in Kashmir not as a crisis but as a currency—a justification for budget allocations, public reverence, and geopolitical manoeuvring. Thus, terror groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad are not outlaws—they are assets. They are the Army’s outsourced foot soldiers, providing a low-cost, high-impact method of waging asymmetric war against India while maintaining plausible deniability.
This policy of weaponised Islamism extends far beyond South Asia. Multiple 9/11 hijackers were radicalised and trained in Pakistan. The infamous Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the operational mastermind behind the September 11 attacks, found both refuge and logistical support in Pakistan, where he was eventually captured in 2003.
For years prior, he had moved freely within the country, protected by the ISI’s duplicity. Training camps in Pakistan’s tribal areas provided sanctuary to al-Qaeda operatives while Islamabad mouthed allegiance to Washington’s war on terror. The result: nearly three thousand lives lost in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania—enabled by a state that pretended to be an ally while acting as an enabler.
The 2005 London bombings that killed fifty-two civilians and wounded hundreds were also seeded in Pakistan’s poisonous madrassa network. The ringleader, Mohammad Sidique Khan, and at least two others of the four suicide bombers visited Pakistan in the year prior, ostensibly for ‘religious study.’
In truth, they underwent indoctrination and training in the very regions long tolerated, if not actively facilitated, by Pakistan’s intelligence services. British intelligence warned Islamabad of the radicalisation pipeline running through Lahore and Karachi, but warnings were deflected, downplayed, or denied. Pakistan became a factory of fanaticism, exporting jihad to every continent.
Islamic State, too, found support networks within Pakistan’s borders. While ISIS flourished in Syria and Iraq, its Khorasan branch—ISIS-K—established cells in Pakistan’s tribal belts, drawing from the same well of disillusioned terrorists trained and hardened under state-sponsored jihadist doctrine.
Reports by Afghan and U.S. intelligence agencies repeatedly cited Pakistani safe havens as key enablers of ISIS-K’s operational reach. The monstrous 2021 Kabul airport bombing, which killed over one hundred and eighty civilians and thirteen U.S. soldiers, was carried out by ISIS-K—a group nurtured in the same soil that had once bred the Taliban.
Nowhere is Pakistan’s proxy terror policy more clearly exposed than in its relentless attempts to destabilise India. In December 2001, five armed men stormed the Indian Parliament in New Delhi, killing nine people and bringing two nuclear powers to the brink of war.
The attack was orchestrated by Jaish-e-Muhammad, operating with ISI backing. The aim was clear: ignite Indo-Pak tensions, sabotage dialogue, and reaffirm the military’s grip on national security. It worked….
It wasn’t the act of a lone actor—it was a symptom of a state devoured by its own clandestine organs. The mystery behind the leaked itinerary remains unresolved, but what it reveals is the true character of Pakistani politics: a theatre of uncertainty, sabotage, and internal treachery among its own intelligence services. Civilian intelligence, military intelligence, and the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI)—each mistrusts the other, each entrenched in its own fiefdom, each accountable to no one but its own corrupt hierarchy.
At the heart of this chaos lies the Pakistani deep state: a malignant nexus of military overlords, rogue bureaucrats, and radical clerics, all operating behind a façade of legality. This clandestine web, kept alive by state patronage, has devoured every democratic impulse in the country.
What should be institutions of public service have been warped into a machinery of repression, profiteering, and religious indoctrination. Military-owned corporations, privileged elites, and cynical politicians have built an empire out of the blood of ordinary Pakistanis. Democracy is mocked, its charade paraded through rigged elections that merely crown the Army’s chosen vassals.
The constitution mandates that civilian governments answer to the people. In Pakistan, however, power is arrogantly hoarded by the generals in Rawalpindi, who orchestrate the rise and fall of prime ministers like stage managers scripting a farce.
The civilian seat in Islamabad is a decoration, nothing more. Since the era of General Zia-ul-Haq, democracy has been a hostage to the Army’s ambitions. Elections are not contested but choreographed; candidates do not win but are installed, provided they surrender strategic autonomy in domestic affairs, defence, and foreign policy.
Any attempt by a civilian leader to tilt the balance toward democratic accountability is met with swift and ruthless retaliation. Nawaz Sharif learned this lesson twice. His efforts to curtail the ISI’s overreach and empower the civilian Intelligence Bureau invited the wrath of the military elite. What followed was not mere political friction—it was war between two states within a state.
His government was sabotaged, his integrity dismantled through media trials, and his political career was terminated not by public will but by a judicial verdict engineered by military pressure. The Panama Papers investigation became the perfect tool for institutional vengeance. Sharif, convicted and disqualified in 2017, has never ceased to call out the Army’s invisible hand in his ouster—an orchestration echoing the 1999 bloodless coup that first ejected him from power.
His crime? The audacity to seek peace with India. Sharif believed in diplomacy, in building bridges in Kashmir—an unforgivable offence to the Army, whose relevance depends on eternal conflict. The generals thrive in war. Peace, to them, is a threat, not a goal.
Pakistan’s military views insurgency in Kashmir not as a crisis but as a currency—a justification for budget allocations, public reverence, and geopolitical manoeuvring. Thus, terror groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad are not outlaws—they are assets. They are the Army’s outsourced foot soldiers, providing a low-cost, high-impact method of waging asymmetric war against India while maintaining plausible deniability.
This policy of weaponised Islamism extends far beyond South Asia. Multiple 9/11 hijackers were radicalised and trained in Pakistan. The infamous Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the operational mastermind behind the September 11 attacks, found both refuge and logistical support in Pakistan, where he was eventually captured in 2003.
For years prior, he had moved freely within the country, protected by the ISI’s duplicity. Training camps in Pakistan’s tribal areas provided sanctuary to al-Qaeda operatives while Islamabad mouthed allegiance to Washington’s war on terror. The result: nearly three thousand lives lost in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania—enabled by a state that pretended to be an ally while acting as an enabler.
The 2005 London bombings that killed fifty-two civilians and wounded hundreds were also seeded in Pakistan’s poisonous madrassa network. The ringleader, Mohammad Sidique Khan, and at least two others of the four suicide bombers visited Pakistan in the year prior, ostensibly for ‘religious study.’
In truth, they underwent indoctrination and training in the very regions long tolerated, if not actively facilitated, by Pakistan’s intelligence services. British intelligence warned Islamabad of the radicalisation pipeline running through Lahore and Karachi, but warnings were deflected, downplayed, or denied. Pakistan became a factory of fanaticism, exporting jihad to every continent.
Islamic State, too, found support networks within Pakistan’s borders. While ISIS flourished in Syria and Iraq, its Khorasan branch—ISIS-K—established cells in Pakistan’s tribal belts, drawing from the same well of disillusioned terrorists trained and hardened under state-sponsored jihadist doctrine.
Reports by Afghan and U.S. intelligence agencies repeatedly cited Pakistani safe havens as key enablers of ISIS-K’s operational reach. The monstrous 2021 Kabul airport bombing, which killed over one hundred and eighty civilians and thirteen U.S. soldiers, was carried out by ISIS-K—a group nurtured in the same soil that had once bred the Taliban.
Nowhere is Pakistan’s proxy terror policy more clearly exposed than in its relentless attempts to destabilise India. In December 2001, five armed men stormed the Indian Parliament in New Delhi, killing nine people and bringing two nuclear powers to the brink of war.
The attack was orchestrated by Jaish-e-Muhammad, operating with ISI backing. The aim was clear: ignite Indo-Pak tensions, sabotage dialogue, and reaffirm the military’s grip on national security. It worked….
