A Blindfolding In J&K, To Headley: What Reporting Days Taught Me About Pakistan

NDTV

15-05-2025

It was the evening after the guns had fallen silent. A ceasefire - hurriedly brokered by Washington, as many in the West believe but India denies - had halted the missile-and-drone skirmish between India and Pakistan that had brought South Asia to the brink. British journalist Piers Morgan, ever eager to provoke, assembled a panel: two Indians, two Pakistanis, including a former foreign minister, to dissect what had just unfolded.
What followed was all too familiar. The Pakistani guests denied involvement in the Pahalgam terror attack - not just this one, but all others going back to the early 1990s. Instead, they cast themselves as victims, suggesting India was the aggressor, allegedly orchestrating attacks in western Pakistan. The show has a global following, and the Pakistani panellists were fully aware of that.
I watched with growing unease. After more than three decades in journalism - many of them covering Kashmir - I have heard this script before. But knowing what I know, having seen what I have seen, it's not just misleading. It's an insult to the truth.
The Pahalgam massacre, where families were gunned down in broad daylight, was no anomaly. It followed a grimly familiar playbook - one authored not in the meadows of Kashmir, but in the war rooms of GHQ Rawalpindi. The Pakistani Army, alongside the ISI, has long used terror as a proxy, orchestrating attacks while denying involvement. Some of my British colleagues in media and academia struggle with this, often falling back on the "both sides" narrative. But the victims and the perpetrators are not equal. Let me recall a few moments that bring this reality into sharp relief:
The Afghan In Downtown Srinagar
It was the early 1990s. A small, easily missed PTI report claimed that Afghan militants had, for the first time, infiltrated Kashmir. It sent ripples through Indian intelligence. My photographer colleague, Neeraj Paul, and I tracked a lead to a rundown part of downtown Srinagar. We were blindfolded, bundled into a van, and taken to meet the Afghan group's leader.
He was short, tense and masked with a handkerchief. Two pistols glinted in his hands. He confirmed he was Afghan and admitted being pushed into Kashmir by the handlers of camps run by the Pakistani military. But before we could go further, his aides whispered urgently. Moments later, 30 to 40 gunmen emerged from behind walls and fired into the sky. Neeraj and I thought we wouldn't make it out alive. The commander told us to leave - he wasn't in the mood to talk anymore.
Later that day, I visited 'Papa 2', the joint interrogation cell. An army colonel I knew there told me they had sent a team in pursuit of some infiltrators. When I said we had been caught in the crossfire, he looked visibly relieved.
The Man Who Knew Too Much
Fast forward to 2011. A federal courtroom in Chicago. Pakistani-American David Coleman Headley, tall, composed, speaking in a flat American accent, laid bare the truth behind the 2008 Mumbai attacks.
It wasn't just Lashkar-e-Taiba, he said. The ISI had funded and guided the operation. He named an ISI officer- 'Major Iqbal' - as the man who gave him $25,000 for surveillance missions to Mumbai. Headley described how targets were handpicked, how his reconnaissance was coordinated from Pakistan. The evidence: emails, phone intercepts, travel records.
Sitting in the courtroom, I watched as years of whispers and suspicions solidified into testimony under oath. It was one of those moments when the fog of geopolitics lifted, and the hand behind the curtain was suddenly visible to all.
The Gunman Who Changed Course
Farooq Ahmed, or Saifullah, once trained in a terror camp in Pakistan and took up arms in Kashmir. Years later, he stood for election in Srinagar, urging young Kashmiris not to make his mistake. 'There was no one to stop me,' he said. 'Now I want to be that voice.'
Men like him - some reformed, some captured, some gone - confirm one thing: the road to terrorism runs through Pakistan's military-intelligence complex. So, watching that post-ceasefire panel, with Pak panellists in denial mode, felt like history being erased in real time. But this is about more than television spin. It's about memory. It's about the truth.
The Support For Khalistani Movement
Set Kashmir aside for a moment. Pakistan's military support to the Khalistan movement was just as calculated and corrosive. In 1997, during a visit to Lahore to report for a global channel, I was shown around a Khalistani indoctrination centre, where a Sikh father-son duo casually told me they had planted bombs across Punjab until the barbed wires came up. I met several of the men who had served jail terms for the hijacked Indian Airlines flights in 1981 and 1984, including their leader Gajinder Singh, whose presence in Pakistan has always been officially denied. Having covered both the Sikh and Kashmiri insurgencies closely, I am left with no doubt that Pakistan's deep state has long used these movements as tools to bleed India, driven by an unrelenting obsession with avenging 1971. Even David Headley, in his Chicago testimony, admitted it outright.
That brings us to May 12. That evening, Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed the nation - not with bureaucratic restraint, but with raw emotion. The country was still reeling from the bloodshed in Pahalgam. His speech was grief-stricken, furious, resolute. Operation Sindoor, he declared, was India's answer. 'Every terrorist and every terror organisation now knows what it means to strike at our people,' he thundered. Modi revealed that Pakistan came to the table only after being hit militarily and morally. The damage from India's swift retaliation was not just surprising; it was, in his words, devastating. Modi's speech was more than a policy statement. It was a message - to Indians and the world - that terror would no longer be treated as routine tragedy. These strikes went deeper into Pakistan than ever before, targeting not just the foot soldiers but the very roots of the infrastructure of terror.
Is Rawalpindi Listening?
Yet, for those of us who have witnessed Kashmir's long, bruising history, a familiar unease lingers. Will this response be enough to deter Rawalpindi's generals, who've long seen terror as strategic depth?
Pahalgam wasn't an isolated event. It's part of a bloody continuum - from Uri to Pulwama, from the Parliament attack in 2001 to Mumbai 2008. All bear the same fingerprint: Pakistan. And beneath these headline horrors is a quieter, ongoing war - low-intensity, high-cost - that's festered since 1989.
Modi's tone evoked his past addresses. After Uri in 2016, he reminded Pakistan that the true fight should be against poverty and illiteracy. After Balakot in 2019, he struck a chord of unity. But this time, the warning was stark: 'If Pakistan doesn't act against terror, it will destroy itself.'
The tragedy is, attacks like Pahalgam happen because memories fade. Mumbai blurred, then Uri happened. Uri faded, then came Pulwama. Now it's Pahalgam - a brutal reminder that the enemy across the border remains rogue, unrepentant and skilled in denial.
A Long-Term Plan
That leads to a conclusion I have long held: surgical strikes, such as Balakot and now Operation Sindoor, grab headlines, but their impact is fleeting. If India truly wants to uproot the machinery that breeds and exports terror, short-term retaliation must be anchored in a long-term doctrine. The real challenge lies in Pakistan's power structure -- not its people, who are busy surviving, but the twin pillars of its military and mullahs, who are obsessed with Kashmir. If the Pakistani Army genuinely wants to dismantle the terror network, it could erase Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed - both globally designated terror outfits - in a day. But it won't.
Learn From Mossad And CIA
Both Israel and the US, under the banner of national security, routinely eliminate threats: no UN outrage, no moralising. In 2018, Mossad agents stole Iran's nuclear archives from a Tehran warehouse; in 2020, Iran's top nuclear scientist was assassinated, reportedly by an AI-assisted remote weapon; in 2024, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was gunned down in Tehran. In 2020, the US killed General Qassem Soleimani with a drone near Baghdad. There are dozens of similar covert operations conducted by the CIA and Mossad. India could consider such precision tactics - but it needs Mossad-level intelligence and the will to strike where it truly hurts.
Pakistan is not a monolith. Its Punjabis dominate, while Balochs, Sindhis, Muhajirs and Pashtuns simmer with resentment. That's where India should invest - discreetly. There's already suspicion of Indian support in Balochistan; true or not, it's the right nerve to press.
And I firmly believe that in the national interest, we must also quietly back democratic actors within Pakistan who despise the army but toe its line to stay politically alive. Many of them I have met in London and Washington - they're waiting for a shift. In the end, eradicating the roots of terror requires more than missiles. It demands patience, precision and a vision that outlasts the headlines. Let the guns blaze in silence.