Pakistan’s Vanishing Minorities: Maria Shahbaz Case

Rohan Giri In March 2026, a court in Pakistan closed the file on a thirteen-year-old girl from Lahore and, in doing so, opened a much older wound that the country has never quite managed to heal. Maria Shahbaz, a Christian by birth, had been abducted, coerced into converting to Islam, and married off to the man who took her. Her family brought documents to prove her age. They pointed to marriage papers that did not match the facts of her life. None of it moved the Federal Constitutional Court, which ruled that her later statements, given after weeks in the custody of her abductor, were enough to validate the marriage and send her back to him. It is the kind of verdict that, on paper, looks like the end of one girl’s story. In practice, it reads like the latest entry in a ledger that Pakistan’s minorities have been keeping, reluctantly and at great cost, for decades. The European Parliament noticed. On 8 July 2026, it adopted a joint resolution on the case, built from four separate drafts submitted by the European People’s Party (EPP), the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (S&D), Renew Europe (Renew) and the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR). What made the resolution worth reading closely was not simply its condemnation of a single court ruling, but the company that ruling was suddenly forced to keep. Buried in the recitals was a figure that ought to have made headlines of its own. In 2025 alone, roughly three-quarters of the documented victims of forced conversion and marriage in Pakistan were Hindu, a quarter were Christian, and nearly eighty percent of all such cases occurred in a single province, Sindh. A single ruling can be an aberration. A demographic skew repeated year after year, concentrated in one province, against the same two communities, is something else entirely. Anyone who has followed Sindh’s Hindu community for more than a news cycle will recognise the shape of this story before it is even told. In February 2012, a nineteen-year-old named Rinkle Kumari was taken at gunpoint from her home in Ghotki district. What followed was almost a template for everything that came after: a sudden disappearance, a claim of voluntary conversion, a court appearance in which the girl, by then weeks removed from her family and in the custody of the man accused of taking her, said what was required of her. Pakistan’s Supreme Court sent her back to her abductor. She told the court, in words that were reported at the time, that there was no justice for Hindus in Pakistan and that she would rather be killed there than returned to the shelter home. She was never seen by her family again. In the years since, the names have changed, Sunita Kumari, Neena Kumari, Lata Kumari, Reena and Raveena, but the sequence rarely does: abduction, a hurried conversion, a marriage certificate produced after the fact, and a court willing to accept a coerced confirmation as proof of consent. Independent research conducted by the NGO South Asia Partnership Pakistan, together with the Aurat Foundation, has estimated that at least a thousand girls, overwhelmingly Hindu, are forcibly converted in Pakistan every year. That is not the residue of an unfortunate exception. It is a functioning system. It is worth asking why this system has been allowed to function for so long, and the answer has as much to do with numbers as with law. Sindh remains home to the largest surviving Hindu population in Pakistan, a community that made up close to fourteen percent of the region’s population at the time of Partition and has since fallen to somewhere between three and four percent. That decline is usually explained away as the ordinary consequence of migration. But researchers who have studied the pattern closely, in India and elsewhere, argue that migration alone cannot account for a fall of that magnitude, and that a slow, decentralised mechanism of attrition, operating family by family through coerced conversion, has done at least as much to hollow out the community as any single wave of departures. No government needs to announce a policy of demographic erasure if its courts will quietly ratify the results of one anyway. There is a second thread in this story that the final joint resolution touched only lightly, though an earlier draft from the S&D group was willing to say it more plainly. That draft connected the pattern of forced conversions to the wider use of blasphemy laws, anti-terrorism statutes and cybercrime provisions against government critics, naming the convictions of Imaan Mazari, Hadi Ali Chattha, Mahrang Baloch and Sibghatullah Shahji, and the continued detention of Baloch and Pashtun rights figures including Ali Wazir. The final text softened this into a general call for judicial reform. But the connection, once drawn, is hard to unsee. A judiciary willing to accept a coerced statement from a frightened thirteen-year-old as evidence of free will is not a separate institution from the one that has, in parallel, been used to jail the lawyers, journalists and activists who try to speak for people like her. Both failures come from the same place: a legal system that treats the powerless, whether a minority child or a dissident adult, as someone whose stated wishes can be safely disregarded once the right procedural box has been ticked. The most telling part of the resolution, in the end, is not what it says about Pakistan’s judiciary but what it says about Europe’s own leverage. Pakistan has held Generalised Scheme of Preferences Plus (GSP+) status for years, a trade arrangement that grants its exports near-zero tariff access to European markets in return for implementing twenty-seven international conventions, among them the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The S&D’s original draft said, without much ambiguity, that continued failure to honour these commitments should result in the withdrawal of that status. By the time the four groups had merged their texts into one, that line had softened into a

International Pakistan Security Terrorism United Kingdom World

135

Radical Islamist Rape Gangs Exposed!

Exposing grooming gangs is not an affront against Islam, highlighting crimes against vulnerable children is not a crime either. K.A.Badarinath Radical Islamist Pakistani origin mafia, the ill-famed ‘grooming gangs’ have got thoroughly exposed for their nefarious, rapacious, pervert and abusive sexual acts against vulnerable girls and women of non-muslim origin in United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden, France and other parts of Europe. These gangs targeted all or any of non-muslim girls to befriend, rape, abuse, addict, inject them with drugs and manipulate in most inhuman ways that’s unheard in human history. These muslim gangs took over the cities, counties, colonies, communities across Europe beginning with United Kingdom. Neither the Tories nor the labour parties in United Kingdom weighed in the depth of this horrendous scandal that spread over last four decades. Both, legitimate and illegally immigrated radicalized Muslim gangs impregnated and sexually violated girls of all non-muslim origins, humiliated them, blackmailed and even subjugated them to modern slavery of a different variety. The institutional apathy towards this societal aggression having impact on socio-cultural and economic cohesion led to demands for a comprehensive probe into the ‘grooming gangs scandal’. On June 16, 2026, “The Rape Gang Inquiry” report running into over 218 pages was released to highlight the real face of radical islam that has impacted the British society like in several other countries. Restore Britain Member of Parliament Rupert Lowe spearheaded the campaign against these brutal gangs with no scruples. Over 250,000 girls and children have reportedly fallen prey to these grooming gangs operating with extreme perversion unseen in human behaviour. These radicalized muslim gangs out there to destroy children seem to have been commented upon in the report that also included several victims testimonies, recommendations to deal with these inhuman elements that perpetrated crimes on innocent and vulnerable girls. On the parallel, Baroness Anne Long field heading a high powered panel to probe the grooming gangs scandal is expected to submit her report by March 2029. Baroness Louise Casey has already undertaken a national audit of such sexual crimes and abuse of non-muslim women in UK. Grooming gangs of radicalized muslims was dashed off by some media outlets as ‘figment of imagination’ or an affront against Islam itself. These media organizations have got it all wrong. Calling spade a spade is not ‘anti-Islam’ or exposing extremist radical islam designs is not a crime whatsoever. Even in Bharat, these gangs have begun to wage ‘Love Jihad’ as a strategy against all non-muslims. Self-assigned messiahs of Islam and even Christians in Bharat did not realize the impact of the grooming gangs strategy till Europe woke up. These gangs roamed around as youngsters seeking love in the name of jihad or Islamic Holy War in Bharat. Centre for Integrated and Holistic Studies calls upon global communities to unite against these grooming gangsters in all garbs and put an end to radical Islamic manipulation of demographics in several geographies. Societal organizations, institutions, academics, intellectuals and those in governance will have to take measured steps to reverse the rape gangs activities. On March 10, 2025, CIHS had published a well-researched blog titled “Grooming Gangs, Forced Conversions, and Sexual Jihad: Truth That The Quint Ignores”. This was in response to The Quint report which dismissed even the existence of any grooming gangs or the scandal itself. Self-styled defenders of Islam and paid media outlets refused to acknowledge this awful scandal unfolding right under our nose. The latest report of rape gangs systematically document the atrocities perpetuated by radical islamists against children as young as even eleven years. CIHS had highlighted similar concerns much earlier in its March 2025 report, “Grooming Gangs, Forced Conversions, and Sexual Jihad: Truth That The Quint Ignores”, examining patterns of exploitation, coercion, and forced conversions that mainstream narratives often overlooked. Read the earlier CIHS analysis here:https://cihs.blog/2025/03/10/grooming-gangs-forced-conversions-and-sexual-jihad-truth-that-the-quint-ignores/ (Author is a veteran journalist, Director & Chief Executive of non-partisan think tank, Centre for Integrated and Holistic Studies based in New Delhi)

Bharat Disinformation Hindus Khalistan Pakistan Security Terrorism World

244

Referendum Farce: Story Written in Karachi, Staged in New York

Rohan Giri On April 29, 2026, Gurpatwant Singh Pannun announced a Khalistan Referendum voter registration drive from the Karachi Press Club. He was speaking via video link from New York. He was targeting Sikhs who live inside Bharat. The venue, the man and the medium together tell a story that his words never could. There is a particular kind of political performance that is designed not to succeed, but to persist, not to achieve a goal, but to manufacture the appearance of. On April 29, 2026, Sikhs for Justice (SFJ) chief Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a man proscribed under Bharat’s Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act along with his organisation, delivered precisely such a presentation from the Karachi Press Club. Speaking via video link from New York, he announced that SFJ would launch a phased voter registration drive for the purported Khalistan Referendum targeting Sikhs residing across all Bharatiiya states. Beginning in Delhi, moving to Himachal Pradesh, Haryana, and ending the registrations in Punjab itself. The sequencing was revealing. A movement that claims Punjab as its spiritual and political homeland does not begin its campaign there. It begins in Delhi, because it knows Punjab will not listen. Bharatiya officials did not miss the significance of the venue. Pakistan’s establishment was openly offering its platform to an organisation that has called for violent attacks inside Bharat and the assassination of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The SFJ has glorified terrorist Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale and treated perpetrators of the Air India Kanishka bombing in which 329 people were killed, as heroes. That Pakistan now provides this group a podium at one of Karachi’s most visible press institutions is not coincidence. Pakistan is playing this game out in the open and is not even bothering to conceal its backing to a terrorist organisation. The brazenness is itself the message, a message directed not at Sikhs in Bharat, but at the ISI’s own operatives, diaspora handlers and global media amplifiers, telling them that the Khalistan project retains state-level patronage. One has to look at trail of its failures in order to comprehend why Karachi has now again emerged as this campaign’s operational hub. In order to undermine and divert Indian government, the ISI started protracted proxy war by aiding the Khalistan movement in Punjab, as this timeline already makes clear. Since 1980s, this tactic has never been formally discontinued. What has changed is the terrain. Operations for SFJ have become significantly harder in Canada and United Kingdom where governments have come under growing domestic and diplomatic pressure to scrutinise separatist activities more carefully. With Western soil getting increasingly inhospitable, Rawalpindi has fallen back on what it controls directly. Offering Karachi Press Club to Pannun is a desperate move to rake up the movement in Bharat after multiple attempts have failed, as officials have assessed. Timing of April 29 announcement was again not coincidental. That same week, Punjab Police dealt another significant blow to ISI – Khalistan terror network recovering a cache that included a rocket-propelled grenade, two packs of RDX, a metallic improvised explosive device, hand grenades, detonators, high-end pistols, wireless sets and timer switches which meant to be used in massive attacks across the state. Director General of Police Gaurav Yadav confirmed the recovery was linked to an ongoing investigation into the Shambhu railway track IED blast case, as well as grenade attack on the Crime Investigation Agency (CIA) office in Moga in 2025. This was not an isolated seizure. In prior weeks, Punjab Police had busted two separate ISI-backed Babbar Khalsa International terror modules recovering RPG launchers, additional IEDs, RDX and a fleet of vehicles with accused persons linked to Pakistan-based handler Harvinder Singh Rinda. The farce of referendum announcement and arms consignments are not parallel stories. They are part of same story, one being propaganda arm and the other as operational arm of the same ISI-directed network. Pannun’s remarks at Karachi press conference stripped away whatever pretence of a civic movement SFJ has had claimed till date. He also claimed that 1.8 million people had participated in the referendum worldwide (a figure that Intelligence Bureau officials dismissed as fabricated, noting that the SFJ has consistently fudged numbers in the past, putting out exaggerated figures to give the impression of traction for a movement that demonstrably lacks it). He pledged to back Pakistan to the fullest in the event of any future tensions with Bharat. He heaped praise on Pakistan Army chief Asim Munir, the same officer who, after Bharat’s Operation Sindoor in May 2025, was promoted to Field Marshal by the Pakistani government for his role in the conflict. A designated terrorist, operating out of New York, cheering a Pakistani general from a Karachi press club, Pannun promised to stand with an adversarial state against Bharat. One must ask: who precisely is Pannun speaking for? The answer is not the Sikh community. The referendum in itself carries no significance whatsoever. SFJ held the first phase of its unofficial and non-binding referendum exercise in London in October 2021. Since then, it has conducted similar theatrics in Canada, Switzerland and Australia, each time claiming record numbers that no independent body has verified. Not one government has moved a single step towards recognising outcome. The reason is structural given that international law’s right to self-determination applies to peoples under colonial domination or foreign military occupation. Bharat’s Sikhs meet neither criterion. They are full citizens of the world’s largest democracy, represented at every level of Bharatiya state from Parliament to judiciary, armed forces to highest office on the land. The legal and philosophical scaffolding for the farcical Khalistan referendum does not exist anywhere in serious jurisprudence. What SFJ produces instead is theatre, elaborate, expensive and entirely hollow. Punjab’s own ballot boxes deliver most decisive verdict. The 2022 Punjab Assembly elections saw Aam Aadmi Party win 92 of 117 seats, majority 79 per cent on an agenda of governance, farmers’ welfare, and electricity. The demand for a separate Sikh homeland did not feature in that mandate. The trauma of

Bharat Defence Kashmir Pakistan Security Terrorism War

234

Vermilion and the War Cry: What Operation Sindoor Was Really About

Every analyst who measured Operation Sindoor in airbases missed the war. Operation Sindoor was not just a reply to an attack. It was a reply to a narrative. Rahul PAWA | x- @iamrahulpawa To understand Operation Sindoor, begin not in 2025 but in the ideological soil from which Pakistan itself was carved, a two-nation theory that turned faith into geography. Its first armed expression on Jammu and Kashmir came in October 1947, when Pakistan launched Operation Gulmarg, an invasion by the Pakistan Army alongside tribal raiders rallied under the cry that “Islam is in Danger.” Behind it sat a second inherited fallacy, the colonial martial race theory, which had convinced Pakistan’s officer class that they were born soldiers and Hindus were not. That sentence was not a slogan of the moment. It became the operating system of every campaign Pakistan would run on Jammu and Kashmir for the next eight decades. By the 1990s, the cry had gone international. Regional terrorists merged with foreign fighters drifting east from the Soviet-Afghan war. Between 1991 and 1999, Indian forces neutralised roughly 1,379 foreign terrorist fighters and arrested 142, men from Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Sudan, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Chechnya, operating through outfits such as Harkat-ul-Ansar and Lashkar-e-Taiba. The invasion was no longer regional. It was a franchise. The narrative that justified it abroad was a fiction. Kashmir Valley takes its name from the Hindu rishi Kashyapa, after whose Kashyapa-mira, the valley was settled. Thousands of years of Hindu heritage still stand in plain sight, from the Naranag temples to the ruins of the Martand Sun Temple, from the caves of rishis once revered by Hindus and Muslims alike to folklore still shared in valley villages. Yet through the late 1980s and 1990s, more than four hundred thousand Kashmiri Hindus were driven out of their homes in an internal displacement campaign that successive governments preferred not to name. In August 2019, India amended Article 370 of its own constitution. For Pakistan’s terror economy this was a structural blow: funding networks frayed, separatist leaders faced courts, and the long-cultivated story of an essentially Islamic valley began to lose its global gloss. Two months later, in October 2019, The Resistance Front was launched, a new face on an old body, an offshoot of Lashkar-e-Taiba which Indian agencies traced without difficulty. Since its founding, TRF has been at the centre of a campaign of targeted killings whose names are on record. Makhan Lal Bindro, a Kashmiri Hindu chemist, was shot dead in his Srinagar shop on October 5, 2021. Two days later, Supinder Kaur, a Sikh school principal, and Deepak Chand, a Hindu teacher, were lined up and killed inside their school in Srinagar. In 2022, Kashmiri Hindus Sunil Kumar Nath and Puran Krishan Bhat were gunned down in Shopian, both among the few who had stayed in the valley. On New Year’s Day 2023, seven villagers, including two children, were massacred at Dhangri in Rajouri. In June 2024, nine Hindu pilgrims were killed when a TRF attack sent their bus off a gorge in Reasi. Through all of it, migrant workers from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Punjab, daily-wage labourers and street vendors who had come from across India to make a living, were shot at point blank. The principle was always the same, what TRF itself called the “outsider-insider” line. Domicile certificates issued to resident and returning Kashmiri Hindus, were reframed in their literature as demographic invasion. The script was adapted, with little edit, from the Hamas playbook. In February 2025, Hamas’s Iran-based representative Khalid Al-Qadoumi shared a stage at Rawalakot in Pakistan-Occupied Jammu and Kashmir with Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed commanders at a conference titled “Kashmir Solidarity Day and Al-Aqsa Flood.” Two months later a Hamas delegation visited JeM’s Bahawalpur headquarters. The ideological alignment had a name: Ghazwa-e-Hind, the Islamist project of conquest in India. The same vocabulary had by then surfaced inside India’s elected politics. In January 2025, Srinagar MP Aga Syed Ruhullah Mehdi of the National Conference described tourists visiting Jammu and Kashmir as a “cultural invasion,” warning in a separate interview that the 1990s-style exodus of Kashmiri Pandits “could be repeated.” Former Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti, leader of the Peoples Democratic Party, has for years framed domicile certificates and resettlement policy as engineered “demographic change,” most recently in February 2026 describing a forty-township plan as a “demography plan for Hindu settlement.” Her daughter Iltija Mufti has spoken of the Centre’s “rush to appropriate our land.” By July 2025, Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha said the quiet part aloud: those claiming “cultural invasion” and “demographic invasion,” he warned, were echoing “the same narrative as the terror outfit TRF.” Three months later, on April 16 and 17, 2025, Pakistan’s Chief of Army Staff General Asim Munir spoke at an Overseas Pakistanis Convention in Islamabad. He reasserted the two-nation theory, declaring Muslims “different from Hindus in every possible aspect of life,” “better and more civilised,” with “nothing common” between the two. He revived the old line that Kashmir is Pakistan’s “jugular vein,” and instructed parents to raise children who would never “forget the story of the creation of Pakistan.” Indian security officials and the Chief of Defence Staff General Anil Chauhan have since identified that speech as the catalyst for what came next. What came next was Baisaran. On April 22, 2025, terrorists at the Pahalgam meadow separated Hindu men from their wives and shot them at point blank, sparing the women so they could carry the message home. This is the detail most international coverage missed. Sindoor, the vermilion a Hindu wife wears, marks the life of her husband. Wiping it off was the message. The message that Kashmir is not theirs. TRF claimed the attack on Telegram, citing “demographic changes” and residency permits to “outsiders,” repeated the claim with photographs the next day, and on April 26 retracted it, blaming a “cyber intrusion”, a retraction widely read as an attempt to dodge scrutiny once gravity of Indian response was clear. On May

Bharat Pakistan Policy Security Terrorism

230

Indus Treaty in Abeyance: India, Pakistan, and International Law

Pakistan’s resort to the UNSC on the Indus Waters Treaty collapses on contact with the law of treaties, the law of state responsibility, and the Charter regime on the use of force. Rahul Pawa | x: @imrahulpawa On 22 April 2025, in the Baisaran meadow above Pahalgam, terrorists separated tourists by faith and shot twenty-five of them and one local. The Resistance Front, a proxy of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba, claimed the attack. The following day, India announced that the Indus Waters Treaty of 1960 would be held in abeyance until Pakistan credibly and irrevocably abandoned its support for cross-border terrorism. On 7 May 2025, Indian forces struck terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan. A cessation of firing followed on 10 May 2025. The abeyance remained. From the start, Pakistan’s response was rhetorical. The abeyance was cast as an act of war, branded “water weaponisation,” and equated with terrorism. A year on, on the first anniversary of the Baisaran massacre, Pakistan has carried that posture to the United Nations Security Council, demanding that India “restore full implementation” of the Treaty and warning of “grave humanitarian consequences.” The recourse asks the Council to examine India’s abeyance in isolation from the conduct that produced it. The framing has a certain neatness. Tested against the law of treaties, the law of state responsibility, and the Charter regime on the use of force, it does not survive contact. The Security Council, under Article 24 of the Charter, holds primary responsibility for international peace and security. It is not a treaty-interpretation body, nor a tribunal over the performance of a 1960 bilateral instrument. The Treaty supplies its own graded dispute mechanism under Article IX: Permanent Indus Commission, Neutral Expert, Court of Arbitration. Article XII(3) requires that any modification proceed by duly ratified treaty. India invoked that provision twice, on 25 January 2023 and 30 August 2024, seeking review of the Treaty in light of changed circumstances and Pakistan’s obstruction of permissible Indian projects on the Western Rivers. Pakistan declined to engage. Its decision to bypass this architecture and approach the Council is itself an admission that the bilateral machinery cannot deliver the political outcome Islamabad seeks. “Grave humanitarian consequences” is rhetoric in search of jurisdiction, not jurisdiction itself. The Treaty is not a static allocation of water. Its Preamble grounds the instrument in “goodwill, friendship and cooperation.” Article VIII establishes a Permanent Indus Commission that presupposes ongoing good-faith engagement. Article IX presupposes a working bilateral relationship. Article XII(3) presupposes that modification proposals will receive serious response. A state that refuses to engage with lawful modification cannot credibly claim the high ground of treaty fidelity. Article 26 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties binds parties to perform every treaty in force in good faith. Good-faith performance is not discharged by partial compliance with allocation rules while the foundational conditions of peaceful coexistence are torn up beneath them. India’s position, that sustained Pakistani sponsorship of cross-border terrorism, culminating in Baisaran, ruptured the premise on which cooperation rests, is not creative interpretation. It is the black-letter application of pacta sunt servanda (treaties must be performed in good faith). Two further VCLT doctrines support, though do not exhaust, India’s measure. Article 60 permits suspension for material breach, including violation of provisions essential to a treaty’s object and purpose. Where that object includes cooperative water-sharing premised on peace, state-supported terrorism is not collateral conduct; it breaches the animating premise. Article 62, on fundamental change of circumstances, supplies a narrower but reinforcing ground. The doctrinal home for abeyance lies in the law of countermeasures. Articles 22 and 49 to 54 of the ILC Articles on State Responsibility require that countermeasures be non-forcible, proportionate, directed at the responsible state, taken to induce compliance, and, where possible, reversible. India’s measure meets each. It is non-forcible, targeted, proportionate to the breach it answers, and reversible: the Treaty stands, and the condition for restoration is on the public record. Pakistan must credibly and irrevocably abjure support for cross-border terrorism. It is also purposive, directed at the customary obligation, reinforced by Security Council Resolution 1373 (2001), that every state prevent the use of its territory for terrorist acts against others. India’s strikes of 7 May 2025 rest on a separate footing. Article 51 of the Charter preserves the inherent right of self-defence. Post-2001 practice, anchored in Resolutions 1368 and 1373, accepts that armed attacks may emanate from non-state actors, and that defensive action may extend to the bases from which they are mounted where the territorial state is unwilling or unable to suppress them. The cessation of firing on 10 May 2025 left the abeyance untouched. The Treaty position is doctrinal, not transactional; it does not rise and fall with the tempo of military exchanges. Pakistan’s “weaponisation” claim conflates the Treaty’s cooperative scaffolding with its physical entitlements. India has not diverted, dammed, or interdicted Pakistani waters in violation of Articles II and III. What it has suspended is the cooperative apparatus: data exchange, Commission engagement, treaty-level dispute mechanisms. If Pakistan’s grievance were that India had unlawfully constructed or operated works, that would be a Treaty-internal dispute, amenable to Article IX. The choice of the Council rather than the Treaty’s own forum is not a performance dispute. It is a narrative posture. The legal contest is not between treaty sanctity and treaty derogation. It is between two readings of obligation. The first is integrated: good faith and reciprocity are constitutive of the duty to perform. The second is fragmented: a state may sponsor armed attacks against its neighbour while demanding uninterrupted strategic benefit. The first is the black-letter of international law. The second is a position no treaty regime has ever sustained. India’s stand is principled, conditional, proportionate, and reversible. It does not weaponise water; it withholds cooperation from a party that has weaponised territory. The path back to the Treaty is open. It runs through Pakistan’s credible, irrevocable, and verifiable abandonment of cross-border terrorism, through no other forum, and certainly not the Security Council. The

Bharat Defence Geopolitics Pakistan Policy Security

406

Looking for Relevance?

Pakistan’s ‘Mediator Moment’ in Iran Crisis may turn out to be more of diplomatic outreach rather than Strategic Opportunism. N. C. Bipindra Pakistan’s most visible foreign policy gambits in recent years are its attempts to position as a mediator in the conflict between US, Israel and Iran. Pakistan has stepped forward to host talks, relay messages and project itself as a bridge between adversaries as tensions between US and Iran oscillate between ceasefire diplomacy and brinkmanship. Yet, beneath optics of shuttle diplomacy lies a more complex reality. Pakistan has limited credibility, constrained leverage and competing internal and external pressures. Optics versus Substance: Pak’s Mediation limits In recent days, Pakistan has actively facilitated dialogue between Washington DC and Tehran. It is even prepared to host rounds of negotiations. But, the substance of this engagement remains uncertain. Iran has shown hesitation in committing to talks in Islamabad. At critical moments, it has not confirmed participation. This hesitation reflects a broader scepticism. Mediation requires trust from both sides and Pakistan’s track record does not necessarily inspire it. Islamabad has maintained relations with Tehran and avoided overt alignment with Israel or US military frameworks. Its strategic dependence on Gulf allies especially Saudi Arabia raises questions about neutrality. The result is a paradox. Pakistan is visible but not indispensable. Trump Factor: Mimicry as Strategy One most striking features of Pakistan’s current posture is its alignment with Trump’s transactional diplomacy style. Islamabad has reportedly tailored its outreach to appeal to Trump’s preferences. It has offered cooperation on counter-terrorism, economic deals and even taken recourse to public praise. This approach has yielded short-term gains. Pakistan has secured a seat at the diplomatic table. Some stakeholders have even described Islamabad as a “central mediator.” Yet, such gains are fragile. They hinge on personal rapport rather than institutional trust. This makes Pakistan’s role vulnerable to shifts in US policy or leadership. More critically, aligning too close with Trump risks alienating other actors particularly Iran. Tehran remains wary of US pressure tactics and sceptical of intermediaries perceived as extensions of Washington. OIC Platform: Visibility Not Influence Pakistan has leveraged Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to project diplomatic relevance. The grouping has publicly acknowledged Pakistan’s “effective role” in de-escalation efforts. However, OIC’s structural limitations undermine its utility. Deep divisions within Muslim world especially between Sunni-majority states like Saudi Arabia and Shia-led Iran limit the organisation’s capacity to act as a unified diplomatic bloc. These internal fractures mean that Pakistan’s use of OIC serves more as a signalling tool than a mechanism for tangible conflict resolution. In effect, OIC amplifies Pakistan’s voice but does not necessarily enhance its negotiating power. Asim Munir eclipses elected govt Another defining feature of Pakistan’s mediation bid is the growing prominence of Army chief Asim Munir. Reports suggest that Munir has cultivated direct ties with US leadership even earning personal praise from President Trump. This dynamic underscores a familiar pattern in Pakistan’s governance. The military is dominant in foreign and security policy. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif while publicly leading diplomatic outreach, appears overshadowed by army chief’s influence. Such a configuration carries risks. While military backing can lend coherence and decisiveness, it also complicates perceptions of Pakistan as a neutral mediator. For Iran and other regional actors, prominence of the military, given its historical alignments, may reinforce doubts about Islamabad’s impartiality. Navigating Sunni–Shia Fault Lines Pakistan’s mediation attempt is further complicated by its need to balance Sunni–Shia dynamics. The country has longstanding ties with Saudi Arabia, including defence commitments while sharing a border and cultural links with Iran. This dual alignment creates structural constraints. Supporting Saudi Arabia too overtly risks alienating Iran. Leaning toward Tehran could jeopardise economic and financial support from Sunni-majority Gulf states. The challenge is not merely diplomatic but existential, given Pakistan’s economic vulnerabilities and reliance on Gulf remittances and energy supplies. Domestically, the stakes are equally high. Sectarian tensions within Pakistan could be inflamed by perceptions of bias in the Iran conflict, adding another layer of complexity to its external posture. Pakistan’s Credibility Deficit Despite its proactive diplomacy, Pakistan’s credibility as a mediator remains contested. Critics, including former US officials such as ex-adviser to Secretary of Defence Col Douglas Macgregor (Retd), have dismissed its role as unrealistic or overstated. Even where Pakistan has achieved visibility, questions persist about its capacity to deliver outcomes. The gap between hosting talks and shaping agreements is significant. Islamabad has yet to demonstrate the leverage needed to bridge it. At the same time, some analysts argue that Pakistan’s emergence as an interlocutor reflects a broader shift in global diplomacy, where middle powers exploit geopolitical flux to carve out roles. From this perspective, Pakistan’s mediation bid is less about immediate success and more about long-term positioning. Crisis at Home, Ambition Abroad Pakistan’s diplomatic activism also contrasts sharply with its domestic challenges. Iran conflict has triggered economic disruptions, including energy shortages and inflation, underscoring Islamabad’s vulnerability. These internal pressures raise an important question. Is mediation a strategic necessity or a diversionary tactic? Pakistan may be seeking to offset domestic instability and enhance its international standing by projecting itself as a peacemaker. Without requisite economic and institutional strength, Pakistan’s ambitions to turn a key mediator may not work. Mediate or Messenge? Pakistan’s emerging posture in Iran crisis reflects a blend of opportunism, necessity and ambition. It has successfully inserted itself into high-level diplomatic processes. Islamabad has leveraged relationships with both Western and Muslim-world actors. Yet, its role remains constrained by credibility deficit, structural dependencies and internal contradictions. At its core, Pakistan’s mediation effort may be better understood not as a decisive diplomatic intervention but as a bid for relevance in a rapidly shifting geopolitical landscape. Whether it evolves into a genuine broker of peace or remains a peripheral messenger will depend on its ability to translate visibility into trust and presence into influence. (Author is Chairman, Law and Society Alliance, a New Delhi-based think tank, and guest columnist with CIHS)

Human Rights Pakistan Security Terrorism

257

Balochistan’s Disappeared: Inside Pakistan’s Kill-and-Dump Campaign

In Pakistan’s largest province, Baloch families no longer ask only whether their loved ones will come home. They ask whether they will return alive, broken, or as a body left by the roadside.Rahul PAWA | X- @imrahulpawa In Balochistan, disappearance has become more than an allegation. It has become a method of rule, a language of fear, and, for many families, the most intimate face of the Pakistani state. A son leaves for college and does not return. A brother is picked up at a checkpoint and vanishes into an unmarked system. A body appears days later, bearing the marks of custody but not the burden of official acknowledgment. This is why the crisis in Balochistan can no longer be described as a peripheral human-rights issue. It now sits at the centre of the province’s politics, shaping how the state is seen, how dissent is expressed, and how the conflict itself reproduces. Balochistan has never sat easily inside Pakistan. Forcibly annexed in 1948 through military aggression, the province has been governed less as a constituent territory than as an occupied resource frontier, its people subjected to successive military operations, its political leaders jailed, exiled, or killed, its wealth extracted while its communities remain among the poorest in South Asia. The Pakistani army, the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, and the civilian bureaucracy that answers to both have together built an architecture of control in the province that relies not on consent but on coercion. Enforced disappearance is its sharpest instrument. For years, Baloch families have spoken of men seized from hostels, lifted from homes in front of witnesses, or taken at security posts, only to disappear into a military and intelligence maze that rarely concedes it holds them. What follows has hardened into ritual: protests outside press clubs, sit-ins on national highways, petitions before courts that issue orders the deep state ignores, and mothers holding photographs that become, with time, the only official record they possess. Paank, the human-rights wing of the Baloch National Movement, documented 1,355 enforced disappearances in 2025 and 225 killings it describes as extrajudicial. Its monthly tallies show the pattern continuing into 2026, with 82 disappearances in January and 109 in February. These are activist figures but even if read conservatively, they describe something far larger than sporadic abuse. They describe a system that is persistent, province-wide, and increasingly willing to move from secret detention to what families and activists have long called “kill and dump.” That charge now carries weight beyond the activist circuit. After a fact-finding mission to the province, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan called enforced disappearances Balochistan’s most urgent human-rights crisis and said testimony from victims and families pointed to a practice that had become systematic. Drawing on police data shared during its visit, HRCP reported 356 disappearance cases, of which 116 people had been traced, 36 were removed for incomplete information, 12 were listed as killed in police encounters, and 192 remained unresolved. Balochistan police alone registered 46 new cases in 2025. More alarming still, the commission described what witnesses called a faster “kill-and-dump cycle,” in which the interval between abduction and the recovery of a body appears to be shrinking. The targets are students, activists, human-rights defenders, journalists, and politically vocal young men and women. Anyone who speaks for Baloch rights, organises peacefully, or simply draws attention risks being categorised by the ISI and military intelligence as a threat to national security. HRCP documented that students had been surveilled and pressured over political expression on campus. In March 2025, UN special procedures experts demanded the release of detained Baloch human-rights defenders and called for an end to the crackdown on peaceful protest. A month later, the same body warned of the “unrelenting use” of enforced disappearances in the province and pressed for independent investigations, criminal accountability, and protection for victims families. The Pakistani state presents Balochistan through the vocabulary of security. The rights record reveals something closer to collective punishment of an occupied people. Islamabad’s counter-narrative rests on the existence of a separatist insurgency. After the March 2025 Jaffar Express attack, the Pakistan Army and the ISI found fresh justification for a harsher crackdown across Balochistan. But this repression is not an aberration. It is the logical outcome of decades of military control, resource extraction without political representation, and a security order that has long treated the Baloch as a population to be managed rather than Baloch to be heard. Pakistan’s institutions acknowledge the problem, but only in the bloodless language of bureaucracy. In October 2025, the government reported that the Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances had received 10,636 cases nationwide since 2011, disposed of 8,986, and left 1,650 under investigation. The numbers give Islamabad a defence of procedure. They do not answer the question that shadows Balochistan: why, after years of commissions, petitions, and court orders, do disappearances remain woven into everyday life? Why do families still pass between morgues, protest camps, police stations, and roadsides searching for men the state insists it cannot find? The answer may be that disappearance has outgrown its origins as a tactic. It has become governance by intimidation, the organising logic of an occupation that cannot justify itself by any other means. Each abduction removes one person but disciplines an entire social circle: a family that stops speaking, a campus that falls quiet, a town that learns the price of visibility. HRCP warned in 2025 that shrinking civic space, institutional impunity, and the conflation of human-rights advocacy with militancy were deepening alienation across the province. Here lies the central paradox of Pakistan’s campaign in Balochistan. It is designed to suppress dissent, yet it multiplies grievance. It is meant to restore control, yet it steadily drains the state of legitimacy. Balochistan’s disappeared are not merely a humanitarian ledger. They are the human index of a military occupation failing in plain sight. A state can compel silence for a time. It can deny custody, delay hearings, disperse protests, and reduce the missing to rows

Bharat Pakistan Terrorism United States USA War World

296

Pakistan May Use Iran as a Smokescreen to Spread Terror in India

Intelligence warnings are flashing red. The arrests are piling up. Pakistan does not need a reason to export terror to India. It needs an opportunity. And right now, with West Asia in open conflict, Pakistan’s deep state believes it has exactly that. Rahul PAWA | X – @imrahulpawa Every major world crisis has provided Pakistan’s terror machinery with operational cover to strike India, timed with cold precision to moments of maximum international distraction or diplomatic leverage. On March 20, 2000, the eve of Bill Clinton’s arrival in India, 35 Sikh men were lined up and shot dead in Chittisinghpora village in Jammu and Kashmir’s Anantnag district. The terrorists wore Indian Army uniforms and spoke Punjabi and Urdu, a calculated false flag designed to hand the visiting American president fresh images of fabricated Indian Army atrocities in Jammu and Kashmir. It was Lashkar-e-Taiba, operating under the Pakistan Army’s direction and its foreign intelligence agency ISI’s direct command. After 9/11, with American attention consumed by Afghanistan and the world watching Islamabad perform as a frontline ally in its “war against terror”, Pakistan’s deep state moved with characteristic audacity. On December 13, 2001, LeT and Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorists stormed the Indian Parliament in New Delhi, killing nine security personnel and nearly triggering a full-scale war. The attack was not opportunistic. It was a calculated attempt to internationalise Jammu and Kashmir at a moment when the world was already in crisis and the Islamic world was split. In November 2008, as Gaza descended into violent escalation and global Islamic outrage peaked, ten Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists sailed into Mumbai and held the city hostage for sixty hours, killing 166 people across multiple coordinated sites including the Taj Mahal Palace hotel, Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, and the Nariman House Jewish centre. The terrorist attack was meticulously planned, with Pakistan Army and its ISI providing training, logistics, and real-time operational guidance. This is not Pakistan-sponsored terrorism born of desperation. It was Pakistan Army strategy, executed with maximum cynicism. In 2001 it wore the mask of America’s indispensable ally against terror while simultaneously directing terror at India. Today it wears the mask of a responsible Islamic middle power and self-appointed Iran mediator while running active cells across Indian cities. The mask changes. The target never does. Domestically, the amendment of Article 370 of the Indian constitution in August 2019 began delivering what Pakistan had spent decades of propaganda insisting was impossible. Pakistani generals watched in horror as peace and normalcy returned to Jammu and Kashmir. Tourism surged. Investment flowed. A new generation of Kashmiris was experiencing connectivity and economic opportunity rather than terror branded as jihad. The Kashmir valley, whose civilisational roots run deep into Hindu tradition, whose saints and ancient temples reflect centuries of Hindu practice long preceding the region’s recent history, was beginning to rediscover itself on its own terms. The Pakistan Army could not allow this. A peaceful, prosperous Jammu and Kashmir demolished the foundational premise of Pakistan’s existence and its seventy-year investment in terror, war, and propaganda. So it recalibrated and struck. On April 22, 2025, three Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists armed with American M4 carbines, AK-47s, and a GoPro camera traced to a Chinese distributor and activated in Dongguan fourteen months before the attack, descended into Baisaran Valley and separated Hindu men from their wives and children before executing them in cold blood. They fled before Indian security forces arrived and were hunted down a few months later, with Home Minister Amit Shah confirming their elimination in Indian Parliament on July 29. From the bodies of attackers, investigators recovered Pakistani voter ID slips linked to Lahore constituency NA-125 and Gujranwala constituency NA-79, and biometric data from Pakistan’s National Database on a micro-SD card recovered from a broken satellite phone. The objective, as evidenced by the immediate operational claim on social media by The Resistance Front, a proscribed outfit and proxy of Lashkar-e-Taiba operating out of Muridke, was precise. Blame Hindus, declare Kashmir exclusively Islamic land, and manufacture an outsider and insider narrative implying that the very Hindus who form the civilisational core of Kashmir since its existence were settlers and occupiers. A fabricated narrative lifted directly from recent collaborators Hamas and Hezbollah’s playbooks in West Asia, designed to erase the Hindu soul of a valley Pakistan has spent decades trying to destabilise. India’s response was decisive and precise. Operation Sindoor struck nine confirmed terrorist training sites: Markaz Taiba in Muridke, LeT’s headquarters where the 26/11 Mumbai attackers were trained; Markaz Subhan Allah in Bahawalpur, Jaish-e-Mohammed’s nerve centre; the Masjid Syedna Bilal camp in Muzaffarabad; the Gulpur camp in Kotli; the Sawai Nala camp in Muzaffarabad; the Abbas camp in Kotli; the Mehmoona Joya facility of Hizbul Mujahideen in Sialkot; the Barnala camp in Bhimber; and the Sarjal facility at Tehra Kalan, a key weapons storage site. These were not arbitrary targets. They were the nerve centres behind decades of attacks on India including the IC-814 hijacking, the 2001 Indian Parliament attacks, and the 2008 Mumbai carnage. Pakistan’s response was to have its generals and senior officers attend the funerals of globally proscribed terrorists and then escalate. Pakistani forces deployed KARGU-2 loitering munitions and Bayraktar TB2 drones procured from Turkey and China in waves against Indian civilian and military targets. On the night of May 9 to 10, Indian air defence intercepted a Pakistani Fatah-II hypersonic ballistic missile over Sirsa in Haryana, aimed at targets near Delhi. In response to Pakistani escalation, Indian armed forces struck eleven Pakistani airbases including Nur Khan in Rawalpindi, the Pakistan Air Force’s central command and logistics hub, Rafiqui in Shorkot, Sargodha’s Mushaf Base, Murid in Chakwal, Skardu in Gilgit-Baltistan, and Bholari in Sindh, degrading frontline squadrons, runway infrastructure, drone hubs, and radar installations across the country. SEAD operations disabled air defence radars in Lahore and Gujranwala. The Indian Navy’s Western Fleet, including an aircraft carrier, repositioned in the northern Arabian Sea within operational range of Karachi. The intensity and reach of India’s strikes forced Pakistan’s DGMO to call his Indian counterpart and

Afghanistan Pakistan Terrorism War

318

Malfeasance at large

USCIRF worked to puncture US interests by framing its strategic ally Bharat as a country of particular concern and recommend ban on RSS, RAW. What’s the hidden agenda? K.A.Badarinath Why doesn’t US President Donald J Trump wind up the pugnacious and toxic organization US Commission for International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) that worked against American interests?President Trump cited ‘inefficient’, ‘wasteful’ expenses or ‘anti-US’ working as reasons good enough to withdraw from 66 international bodies including 31 UN agencies beginning January this year.By same yardstick, USCIRF is a fit case for immediate closure, try all six commissioners appointed through Presidential decree for ‘anti-US’ activities and recover state expenses that went into its anti-American propaganda. To begin with, US Congress that funds USCIRF for an ‘independent’ opinion on religious freedom in different countries may have to reconsider and stop bankrolling the redundant outfit. President Trump may have to then go ahead and proceed against these commissioners possibly having a hidden agenda.Now, one would be wondering as to what’s the crime that USCIRF or its commissioners resorted to for such an extreme measure. USCIRF recommendations in its report update of 2026 have the potential to derail American strategic and special relations with its major Asian allies like India.It has recommended limiting security relations, link US assistance and bilateral trade to “improved religious freedom” and pushed for enforcing Section 6 of Arms Export Control Act to halt sale of arms to India.All these recommendations have been made on purported “…continued acts of intimidation and harassment against US citizens and religious minorities (in India)”. Neither of these charges were proven nor evidenced to demand virtual severing of links between US and Bharat.More obnoxious is the recommendation of USCIRF headed by Pakistan linked Vice Chair Asif Mahmood to impose targeted sanctions on individuals and entities like India’s external spy agency, Research And Analysis Wing (RAW) and Hindu-centric civilizational, cultural organization, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Brazenly enough, USCIRF has sought freeze on assets, movement of people associated with these organizations.Incidentally, Asif Mahmood is a Pakistani American Physician and political activist based in California. Mahmood was head of APPNA (Association of Physicians of Pakistani Decent of North America) in South California that was reportedly a lobbying front for Islamabad.Avowed reason, however, offered by the commission is that these two organizations, RAW and RSS, tolerated severe violation of religious freedom in Bharat. Even Republican White House led by Donald Trump will have to think a billion times before restricting RAW or RSS leave alone a US government commission.Does USCIRF have the mandate to get the sovereign national agency of Bharat sanctioned? Larger malfeasance is to recommend sanctions on world’s largest volunteers driven, services oriented movement, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.As a commission funded by US government, it’s within its right to undertake critical analysis on issues that may be of importance to American interests. One gets flummoxed as to why the commission picked RAW and RSS in one sweeping recommendation sans logic, reasoning and rationale that’s basic to intellectual activity.RAW is the state-run agency and part of Indian security establishment like the American CIA and Israel’s Mossad. USCIRF has had no reference to RAW in its entire report leave alone irrefutable evidence to recommend sanction against a professionally run agency.On the other hand, RSS is a movement with millions of selfless volunteers providing education, healthcare, rural development, women’s participation, inclusivity and personality development services through tens of thousands projects.As per latest report of RSS Sarkaryavah Dattatreya Hosabale presented to the organization’s general council last week at Samalkha in Haryana, a whopping 152,003 service projects are run to benefit millions of vulnerable individuals, families and communities.Hindu-centric RSS is open to objective scrutiny by communities, stakeholders, friends and foes. But, it cannot be used as whipping boy by USCIRF to pursue its pre-designed anti-Hindu, anti-Bharat narratives globally. Otherwise, how does one explain the commission equating Hindus, Hindutva and Hinduness to ‘religious bigotry’ without having reported convictions, prosecutions or accountability data?After having established in 1925, RSS evolved into the largest Hindu organization working amongst communities. Several RSS inspired Hindu organizations have been active in countries like the US to provide humanitarian services during adverse climatic conditions apart from community centric projects.This is not the first time that USCIRF committed the abomination that seeks to rupture respectful relations between Bharat and United States. USCIRF report of 2026 has outraged Bharat’s intellectuals that came down heavily on its recommendations.About 131 decorated army officers, 131 former bureaucrats that include ten ex-ambassadors and 25 retired judges have openly questioned findings of USCIRF report. They cited lack of intellectual rigour and present a report that’s ‘disturbing’ and imbalanced with regards to religious freedom in Bharat.While designating Bharat as a ‘country of particular concern’, USCIRF showed its true face by picking on every development and governance in Bharat especially under Prime Minister Narendra Modi.Centre for Integrated and Holistic Studies (CIHS) pointed to USCIRF having waded into resolution to Babri structure, decision on Article 370, citizenship amendment act, anti-conversion laws and Waqf amendments done through due process of courts and Bharat’s parliament.For instance, Babri structure was resolved through three decades of patient, painful and at times frustrating judicial process and never by force of Hindu majority. USCIRF to resorted to Bharat bashing without reason or rhythm and points to its hidden agenda. It was gross to primarily denigrate a sovereign nation with irrefutable record of judicial processes, stringent Parliamentary democracy and associated institutions of repute.Let the commission be wound up and not rupture the special and mutually respected ties between Bharat and US. (Author is a veteran journalist, Director & Chief Executive of New Delhi based non-partisan think tank, Centre for Integrated and Holistic Studies).

Afghanistan Pakistan Terrorism War

264

Pakistan Bombed a Rehab Hospital. It Is a War Crime.

slamabad called it a military target. International humanitarian law calls it a protected facility. The evidence supports one of those positions. Rahul PAWA | x – imrahulpawa At approximately 9 p.m. on 16 March 2026, an airstrike hit the Omid Addiction Treatment Hospital in Kabul, a 2,000-bed drug rehabilitation facility near the city’s international airport, destroying large sections of the building. Afghanistan’s Interior Ministry confirmed 408 dead and 265 injured. Rescue crews were still recovering bodies from the rubble the following morning. The patients were civilians in medical treatment for addiction. Pakistan’s Information Minister said the air force had carried out precise, deliberate, and professional strikes on military installations and terrorist support infrastructure, that secondary detonations clearly indicated the presence of large ammunition depots, and that no hospital, no drug rehabilitation centre, and no civilian facility had been targeted. The factual dispute between Islamabad and Kabul has not been independently resolved. The legal analysis does not require it to be, because under international humanitarian law the evidentiary burden does not rest on the victim. It rests on the state that fired. International humanitarian law does not prohibit civilian deaths in armed conflict as such. It prohibits specific categories of conduct, and attacking medical facilities sits near the top of that list. Article 12 of Additional Protocol I requires that medical units be respected and protected at all times. Article 18 of the Fourth Geneva Convention states explicitly that civilian hospitals may in no circumstances be the object of attack. The Rome Statute, in Article 8(2)(b)(ix), classifies intentionally directing attacks against buildings dedicated to medical purposes as a war crime, provided those buildings do not constitute military objectives. Residents and a Reuters journalist present at the site confirmed it was the hospital that was struck, and that the Omid hospital and Camp Phoenix, the former NATO base Pakistan claims to have targeted, were not the same location. The facility held protected status under four separate instruments of international humanitarian law. Its location beside a former NATO base that had been repurposed by Afghan authorities after 2021 does not extinguish that protection. The central legal question is whether Pakistan can demonstrate that the facility’s protected status had been lawfully forfeited before the strike was ordered. Under IHL the threshold for forfeiture is narrow and procedurally demanding. A medical facility loses its protection only when it is actively used to commit acts harmful to the enemy, not when a state suspects proximity to militants, not when it occupies ground adjacent to a former military installation, but when the facility itself is engaged in hostile military conduct. Even then, a warning must be issued, a reasonable deadline set, and that warning must go unheeded before an attack becomes lawful. Pakistan issued no warning. Its claim that secondary detonations indicated ammunition storage was made after the strike, not before it. Post-hoc assertion is not pre-strike evidence, and the burden of proof rests entirely on the attacking party. Article 50 of Additional Protocol I is explicit: in case of doubt, civilian status is presumed. That presumption applied to the Omid centre. Pakistan made no demonstrated effort to rebut it before firing, which means the strike was unlawful from the moment the order was given. The proportionality and precaution analysis is an independent and equally serious exposure. Article 57 of Additional Protocol I requires commanders to do everything feasible to verify that targets are military objectives, to select means and methods that minimise civilian harm, and to refrain from attacks where civilian losses would be excessive relative to the anticipated military advantage. These are binding obligations, not operational guidelines. The strike occurred at 9 p.m. in a populated district of Kabul, against a 2,000-bed medical facility, with no warning issued to staff or patients. Pakistan has not defined the military advantage it anticipated, has not quantified it, and has not demonstrated that any proportionality assessment was conducted before weapons were released. The precautionary duties of Article 57 exist precisely to prevent this scenario. They were not discharged. Pakistan’s stated defences do not survive legal scrutiny. The first is that it struck a legitimate military objective, which requires verified pre-strike evidence of hostile use and established forfeiture of protected status. Neither has been demonstrated. The second is that Afghanistan provides sanctuary to Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan fighters, giving Islamabad just cause. This is irrelevant to the targeting legality of a specific building on a specific night. The principle of distinction requires attacks directed at identified military objectives, not at territory as collective accountability for the conduct of armed groups operating there. The third, implicit in Pakistan’s public framing, is that Taliban cross-border attacks on Pakistani civilians provide reciprocal justification. That argument was explicitly and permanently rejected at the Nuremberg Tribunals in 1946. Reciprocity does not suspend the laws of war. An adversary’s violations do not authorise your own. On the mental element, the Rome Statute does not require proof that Pakistan intended to kill patients. It requires that the attack be intentionally directed at a protected site, and recklessness satisfies that threshold. A commander who orders munitions onto a compound at night, without verifying it is a lawful military objective, without issuing a warning, when a civilian medical population is foreseeably present, has met the intent standard through recklessness even absent specific malice. On the present public record, every element of the war crime of attacking a protected medical facility is satisfied. The site held protected status. No forfeiture was established. No warning was issued. The proportionality obligation was not discharged. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has called for an investigation and for those responsible to be held to account in line with international standards. That call will almost certainly go unmet. Pakistan is not a party to the Rome Statute, and a Security Council referral would face veto from states with their own unresolved targeting exposure. The legal classification and the probability of accountability are two entirely separate questions. The strike constitutes a war crime. Whether

Blog Post