Two things are now apparent. First, the jihadi groups that Pakistan created and nurtured for decades to carry out proxy attacks in India, pursuant to its Bhutto doctrine of ‘a thousand-year war’, are now autonomous, with or without official approval. Second, the country that stands to benefit the most from instability and military conflict in the subcontinent is China, which wants to foil Donald Trump and America’s effort to promote India as an alternative to it.

Jihadis have their own timelines and compulsions. They are not known to be concerned about collateral damage, civilian or economic, from their moments of action and glory. And it is evident that of all the times to launch a calculatedly communal attack in Kashmir, that too against civilians, this was certainly not the best from the standpoint of the Pakistani establishment, which is grappling with dire economic and political stress and is pretty much broke too.

Worse still, the massacre of 26 male Hindu tourists in Pahalgam by Pakistani and Pak-trained local jihadis with body-cameras has obvious shocking parallels with the Islamist Hamas terrorists murdering 377 Jewish revellers at a music festival in the desert on October 7, 2023. And information has now emerged that in the run-up to the Pahalgam attacks, Hamas functionaries had been visiting Pakistan in preceding months, pointing to a murderous pan-Islamist compact.

A Hamas team visited a Jaish-e-Mohammed facility in Bahawalpur soon after it was opened last month by Pakistan’s Army chief Asim Munir. As JeM and Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (which claimed responsibility for Pahalgam under its new alias, The Resistance Front and then backtracked) are fostered by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, deniability is not plausible. But ISI has acted independently of, if not defied, the civilian government earlier too.

When the US Navy SEALs flew in and killed Osama bin Laden in his fortified home in Abbottabad in 2011, Pakistan claimed it was unaware he had been there and had not been........

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