Who did Pahalgam, no one may ever know. India has stonewalled any attempt by Pakistan and the vociferous appeal by entire international community to carry out investigations into the incident. That the incident occurred amidst a massive presence of 7-800,000 security personnel deployed to keep Kashmir quiet and controlled leaves a lot to imagination and hence the universal cry for India to conduct transparent, preferably neutral, inquiry before assuming its default recourse to blame Pakistan, an archenemy since inception with which she had already fought four wars.

That the government of India is still posting flyers around Kashmir to request information of the possible attackers would be laughable if over a hundred more people on both sides of the border had not died in a fifth such war. It is not even laughable; it is outright detestable and contemptible considering it was by an aspirational power hoping to find greatness and global eminence.

A fulsome economy alone cannot pass for greatness. It must come with greater responsibility, a better sense of fairness and justness, and an unqualified respect for others to their right to coexist. Plucking deceit and ruse out of thin air it contrived a reason to assert its dominance and complete hegemony and failed miserably, instead hurting its immediate-to-mid-term prospects at the hands of the Pakistan Air Force and a nation that came together like a single bonded entity to thwart what an evil enemy had attempted to impose.

If there are two or even three major lessons that Pakistan can draw from this short war, those are the brilliance of the PAF, the unity this nation can garner as a reflex action despite its various divisions when another nation challenges its existence, and the........

© The Express Tribune