The phrase “Indian-sponsored” now appears in almost every ISPR communiqué on militancy in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan. It appeared again on Sunday, when the military’s media wing said 21 terrorists had been killed in multiple engagements across KP between 3 and 5 September, taking the toll from a single week of border fighting to 25. It had appeared three days earlier, when 12 terrorists were killed in an intelligence-based operation in Kalat — that time under the parallel designation Fitna al-Hindustan.
Islamabad’s case, argued repeatedly at the United Nations Security Council and in Foreign Office briefings, is that Indian intelligence provides funding, logistics and safe passage to the TTP, the Balochistan Liberation Army and its Majeed Brigade. Officials point to the 2016 arrest of Kulbhushan Jadhav and to the dossiers released in subsequent years as evidence of a settled pattern of subversion.
Everyone deserves to know where that case is strong and where it is weak. It is strong on plausibility and on pattern. Pakistan is not the only state to have accused India of extraterritorial operations, and the Canadian and American cases raised since 2023 gave Islamabad’s broader argument a hearing in Western capitals it had not previously enjoyed. It is strong, too, on international traction — in August 2025 the United States designated the BLA and the Majeed Brigade as foreign terrorist organisations, a step Pakistan had pressed for over several years.
It is weaker on adjudication. Pakistan’s dossiers have not been tested by any international body, and the sponsorship claim in this particular press release is asserted rather than documented. That is not a small matter. A charge repeated in every communiqué without supporting material eventually stops functioning as an accusation and starts functioning as a formula — and formulas do not move foreign ministries. If the evidence is as solid as officials privately insist, the argument for putting it before an international forum is stronger than the argument for holding it back.
India’s Position
New Delhi rejects the charge in categorical terms, and its rejection be recorded.
India’s Ministry of External Affairs dismissed the allegations as baseless in June, after Islamabad linked India to the attack on a Rangers camp in Karachi’s Gulistan-i-Jauhar on 27 June, in which three security personnel were martyred. ISPR attributed that assault to Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, which it described as an Indian proxy; the TTP splinter group claimed it.
MEA spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal has framed the exchange in the reverse direction, told a briefing on 28 July that Pakistan had sponsored cross-border terrorism against India for decades. In August, Indian Home Minister Amit Shah announced the arrest of more than 200 alleged operatives of what Indian authorities call the Shahzad Bhatti Network, across 14 states, accusing the ISI of backing them. Foreign Office spokesperson Tahir Andrabi called the claim propaganda intended to deflect from India’s domestic difficulties.
The result is a closed loop. Each capital’s evidence is the other’s fabrication, and neither submits its file to arbitration. Pakistan has the better of this exchange on one narrow but real point; it has offered international investigation and India has declined it. That offer should be repeated, in writing, at every available forum — precisely because refusal is more costly to New Delhi than to Islamabad.
The Shadow of May 2025
What has changed since 2025 is the ceiling on escalation.
Following the Pahalgam attack, India launched Operation Sindoor against sites in Pakistan and Azad Kashmir on the night of 6–7 May 2025. Pakistan responded on 10 May with Operation Bunyan-um-Marsoos — the Quranic phrase for a wall of poured lead — striking Indian installations including Udhampur, Pathankot and Adampur. The four-day exchange ended in a ceasefire announced the same day, which United States President Donald Trump’s claim that he personally brokered. The conflict period is officially designated Marka-e-Haq, and 10 May is now observed annually as Youm-e-Marka-e-Haq, a decision made by the Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif announced last year on the success of Operation Bunyan-um-Marsoos.
There is a factual core to the national confidence. India’s then Chief of Defence Staff, General Anil Chauhan, acknowledged aircraft losses on the opening day of the fighting in interviews on the sidelines of the Shangri-La Dialogue at the end of May 2025 — the first such admission from any Indian official, after weeks of official silence. He also called Pakistan’s figure of six downed jets absolutely incorrect while declining to give a number of his own. Both halves of that statement belong in any honest account. The admission was real, and it was extracted; the specific tally remains contested.
But triumphalism should be tempered, and The Lahore Times has said so before. The war settled nothing structural. Kashmir remains unresolved. The Indus Waters Treaty remains in abeyance at India’s insistence (despite a recent unanimous ruling by a Hague-based Court of Arbitration), with New Delhi tying restoration to conditions Pakistan will not accept. And both militaries emerged convinced they can absorb a limited exchange — a conviction that lowers, rather than raises, the threshold for the next one. Deterrence that has to be demonstrated every few years is not deterrence in the sense the word is usually meant. Defence Day commemorations are the right place for pride. Policy documents are the right place for arithmetic.
The Real Front Is Domestic
Whatever the merits of the sponsorship argument, it cannot by itself explain the numbers.
Data compiled by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data project records a near-fourfold rise in militant attacks nationally, from 658 in 2022 to 2,425 in 2025, with TTP-attributed attacks rising more than sevenfold over the same period. The Institute for Economics and Peace ranked the TTP the third-deadliest terrorist organisation in the world in its 2026 index. In Balochistan, the Majeed Brigade’s suicide bombing of a shuttle train near Quetta in May killed more than 47 people. No foreign hand, however malign, builds a curve like that on its own.
The TTP’s regeneration since 2021 has been driven by sanctuary across the Durand Line, by the return of hardened cadres after the fall of Kabul, and by governance gaps in the merged districts that no kinetic operation can close. It is worth noting that a substantial portion of Sunday’s ISPR statement was directed not at New Delhi but at Kabul — at what the military called the Afghan Taliban’s abject failure to deny its soil to groups operating under its patronage. That emphasis is correct, and it is the part of the statement that deserved the headline. The most sustained Pakistan-Afghanistan hostilities since 2021 have produced a fragile Qatar-brokered ceasefire, renewed strikes in February, and mediation rounds in Doha, Ankara and Urumqi that have yet to yield a durable arrangement.
Intelligence-based operations of the kind announced on Sunday are effective at attrition. Twenty-one terrorists in three days is a real tactical result, and the army’s tempo under Azm-e-Istehkam has kept pressure on infiltration routes and prevented militants from holding territory — not a small achievement given the terrain and the length of the frontier. But attrition is not denial. A network that can replace its losses faster than they are inflicted is not being dismantled; it is being taxed.
The harder work belongs elsewhere: to a functioning police and prosecution chain in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where conviction rates in terrorism cases remain the weakest link in the entire structure; to development spending in the tribal districts that actually reaches them; and to a border policy that does not swing between airstrikes and stalled negotiations. It belongs, too, to a political settlement in which provincial governments and the centre are not permanently at war over everything except the thing that is killing people.
Until those are in place, ISPR press releases will keep arriving, and the arithmetic will keep repeating.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Lahore Times.
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