Some days, geopolitics writes its own satire. Yesterday was one of them, and New Delhi and Tel Aviv supplied the material.
It began in the sky. On Wednesday, a flydubai flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv suddenly plunged thousands of feet after a fight in the cockpit. The Omani co-pilot is accused of stabbing the Indian captain and trying to bring the aircraft down. Passengers restrained him, one of them took over the controls, and the plane landed safely in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia. Those 174 passengers, including 27 children, went through real terror, and nobody should make light of it.
What Israel and India made of it is another matter.
Before investigators had even begun their work, Netanyahu was on American television presenting an Israeli plumber as the hero of the hour, and was soon promoting the man’s plumbing business. Not to be outdone, Narendra Modi declared that the Indian captain had prevented “another 9/11”. Within a day, a cockpit crime under investigation had become a campaign advertisement for two governments.
For Netanyahu, whose government’s record in Gaza is known to the whole world, any story that recasts Israelis as victims and rescuers is too valuable to pass up. For Modi, whose propaganda machine never misses a chance to dress India up as the world’s frontline against terror, an Indian captain on an Israel-bound flight was perfect material. The Indian media did what it does best: it turned a news story into a hero story with a cast of saviours and no questions.
But on the same day, India’s propaganda machine was running a second story, and this one collapsed in public.
On September 29, India’s Chinar Corps announced that it had killed a militant in occupied Kashmir. By the next morning, the dead man had a name: Muhammad Asif, alias Hashim Moosa. By the afternoon, Indian news agency ANI was claiming he was a former Pakistani SSG commando. By evening, Indian media had linked him to the Pahalgam attack and even placed him in Pervez Musharraf’s security detail. In 48 hours, an unnamed body had become, on Indian screens, a Pakistani army terrorist.
The timing tells its own story. On the very day India was being celebrated for stopping “terror” in the sky, it hoped to show the world a Pakistani soldier carrying out terror on the ground. India the hero, Pakistan the villain, both in one news cycle.
There was one problem: the “dead” commando was alive.
On Thursday, the DG ISPR, Lt Gen Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry, sat before the press in Rawalpindi with retired Havildar Muhammad Asif beside him. Asif said he had joined the army in 2000, served in the SSG and retired in 2023. When Indian channels reported his death, he said, he was at home in Pindi Gheb, Attock, and found out when friends called him. India still insists the man it killed was “Asif alias Hashim Musa”. But the Pakistani soldier its media claimed to have killed in Kashmir was sitting in Rawalpindi.
This is not the first time. Pakistan has seen this pattern before, in Pulwama and in Pahalgam: a tragedy, an instant accusation, and evidence that never arrives. This time, the evidence arrived, but it was against India.
Why take such a risk? Look west of the Durand Line.
On the night before the press conference, Pakistan carried out air and drone strikes on TTP and BLA hideouts in Afghanistan’s Kunar and Helmand provinces. Islamabad says 22 militants were killed. Kabul and the UN mission say civilians died too, a claim Pakistan rejects. But the strategic message is clear. For years, these groups, which Pakistan has long accused India of backing, treated Afghan soil as a safe haven beyond Pakistan’s reach. That safe haven no longer exists.
Neither Delhi nor Kabul expected Pakistan to strike this deep, or keep striking. What India cannot stop on the battlefield, it is trying to stop through the headlines: paint Pakistan as a sponsor of terror, raise international pressure, and hope Islamabad pulls back.
Yesterday showed the limits of that strategy. Narratives built in an afternoon can travel the world quickly. But they don’t survive the moment the truth walks in, alive and well, from Attock.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Lahore Times.
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