Politics: poking the hornet’s nest
By Richard North - April 25, 2025
As the Telegraph reports today that “Pakistan threatens war with India after Kashmir massacre”, readers might be puzzled by the idea that Pakistan, cast as the aggressor, is making bellicose noises directed at India, the victim of the recent attack.
One might recall, though, that this region is the location of Kipling’s “great game” of espionage and intrigue and nothing much has changed in a group of warring nations where the politics and geography are opaque to most Western readers.
In this context, from the distance of nearly 90 years, one can only marvel at Neville Chamberlain’s remarks about the Sudeten dispute on the borderlands of Czechoslovakia, when he addressed the nation on the peace negotiations with Hitler after his attempt to head off war.
In his broadcast on 27 September 1938, he spoke of his efforts to resolve the dispute, referring to a “quarrel in a far away country, between people of whom we know nothing”.
Courtesy of Ryanair, the Czech Republic, as it is now, is a popular destination for weekend breaks from England and, with our wider geographical horizons, any politician who suggested now that the country was “far away” or that we know nothing of the people would probably be met with amused incredulity.
Yet, anyone could transpose Chamberlain’s same comment to the Pakistani-occupied province of Baluchistan, which might have a pivotal role in the ongoing drama. There mass protests have erupted in the city of Khuzdar, and the sense of the unknown would resonate with many people, who would be hard-put to find the province on the map.
I have to admit that, but for the British Army’s activities in Afghanistan earlier this century, I would be on the same class as those struggling to find the name on a map. But in October 2009, the province impacted briefly on US Marine operations in southern Helmand, when I found myself writing a background piece about the situation there.
On the face of it, the more recent history of this tortured province represents one of the most shameful episodes in our own colonial history, when a previously independent state was carved up between Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, the larger part going to Pakistan in March 1948.
The peoples of Baluchistan have never since unanimously accepted Pakistani rule – or the partition of their country – and in what they regard as the Pakistani occupied area, there have been a succession of insurgencies dating from 1948, 1958–59, 1962–63 and 1973–77, with an ongoing insurgency by autonomy-seeking Baloch groups which has been intermittently pursued since 2003, in the face of violent and sometimes brutal Pakistani repression.
What now gives this its topicality and relevance is the terrorist attack in Indian-held Kashmir, about which I wrote yesterday. The significance is, as it was in 2009 and previously, that India in its historical enmity with its neighbour, has been accused of fomenting and supporting dissent in Baluchistan, as a means of destabilising Pakistan.
The accusations were doubtless well-founded and the same thing, incidentally, was happening in Afghanistan, which possibly even amounted to India financing the Taliban to mount attacks on Pakistani installations.
From an Indian perspective, this can only be regarded as money well spent. Both Afghanistan and Baluchistan are regarded as “back doors” into Pakistan, and by fomenting instability in these regions, substantial numbers of PAK Army troops are tied down who might otherwise be deployed on the Indo-Pakistani border.
Even back in 2009, there was serious tension between India and Pakistan – there is nothing new about the current situation. At that time, I was writing about the tension being exacerbated by Pakistani intelligence service support for an active insurgency by Muslim extremist groups within the Indian-held area of Kashmir.
To add some further spice, the Indian intelligence service, known by the initials RAW, was also active throughout Kashmir, with the alleged involvement of the Israeli spy agency Mossad. Israel had also become a major arms supplier to India, inflaming Moslem sensitivities, a situation that holds to this day.
Thus we had a stand-off, where a politically fragile Pakistan firmly believes that the Indian long-term objective is the dismantling of the Pakistani state, and it looks nervously across the border at the huge 1.4 million-strong Indian army, the third largest after China and the US, comprising 14 Corps and 40 combat divisions – with significant forces poised on the border with Pakistan.
Reliable information from the region is extremely hard to get, but it was interesting to see in January 2023 an op-ed in Eurasia Review headed: “Indian Disinformation Campaigns Against Pakistan”.
The author, Qura tul ain Hafeez, wrote of the “fact” that the Indian media immediately starts blaming Pakistan after a terrorist attack in India, which she argues “gives an indication of how war-crazed they are”.
India, she asserts, has been purposefully misrepresenting Pakistan using false flag operations. There have been, she claims, many international masquerades in the past, but there are also many instances of Indian fake operations and its baseless allegations against Pakistan that were later disproven, revealing India’s agenda to harm Pakistan’s reputation abroad.
These false flag operations, she further claimed, also involve attacking their own territory and attributing the attacks to rivals or terrorists, which could serve as justification for inland or foreign aggression.
These accusations, we are told, were consistently supported by tenuous evidence and were even disproved by Indian judicial systems and international investigative organisations. Sushil Kumar Shinde, a former minister of the interior of India, claimed on 20 January 2013, that the BJP and RSS are supporting Hindu terrorism through organized campaigns. Additionally, he described how India created false flag operations to defame Pakistan.
How much of that is rhetoric is hard to say, but there is some substance to the claims, although the Muslim state of Pakistan is hardly without sin.
On the basis of my own research, published on Turbulent Times in August 2021, I wrote of the complexity of the scenario we’re dealing with, when Pakistan-backed Islamists mount terrorist attacks on India and stirred violence in its restive region of Kashmir, with India poised to use its Afghan assets to stir trouble in Pakistan’s rebellious region of Baluchistan.
Such details, I noted, especially those related to the volatile situation in the Pakistani-occupied territory of Baluchistan, hardly ever get a mention in the British legacy media, so I pointed to the Pakistan Observer and a report on a press conference by Pak Army Major General Babar Iftikhar.
He had claimed that India had “played a negative role in Afghanistan as it made an investment there with the sole intention of harming Pakistan”, accusing Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security (NDS) of helping the Indian spy agency, RAW, to harm Pakistan. The NDS-RAW nexus, he claimed, has been behind terrorist incidents in Dasu, Lahore and Gwadar in Baluchistan.
This is the background to the events in Kashmir over this week and the actions of the terrorists has been akin to poking a gigantic hornets’ nest with a sharp stick. There are endless rivalries, tensions and murderous proclivities within this region which are best left undisturbed.
With luck, the current bellicose talk is just posturing between two sworn enemies, and the tempers will calm over the next few weeks. But there is no guarantee that this will be the case and all-out war – however unlikely – cannot be ruled out, engulfing the whole region, spilling over into China in the east, and Iran in the west.
Because of Britain’s special position as the former colonial power, and the immigration history, the impact of open hostilities could be far greater than has been from the Ukrainian conflict, triggering domestic sectarian violence and another huge surge of immigration, with evacuees from multiple war zones claiming refugee status.
That same history, though, ,makes it difficult for the British government to intervene as an “honest broker”. It thus seems as if the United States is doing the heavy lifting, with Trump throwing his weight behind India. In terms of damping down inflamed tensions, this may be the wrong thing to do, in a situation where subtle diplomacy is needed.
But then, the UK has only David Lammy on whom to rely. We do not seem to be in the best of places, as the whole region is poised to go up in flames.
