Last month, a senior foreign correspondent for a major international broadcaster asked me what it would actually take for peace between India and Pakistan. Not another temporary ceasefire. Not another carefully staged diplomatic handshake. Real peace. My answer was simple. Pakistan must stop terrorist groups responsible for mass-casualty attacks. Groups like Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba are designated by the United Nations and much of the international community. Pakistan treats them like sports teams. Everything else flows from there. India ultimately wants good relations with Pakistan. Most Indians do. But no country can build lasting peace with a gun permanently pointed at its head.
That is the uncomfortable reality sitting at the heart of South Asia’s crisis. Before discussions about strategic doctrines, regional balance, covert operations, or nationalist rhetoric can even begin, there remains the unresolved issue that some of the world’s most notorious militant organisations emerged, operated, or found shelter within Pakistan’s orbit over decades. Until Pakistan fully confronts that legacy with clarity rather than ambiguity, trust will always remain fragile.
That is why Senator Sherry Rehman’s post on X on May 18, 2026, was so striking. In the post, she argued that the so-called “Doval Doctrine” had become a “spectacular failure” and accused India of attempting to destabilise Pakistan “through a thousand cuts”.
There is a serious debate to be had about India’s regional strategy and the dangers of covert escalation between two nuclear powers. There are also legitimate concerns surrounding hyper-nationalist rhetoric on both sides. But Pakistan risks undermining its own position when criticism of India crosses into outright historical revisionism. Lies will not help anyone.
India is not viewed internationally as an engine of international terrorism. Pakistan is. That reputation was not invented by propagandists sitting in television studios in New Delhi. It developed over decades because of militant networks, proxy warfare, the Taliban era, Kashmir militancy, extremist infrastructure, and repeated international allegations involving elements of Pakistan’s security establishment. NATO camped out in Afghanistan for twenty years while Pakistan’s proxies made Western troops, diplomats, aid workers, and civilians bleed. The world has not forgotten that reality. Pakistan may dislike it, but denying it outright only deepens international scepticism.
The Abbottabad raid remains one of the clearest examples of this credibility problem. After the operation that killed Osama bin Laden, narratives quickly surfaced suggesting Pakistan had secretly cooperated with the United States. Pakistani strategists briefed Seymour Hersh, once one of America’s most formidable investigative journalists. Almost nobody bought it. The story never truly landed internationally because it contradicted the visible humiliation the raid inflicted upon Pakistan’s military and intelligence establishment. The world was effectively being asked to believe that Pakistan had both harboured the world’s most wanted terrorist near a major military academy and simultaneously orchestrated one of the greatest intelligence deceptions in modern history. The narrative collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions.
