By Akbar Jamal
One of the accepted principles of human psychology is that when a person cannot accept or endure his own weakness or failure, he redirects his anger and frustration toward someone he considers incapable of fighting back. In psychology, this is known as displacement. In everyday language, it is often described as kicking the dog: the employee who is humiliated by his boss at work comes home and takes it out on innocent children.
The tragedy begins when this same psychological pattern becomes part of a state’s security apparatus and foreign policy. At that point it is no longer just a moral failure. It becomes a strategic crisis that spreads beyond borders and pulls an entire region into its consequences. Today, Pakistan’s military narrative and its conduct toward neighboring countries have become a classic and disturbing example of this kind of psychological and political contradiction.
The attack claimed by Jamaat-ul-Ahrar (JuA) on the Rangers’ headquarters in the heart of Karachi, and everything that followed, exposed this contradiction in full. According to reports, only seven to nine attackers targeted the heavily fortified compound. Independent sources say more than twenty-four Rangers personnel were killed.
Any ordinary person would naturally ask a simple question: where did these attackers come from, and how did they get there?
Instead of investigating this intelligence failure inside its own territory, Pakistan’s government and military produced a narrative within hours claiming that one of the attackers was an Afghan citizen who had crossed the Durand Line only days earlier. The military even released a video of the detained man. But that was where the story first began to collapse.
The man’s accent, speech, and linguistic style made it clear that he belonged to the Pashto spoken in Peshawar and its surrounding areas, not to any dialect spoken in Afghanistan. That contradiction alone showed that the military’s narrative was built not on facts but on predetermined strategic objectives.
The most astonishing part of the entire affair is the highly selective efficiency of Pakistan’s intelligence apparatus.
On one hand, Pakistan claims it has spent billions of rupees fortifying the entire frontier from Chitral to Kandahar, erecting fencing and installing biometric systems and modern thermal surveillance technology. Yet armed men are somehow able to move with weapons across nearly 1,500 kilometers of the territory, from Bajaur into Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Punjab, or Balochistan, while the intelligence services remain completely unaware.
Then the moment an attack takes place in Karachi, that same intelligence system suddenly awakens. Within hours it claims to know exactly where the attackers came from and, before the night is over, launches airstrikes on alleged targets in Afghanistan’s Kunar, Paktia, and Paktika provinces.
The obvious question is this: if an intelligence service cannot detect armed groups traveling 1,500 kilometers inside its own country, how does it suddenly become so precise and efficient when it comes to the mountains of another country?
This contradiction makes one thing clear. The strikes were not the result of a sudden intelligence breakthrough. They were an attempt to cover up a failure by redirecting public anger and placing the blame on a neighboring country.
Throughout this episode, much of Pakistan’s media and several self-styled think tanks played their familiar role of echoing the military’s version of events. They repeated the official briefings without asking a single serious question and helped manufacture an artificial atmosphere of confrontation against Afghanistan. No one dared ask fundamental questions about border management, route surveillance, or intelligence coordination. Anyone who raises such questions is branded either a traitor or a supporter of terrorism, or simply silenced.
Another deep contradiction in Pakistan’s conduct lies in the imbalance of power. Pakistan repeatedly claims that India’s hand is behind BLA operations in Balochistan and that its leaders are hiding inside Iran. Yet it never dares to carry out the kind of airstrikes against India or Iran that it routinely carries out inside Afghanistan.
The reason is obvious. It is the balance of deterrence.
Pakistan’s military knows perfectly well that both India and Iran possess modern air forces and advanced missile systems, and that any attack would bring an immediate and costly response. Afghanistan, by contrast, currently has neither a modern air defense system nor combat aircraft. That is why Pakistan’s military plays the lion here, bombing civilian homes much as the Israeli regime has done.
The truth is that every armed and political movement inside Pakistan is, in one way or another, a natural response to the state’s own oppression, the denial of political and economic rights, and the practice of enforced disappearances. History has repeatedly shown that when a state turns its guns on its own people, resistance inevitably follows.
If there were genuine intent to resolve these problems, the answer would be political dialogue, development, and restoring people’s rights, so that armed groups could lay down their weapons and become part of the national process.
That does not happen because the military no longer treats internal unrest as merely a security issue. It has become a war economy. As long as a real or imagined threat exists, larger defense budgets, elite privileges, and the military’s dominance over politics and the economy can all be justified.
History teaches another lesson as well. Oppression and contradiction never last forever. Afghanistan is a land that, despite limited material resources, forced global powers like the Soviet Union and the United States to accept defeat through faith in Allah and steadfast resistance.
If Pakistan’s security establishment continues blaming its failures on the Afghan people and turns the spilling of innocent Afghan blood into routine policy, it will sow the seeds of lasting hatred and retaliation on both sides of the Durand Line. One day, that hatred will push Pakistan’s entire internal security structure into a crisis and a level of complexity from which there may be no escape.
The need of the hour is not to keep throwing stones at a neighbor’s wall or searching for scapegoats. It is to look inward and confront one’s own failures.
