By Dipak Kurmi
The history of statecraft is often written in the ink of diplomacy but underscored by the blood of those deemed expendable. Beneath the polished veneer of international summits and the measured cadence of peace proposals lies a darker reality where strategic depth is purchased with human lives. This fundamental paradox of the modern nation state is perhaps nowhere more visible than in the trajectory of Pakistan, a country that has mastered the art of projecting itself as an indispensable regional mediator while simultaneously presiding over a domestic landscape of systematic repression. The core question remains: who decides which lives are lost in the name of national interest, and how can a state preach the virtues of a ceasefire while allegedly waging covert operations against its own citizens and neighbors? History repeatedly demonstrates that human civilization often advances through brutal conflict, leaving a trail of moral compromise that is frequently buried beneath the sanitized language of diplomatic statements.
The resonance of historical trauma provides a haunting backdrop to these contemporary contradictions. Karbala, the spiritual heart of Shia martyrdom, stands as a timeless symbol of the collision between unwavering principle and state brutality. The pilgrims who walk barefoot to mourn Imam Hussain, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad who was betrayed and slain centuries ago, participate in a ritual that transcends time. This echo of martyrdom was deafening during the 1980s Iran-Iraq War, where the massacre of Iranian soldiers mirrored the horrors of antiquity. Saddam Hussein, reportedly bolstered by Western intelligence and regional allies, deployed chemical weapons with a devastating efficiency that the world chose to largely ignore. Entire units were allegedly liquidated in gas attacks, their bodies left to rot in trenches without a single bullet being fired. One Iranian journalist recounted the sight of soldiers bleeding from their noses, helpless against the invisible clouds of toxins, as hundreds of thousands perished while the international community remained silent due to geopolitical expediency.
Pakistan occupied a particularly shadowed and complex role during this era of chemical warfare and regional instability. While the West provided overt and covert support to Iraq, Islamabad allegedly engaged in a sophisticated double game by supplying weapons to Iran, including systems derived from Chinese and American inventories. Officially, Pakistan maintained diplomatic ties with the post-revolutionary government in Tehran, yet clandestine coordination was reportedly the norm, driven by shared strategic interests in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union. Simultaneously, Pakistani troops were dispatched to Saudi Arabia, a primary financier of Iraq, under the guise of protection. This dual role of broker and executor allowed the Pakistani state to instrumentalize itself to serve external powers, even as domestic development and the welfare of its own citizens were relegated to the background of high stakes power politics.
This pattern of duality is not merely a relic of the Cold War but continues to manifest within Pakistan’s current domestic policies. In Balochistan, a decades long insurgency has been met with a state response characterized by reports of enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings, and indiscriminate military campaigns. Human rights organizations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have documented how entire communities are displaced and unarmed civilians are targeted under the broad and often opaque banner of counter terrorism. The state justifies these actions through the rhetoric of patriotism and national security, effectively cloaking systematic repression in the language of sovereign defense. In this framework, the citizen is not a beneficiary of state protection but a variable in a security equation, where dissent is viewed as a threat to the structural integrity of the military civilian complex.
The crisis in Afghanistan further illustrates this lethal paradox. In early 2026, even as Pakistan drafted the Islamabad Accord peace proposal intended to halt hostilities in the Iran conflict, its own military was reportedly conducting cross border shelling in Afghanistan’s Khost, Paktia, and Paktika provinces. These strikes, allegedly involving mortars, missiles, and drones, forced tens of thousands of civilians into makeshift shelters and caves. Children reportedly froze on stone floors as mothers lamented having nowhere to go after their villages were reduced to rubble. These events reached a horrific crescendo on March 16, 2026, when Pakistani airstrikes allegedly struck the Omid drug rehabilitation center in Kabul. While the UN reported at least 143 initial deaths, many of them children, Afghan officials claimed the death toll exceeded 400. Despite these reports of carnage, Islamabad continued to present itself on the world stage as a stabilizing actor and a guardian of regional peace, sacrificing civilians for the sake of strategic depth.
Domestic political stability in Pakistan is equally performative, masking a rigid hierarchy where the military remains the ultimate arbiter of political survival. The treatment of opposition leaders highlights the fragility of the democratic process. Imran Khan, the former Prime Minister and cricket icon, has faced prolonged imprisonment, with reports from late 2025 describing his confinement in a death cell at Adiala jail. According to accounts from his family and international media, Khan was kept in a six by eight foot cell, denied visitors for weeks, and provided with only the Quran and basic water for washing and drinking. This follows a long tradition where leaders like Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto suffered exile or judicial disqualification when their interests diverged from the strategic imperatives of the establishment. In this environment, media and civil society are pressured into compliance, and political contestation is strictly conditional, ensuring that the military civilian framework remains unchallenged.
The 2024 Iran-Pakistan border incident serves as a microcosm of this international and domestic balancing act. After Iranian missile strikes targeted Jaish ul-Adl militants in Balochistan, Islamabad condemned the violation of its sovereignty and launched retaliatory strikes inside Iran. Yet, by April 2026, reports surfaced that Pakistan was helping to broker a ceasefire between Iran and the United States. This demonstrates a sophisticated ability to balance aggression with negotiation, using violence as a tool to maintain relevance while projecting indispensability as a diplomatic bridge. The state manages to tolerate or perpetrate violence at home while cultivating an image of a peacemaker abroad, a strategy that is structural rather than incidental. It is a refined version of the policies seen in 1971, when the suppression of East Pakistan under General Yahya Khan led to hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions of refugees, an atrocity the United States reportedly tolerated to protect its own cold war interests.
The Shia population living along the border with Iran embodies the human cost of this geopolitical calculus. Millions reside in a region that is critical to the regional balance of power, yet they are often neglected in terms of civic protection and basic human rights. These communities exist in a state of perpetual vulnerability, exposed to cross border violence, insurgencies, and state neglect, served up as instruments in a broader game of strategic leverage. The military’s prioritization of geopolitical influence over the welfare of its people ensures that these regions remain underdeveloped and unstable. It is a persistent cycle where human development, accountability, and institutional integrity are subordinated to the utility of the state as a facilitator for external powers and a guardian of its own internal hegemony.
The history of the last several decades reveals a perfected tripartite strategy: domestic repression, regional projection, and international negotiation. The reality of civilians fleeing shelling to live in caves with no food or medicine is conspicuously absent from the narratives of mediation presented in world capitals. The enforced disappearances in Balochistan and the imprisonment of political rivals are the quiet prerequisites for a state that maintains its grip on power by appearing necessary to the international order. Peace is brokered in the public eye, while war is executed in the shadows. This dualistic approach suggests that the state’s advocacy for peace may be nothing more than a mirage, a strategic mask worn to hide the systematic silencing of its own citizens. As long as global powers prioritize strategic utility over human life, the records of peace will continue to be written in the blood of the expendable.
(The writer can be reached at dipakkurmiglpltd@gmail.com)
