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What Can the U.S. Do About Pakistan?
Foreign Affairs
What Can the U.S. Do About Pakistan?
The nuclear-armed power can be contained, but not reformed.
Credit: Aamir Qureshi/Getty Images
On April 16, 2025, Pakistan’s army chief, General Asim Munir, delivered a speech at the Overseas Pakistani Convention in Islamabad. Munir delivered a speech blending Islamic revivalism and militaristic rhetoric, tapping into Pakistan’s foundational narrative of the two-nation theory. Munir, who comes from a family of religious Islamic scholars, is himself known as a Hafiz-e-Quran—a devout muslim who has studied and memorized all passages of the Quran. As Pakistan’s most overtly religious army chief, Munir’s repeated emphasis on the two-nation theory had a fundamentalist significance. In Islamic terms, the Muslim community constitutes a qaum: a separate nation, no matter where they live. It was on this basis that Muhammad Ali Jinnah argued for the partition of British India—that Hindus and Muslims could not cohabit under a secular government.
Munir reemphasized this concept that, whether under the Mughals, the British, or any other power, the Muslims of the subcontinent are culturally, religiously, and civilizationally distinct from the Hindus. Thus, the Partition of India was a foregone conclusion. Munir also claimed that Pakistan was only the second state in history to be established on the Kalima (the Islamic declaration of faith), following the first Islamic state founded by the Prophet Muhammad. Implicit in Munir’s speech was the idea that the 200 million Muslims of India are living under foreign rule, and that their loyalty rightly belongs to the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.
Some viewed the speech, delivered in front of a diaspora audience, as a calculated move by the army chief to deflect attention from Pakistan’s deepening domestic crises. Munir’s religious background could also be a cover for his repeated use of extremist terminology such as jihad fi Sabilillah—armed combat in the name of Islam. Still, the speech revealed a growing unease within Pakistan’s military, which has dominated the country’s civilian governments since the 1950s. The former Prime Minister Imran Khan remains imprisoned on corruption charges, allegedly ousted for challenging the army’s authority after he fired Munir, then chief of Pakistan’s security services. He later rose to become army chief in 2022 following Khan’s removal. In the audience at Munir’s speech was the current Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, whose brother, the former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, was overthrown for trying to assert civilian control over the army. Munir’s speech, then, was less about national unity than a blunt reaffirmation of the army’s supremacy over Pakistan.
One week after Munir’s speech, four terrorists massacred 26 Indian civilians at the Baisaran meadow near the town of Pahalgam in Kashmir. Pahalgam is a popular tourist destination in India, situated in the Kashmir Valley, where visitor numbers have increased significantly in recent years due to improved security conditions and a decline in unrest. That day, the 100-acre meadow was crowded with tourists from all over India. Indian military servicemen on leave were there with their families, along with Hindu, Christian, and Muslim vacationers who had traveled from as far south as Kerala on the opposite end of the Indian subcontinent.
From eyewitness accounts, the terrorists separated the Hindu men from the Muslim men by checking their IDs. In a deliberate act of humiliation, they forced the men to remove their trousers so they could be inspected for circumcision—a practice common among Indian Muslims but not among Hindus. They also asked the tourists to recite the Kalima, the Islamic declaration of faith, as proof that they were truly Muslim. The terrorists executed the Hindu men at point-blank range, with one of the tourists reporting that the terrorists refused to kill her so she could “go tell Modi,” referring to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The terrorists filmed their massacre with body cameras and took selfies with the dead bodies before escaping into the woods.
The Resistance Front, a front organization for the terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), claimed responsibility for the attack. LeT is a Pakistan-backed proxy, an Islamic fundamentalist organization supported by Pakistan’s intelligence arm, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI), and the Pakistani Army. The group gained international notoriety for orchestrating the 2008 Mumbai attacks, when terrorists from Pakistan infiltrated Mumbai by sea and killed hundreds of Indian civilians and foreign tourists. At that time, a separate front organization known as the “Deccan Mujahideen” claimed responsibility, which is a common tactic used by such groups to hide their real affiliations, allowing Pakistan to maintain its innocence.
To say that this massacre has angered Indians would be understating the outrage around the country and the world. Indian civilians have been targeted by terrorist attacks in Kashmir and elsewhere before, but rarely has the violence taken on such an explicitly religious character, with victims singled out based on their faith. Since 2019, when the Indian government revoked Article 370, Kashmir has experienced relative peace and stability. The tourism industry generates nearly $2.5 billion in economic activity, a powerful symbol of Kashmir’s reintegration into the Indian mainstream. Just a week before the attack, members of this writer’s own extended family had visited the Baisaran meadow, a popular destination for ziplining, riding ponies, and enjoying the region’s natural beauty.
The footage of grieving widows—one of them newly married and on her honeymoon—has left no room for illusions about peace with Pakistan in the Indian heart. This attack will affect Kashmir’s fragile progress; tourism has already plummeted at the beginning of the season. The clash between India and Pakistan is ongoing, a conflict many Indians had hoped was a thing of the past. That hope, too, now lies in ruins.
Pakistan’s reliance on jihadist groups is the inevitable outcome of a state built on religious nationalism, praetorianism, and anti-pluralism. Central to this vision is the belief that Pakistan, not India, is the rightful inheritor of Islamic sovereignty on the subcontinent. Secular and pluralistic India is a historical aberration—an illegitimate successor to a past dominated by Muslim empires. This revisionist posture is anchored by its obsession with taking Kashmir, which is fetishized as the unfulfilled promise of the partition. That fixation has made Islamic terrorism a deliberate instrument of Pakistani statecraft.
Pakistan’s creation is the result of a complex interplay of historical factors: the long decline of Muslim political power in India, British divide-and-rule strategies, and the emergence of the “theory of distance,” which advocated for Muslim separation from the Hindu majority. The call for cultural and political autonomy by Islamic scholars transformed into a demand for a separate nation. It was fueled by fears of Hindu domination and nostalgia for the days when Islam dominated the subcontinent. Under Jinnah’s leadership, the Muslim League advanced the Two-Nation Theory, arguing that Hindus and Muslims were not just different communities, but separate nations. The movement culminated in the 1947 Partition of British India and the creation of Pakistan as a homeland for Muslims.
By the time Jinnah died in 1948, the nation was already undergoing sectarian unrest. The arrival of six million Muslim refugees from India overwhelmed the government of West Pakistan, which became preoccupied with their resettlement and welfare. The newly formed government and bureaucracy were quickly captured by entrenched interests, as powerful landlords in Punjab and Sindh refused to accommodate the Mohajirs—the Urdu-speaking migrants who had fled India during Partition. Fearing the demographic and political dominance of Bengali-speaking East Pakistan—home to the majority of the country’s population—the Urdu-speaking Punjabi elite of West Pakistan engineered a reorganization, merging the provinces of West Pakistan into a single administrative entity to counterbalance the East’s electoral weight. The first use of martial law in the country’s history came in 1953, when Sunni clerics incited riots in Lahore demanding that the Ahmadis—a minority sect that believes in a prophet after Muhammad—be declared non-Muslim and removed from key civic positions and public life.
Lacking a plural or secular foundation from the start, Pakistan became a state dominated by its military. The Army emerged as the most powerful institution, positioning itself as the guardian of national ideology and territorial integrity. This praetorianism, reinforced by the deep state apparatus of its Punjabi elite, continues to pull the political strings behind a façade of civilian governance. As Voltaire once said of Prussia, Pakistan is “an army with a state.”
After seizing power in a military coup in 1977, General Zia-ul-Haq set about reshaping Pakistan’s institutions to reflect a rigid vision of Islamic governance. He introduced Islamic laws into the legal and education system and promoted Islamism in the bureaucracy and the military. Zia’s rule entrenched Pakistan’s Islamization, transforming it into a state where national policy and identity were determined by hardline Sunni orthodoxy. Backed by Saudi money and legitimized by the Cold War, his regime fused religion with state power, embedding sectarianism, blasphemy laws, and madrasa networks deep into Pakistan’s political and military establishment.
This Islamization extended into the narratives about Pakistan’s history, which does not start at 1947. Pakistani history books glorify Islamic invaders of the Indian subcontinent, portrayed as ghāzīs—holy warriors fighting to establish Islam. This reinforces Pakistan’s self-image as a state formed out of resistance to Hindu-majority India. The country’s nuclear-capable missiles are named after figures like Babur and Ghori, invaders of India transformed into symbols of Islamic conquest. By projecting its founding ideology backward into history, Pakistan seeks legitimacy through the illusion of an unbroken legacy of Islamic rule. Hardline Pakistanis will often proclaim that “we ruled you for 800 years” to assert religious superiority over Indians.
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 provided Pakistan with an international patronage network that facilitated the use of proxy groups. Under the guise of jihad against communism, Pakistan’s military and security organ, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI), backed by American and Saudi funding, began cultivating a vast ecosystem of Islamist militants. It was within this ecosystem that groups like the Afghan Taliban, LeT, and Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) were born: nurtured in Saudi-funded madrasas, trained with ISI support, and shaped by a vision of a pan-Islamic movement across the subcontinent.
The use of terror proxies gave Pakistan leverage over Afghanistan and India without risking a direct military confrontation. As the Soviet–Afghan war drew to a close, Pakistan redirected its hardened jihadi infrastructure toward India, channeling weapons, fighters, and separatists into Kashmir. It also pursued the covert development of a nuclear weapon, thanks to its connections in the West. Pakistan’s 1998 declaration as an atomic power emboldened it to intensify destabilization efforts in India, confident that its nuclear umbrella would deter any full-scale military response. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, Pakistan-backed terrorist groups carried out a series of high-profile terrorist attacks across India, including the 1993 Mumbai bomb blasts, the 1999 Air India hijacking, the 2001 Indian Parliament attack, and the devastating 2008 Mumbai attacks.
India responded cautiously, limiting itself to diplomatic condemnation, compiling intelligence dossiers, and restraining its military from cross-border action. Whether due to fears of nuclear escalation, economic vulnerability, or a non-belligerent culture, successive Indian governments failed to impose meaningful costs on Pakistan. Time after time, India returned to the negotiation table in the hopes of resolving the Kashmir issue, reinforcing Islamabad’s belief that terrorism would be a consequence-free tool of foreign policy.
One of the more tragic consequences of Pakistan’s support for Islamist militancy in Kashmir was the mass exodus of the Kashmiri Pandit community. In the early 1990s, Pakistan-backed insurgent groups conducted a campaign of targeted assassinations and public intimidation aimed at the minority Hindu population in the Kashmir valley. Nearly the entire Kashmiri Pandit community—over 100,000 people—was driven from their ancestral homeland in a matter of months, many of them fleeing with little more than the clothes on their backs. This ethnic cleansing, rarely acknowledged in global discourse, epitomizes the sectarian logic of Pakistan’s statecraft: a vision of Kashmir as an exclusively Islamic space, achieved through fear, violence, and demographic erasure.
Pakistan continues to harbor Islamist militant groups such as LeT and JeM, responsible for countless attacks across Jammu and Kashmir. These groups target Indian security forces and work to radicalize segments of the local population, keeping the region in a constant state of chaos. Beyond Kashmir, Pakistan has sought to foment unrest in other parts of India as well, such as backing the Khalistan separatist movement in Punjab. At the diplomatic level, Islamabad repeatedly calls for a so-called “Kashmir referendum,” attempting to frame the conflict as a matter of self-determination while downplaying its long record of sponsoring cross-border terrorism. These efforts are part of Pakistan’s broader strategy: sustain permanent instability in India’s border regions, internationalize the Kashmir issue, and project itself as the guardian of India’s Muslims.
LeT stands out among Pakistan’s terrorist groups for its unwavering loyalty to the Pakistani state. LeT maintains a tightly knit, hierarchical structure with leadership roles often occupied by founder Hafiz Saeed’s relatives for stability and control. Unlike other groups plagued by infighting or targeted killings, LeT’s longevity is a product of both internal discipline and the protection provided by the ISI. It operates as a strategic proxy, channeling jihad outward toward India and Kashmir, while avoiding attacks within Pakistan. Through front organizations like Jamaat-ud-Dawa, LeT raises millions under the guise of charity and respectability. Its founder, Saeed—the mastermind of the 2008 Mumbai attacks—is treated like a celebrity in Pakistan. Although technically imprisoned, he is essentially under house arrest, remains politically active, and is routinely released to campaign under the ISI’s watchful protection.
This carefully managed relationship reflects the balancing act of Pakistan’s post-9/11 strategy: suppress militants who turn rogue, and shield those who remain loyal. Under U.S. pressure to take action against Al Qaeda and Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), Pakistan continued to protect its “good terrorists”—groups like LeT and JeM. Other militant groups that were nurtured initially for external operations turned on Pakistan after General Pervez Musharraf aligned Pakistan with the United States during the War on Terror.
The blowback was devastating. The TTP unleashed a violent insurgency inside Pakistan. They targeted the military and civilians, launching attacks such as the assault on Army General Headquarters (GHQ) in Rawalpindi in 2009 and the massacre at the Army Public School in Peshawar in 2014. The forces once cultivated to expand Pakistan’s strategic depth mutated into an existential threat to the state itself. Cleverly, Pakistan exploits this blowback to present itself as a victim of terrorism, deflecting international scrutiny while hiding the fact that it helped nurture the very groups that later turned against it.
LeT survived because it never broke ranks with the Pakistani deep state. Unlike groups that declared war on Pakistan, LeT rejects the excommunication (takfir) of fellow Muslims and avoids attacking domestic institutions. Within Pakistan, it focuses on dawah—preaching and proselytizing among Hindus, Christians, and Shias, promoting Sunni unity, and steering clear of intra-Muslim violence. Outside Pakistan, it targets religious minorities and civilians with calculated savagery. LeT literature casts Pakistan as Islam’s final stronghold—the world’s only Islamic nuclear power and a bulwark of Muslim identity. Its rhetoric echoes Munir, who frames Pakistan’s role in similar manichaean terms. Its self-restraint makes LeT a stabilizing domestic force in Pakistan’s militant ecosystem, allowing the Pakistani military to maintain domestic control while projecting jihad outward.
The 2019 conflict between Pakistan and India marked a turning point for Modi’s government, which abandoned any remaining hopes of engagement with Pakistan. In the summer 2019 session of Parliament, Modi’s administration revoked Jammu and Kashmir’s special status under Article 370 and formally withdrew Pakistan’s Most Favored Nation (MFN) trading privileges. Pakistan protested loudly, but found little international sympathy. The era of globalizing the Kashmir dispute had come to an end. For most countries, Kashmir is an internal matter for India, not an international crisis. Indian prime ministerial visits abroad no longer trigger diplomatic pressure or media campaigns tying Kashmir and Pakistan to India’s foreign relations. India is forging a new relationship with the world, one defined on its own terms, not through the lens of its rivalry with Pakistan.
The 2025 conflict has only reaffirmed India’s strategy since 2019: no more Queensbury rules. This time India struck 11 Pakistani air bases and multiple terrorist camps, signaling a willingness to call Pakistan’s nuclear bluff and impose costs for cross-border terrorism. The war has halted with a ceasefire—with President Donald Trump taking credit for brokering peace and floating the idea of “solving Kashmir”—but the fundamentals remain unchanged. The world still treats Kashmir as a bilateral, not an international crisis. Moreover, more confident than ever, India has shown that it will not be coerced by global opinion or Pakistani provocations. Its economic and strategic position continues to rise. India’s economy is now 11 times larger than Pakistan’s and is projected to become the world’s fourth largest. With deepening economic and defense ties to the United States, India is viewed as a reliable international partner and a bulwark against China. It is this growing asymmetry that drove Pakistan to attempt to internationalize the Kashmir dispute in 2025, fearful of being left behind, and desperate to stabilize its increasingly fragile internal politics.
There are no easy solutions, only manageable ones. Pakistan’s deep state remains intransigent and will continue to pose a threat to international security. There is no credible internal or external pressure sufficient to force Pakistan to abandon its jihadist proxies or revisionist goals. The military’s domination, combined with an elite invested in strategic hostility toward India, ensures that terrorism will remain an instrument of statecraft. Concessions to Pakistan will be interpreted not as opportunities for peace, but as openings for further exploitation.
America and the world must therefore shift from expecting reform to a strategy of isolation and containment, much like the approach taken with North Korea. This means curbing financial support, publicly calling out Pakistan’s duplicity, and hardening regional alliances to deter future provocation. Engagement with Pakistan should be transactional and conditional, focused not on resolving Pakistan’s ideological grievances—but on limiting the fallout from a state that has weaponized instability and nuclear escalation as leverage.
The post What Can the U.S. Do About Pakistan? appeared first on The American Conservative.
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