Now that the competitive anniversary events of our 87-hour skirmish are over we can assess how Pakistan has historically conducted warfare with India. Tactically brilliant and strategically disastrous can be a good headline for it. That’s the reason it has lost every war after beginning strongly, sometimes even spectacularly.
For sure that hasn’t prevented it from claiming victory in most, barring 1971 and Kargil. Let’s assess as much evidence as a mere 1250-word column would permit.The revisionist history of every war or skirmish is a popular subcontinental phenomenon. Just that in Pakistan it’s carried out at industrial scale, school textbooks included.
Take the 87-hour skirmish. All of Pakistan, from the Field Marshal to the subalterns of its politics believes it won this round. That this was followed by Donald Trump’s embrace of the historical ‘stalwart ally’ America had dumped was seen as an endorsement of this self-proclaimed ‘victory’.
The fact is, Munir and his people had planned this earlier. The visit of Steve Witkoff’s son Zach and the crypto deal—through a Pakistani tech whiz kid, Corps Commander’s son-in-law and now crypto czar with a cabinet rank—took place just four days after the Pahalgam massacre and nearly two weeks before Op Sindoor.When he set up Pahalgam Munir knew India would retaliate. He, therefore, planned this incredible move to exploit the Trump family’s greed. Give him full marks for understanding it before most people in the world. Or maybe the Saudis alerted him.He had the Trump ‘system’ in the bag long before any fighting started. And Pahalgam, he had given us an indication a week earlier with his speech to overseas Pakistanis on 16 April, 2025. The killings were his tactics to draw an Indian response. To reopen the Kashmir issue, with Trump sewn up, was his strategic objective. The first worked perfectly, the second failed.
