Why Pakistan’s denial on Pahalgam has zero credibility

“Not us,” declared Islamabad within hours of the slaughter in Pahalgam, J&K, on April 22, when five gunmen lined up tourists, asked who among them was not Muslim, and executed 26 people. The claim of innocence is familiar theatre. A quickly issued statement of sympathy is followed by an insistence that the killers were freelancing militants for whom Pakistan cannot be held responsible. It ought to convince no one. The historical record shows that Islamabad’s denials of complicity in cross-border terrorism almost always turn out to be at best economical with the truth.Take the bloodiest precedent: Mumbai, 2008. Pakistan first dismissed Indian evidence that the attack had been mounted from its soil. Only when the lone surviving gunman, Ajmal Kasab, began speaking in a Mumbai courtroom did Pakistani authorities grudgingly admit that he hailed from Faridkot in Pakistan’s Punjab. Dawn, the country’s newspaper of record, ran the headline “Ajmal’s nationality confirmed”. Western intelligence later traced funding, training and handlers back to Lashkar-e-Taiba, the same organisation that now hides behind the anodyne moniker ‘The Resistance Front’ or TRF. 120608229 120608255 medium nocaption120619844Not so 'dumb' charadeEven Pakistan’s civilian leaders have wearied of the charade. In 2018, Nawaz Sharif, a three-time prime minister, asked in exasperation why his country “allows non-state actors to cross the border and kill 150 people in Mumbai”. The establishment’s response was to hound him for “treason”. His outburst, recorded by Dawn, was remarkable not for what it revealed, but for confirming publicly what diplomats hear privately in Islamabad: the state sees terrorism as a lever of policy, then pleads impotence when the lever snaps.Military leaders have been still slower to confess. During the Kargil war of 1999, Pakistan swore blind that the fighters dug into Himalayan ridges were Kashmiri “freedom-seekers”. Last September, General Asim Munir, the current army chief, finally admitted what India, America and Pakistan’s own widows already knew — that the Kargil operation was “planned and executed” by the Pakistani army.Then there is the most notorious harbouring of all. For years Pakistan’s generals insisted they had no idea where Osama bin Laden was hiding. When US Navy SEALs found the al-Qaeda leader in a safe house a short stroll from Pakistan’s premier military academy at Abbottabad, the world drew its own conclusions. medium120605427Denial extends beyond today’s conflicts. Islamabad still resists calling the 1971 bloodbath in East Pakistan a genocide, despite reams of archival and scholarly evidence. A recent peer-reviewed study notes that official narratives continue to downplay the massacre of Bengalis as mere “excesses”. The habit of refusing uncomfortable facts is, in short, a constant.Pak must prove, not proclaimWhat, then, of Pahalgam? The attack was claimed by TRF, Lashkar in all but name. Indian intercepts trace weapons and handlers to the usual camps across the Line of Control. Pakistan, predictably, shrugs. Yet past form leaves its protestations bereft of credibility. When every chapter of the recent past — from Mumbai to Kargil, from Abbottabad to Dhaka — has exposed the same pattern of denial followed by reluctant admission, the rational observer assigns Islamabad’s latest disclaimer a probability approaching zero.If Pakistan wants its pleas of victimhood to be taken seriously, it must prove, not proclaim, that it has dismantled the jihadist infrastructure it once mid-wifed. That requires transparent trials, visible shutdowns of training camps and the public prosecution of handlers — not cosmetic bans and new letterhead organisations. Until then, the world, and especially India, can be forgiven for regarding each Pakistani denial as just another exercise in snake-handling.