Pakistan as a Missing Headline

AFTER THE BLOOD RITES INVOLVING some of the most aggrieved as well as aggressive in history, a closure is in sight. The day after peace in Gaza may be fragile and the remains of the hate unforgiving. Still, the battleground has been replaced by the charred earth struggling to rebuild a future. The defeated may not have abandoned the politics of hate for the simple reason that scriptural revenge continues to power Hamas; the idea of Palestine is no longer separable from the inevitability of jihad as the darkest pursuit of justice in our times. The story of closure in Gaza is written by memories of denials and deprivations.

 Ukraine, too, is swinging between hope and fear as closure becomes a possibility. What really stops the indefatigable fighters of an invaded country from accepting the terms of ceasefire is the intention of the invader. In the craft of peace-making, the perceived winner is entitled to more power at the table. On Ukraine, the deal maker in Washington is by nature an appreciator of brute power, not a sentimentalist who stands by the little guy still defending his country, which has already suffered immense personnel and territorial loss. A peace formula, in Putin’s imagination, includes capitulation and humiliation of a badly mangled Ukraine. That Kyiv has not fallen into the Russian trap tacitly approved by Trump is a measure of how deep is a battered little nation’s determination to be alive on its own terms.

What matters now is not the nature of the peace plan itself but the willingness to talk. Putin may be on a mission to reclaim a lost empire through Soviet methods but without communism, which has been replaced by grievance-fuelled nationalism. Ukraine, for him, is a lie born in the aftermath of an imperial meltdown, which was in a way like the benefactors of Hamas seeing Israel as a lie legitimised by a colonial conspiracy. In a convergence of national conservatives’ detachment and Trump’s macho internationalism, Russia’s grievance, no matter how much enemy land it needs to feel good, is more genuine than Ukraine’s victimhood. Both sides have now realised that a conversation about their future cannot be postponed further, and Trump has acknowledged the limits of American power in influencing places like Ukraine where the purpose of nationalism is not to feed paranoia. Peace is now a shared goal despite the setbacks.

The texts of closure are the end note of 2025.

No nation can afford permanent wars, and for a country like Israel, to be alive is to be on permanent alert. When a nation is denied its right to exist, defence is an existential right. Israel and Ukraine are united by, apart from the Jewish diaspora, the urge to defy those who think genocidal rage is the only way to correct what they still believe as errors of history. A belated realisation that such errors could not be corrected by extraterritorial violence is the first sign of peace. Putin’s Russia at the negotiation table means battlefield victories cannot be celebrated forever.

Having said that, the sense of closure is marred by China’s heightened claims over Taiwan and the whiff of a fall in Venezuela, as if we needed a reminder that national sovereignty and international morality are relative terms in places where history is still a dispute. There is still one country that just cannot define itself without the imagery of the looming enemy. Pakistan has normalised hate as national behaviour, and the world doesn’t seem to mind. It may be the case that the story of modern terror, including 9/11, cannot be told without tracing the evolutionary saga of Pakistan as a state born in religious impatience; its institutionalisation of terror as a national necessity doesn’t surprise anyone but the victim. The rise of India only magnifies Pakistan’s failure, the unmaking of a badly imagined idea. It plays out that historical futility by waging stealth war against India. Hate is its only growth industry.

Pakistan is what makes the story of closure a partial success. When others inch towards reconciliation, Islamabad, where a broken civil society is caught between military dictatorship and Islamic radicalism, is killing any chance of peace by playing the sponsor as well as the practitioner of terror with equal ease, all the while bargaining its way to Washington. Pakistan is everything that defines a destabilising state: a kleptocratic military establishment; a subterranean terror machine; a ruling establishment invoking the enemy for national mobilisation; and the rule of fear at home. Pakistan remains beyond the headlines despite all that. Its unravelling is not yet a sufficiently read global story.