On January 16, 2024 Iran conducted as series of airstrikes in Pakistan claiming to target a few of Sunni Terrorist organization (Jaish-Ul-Adl).
Pakistani officials claimed to have retaliated by conducting reciprocative airstrikes in Iran on January 18. It got a lot of people including myself confused and were finding it difficult to imagine the fact that a country as weak and dysfunctional as Pakistan could dare to pick up a fight with Iran.
Once Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a two page press release and provided with a few details of their “Operation Marg Bar Sarmachar”, things started to make sense, as to what has happened:
The one noteworthy piece of information in these two pages to pay attention to is “Pakistan Origin Terrorists, calling themselves Sarmachars residing in ungoverned territories in Iran.“
In the Baloch language, “sarmachar” translates to guerrilla. The sarmachars referred to here are militants belonging to the separatist groups Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) and the Balochistan Liberation Front (BLF).
In short, the social media tigers including the Pakistani run twitter handles claim it be to a “retaliation against Iran” but in fact it is just another Pakistan’s attack to crush a rebellion. Pakistan made it extremely clear in its briefing that Iran is a brotherly nation and the attack is on the ”ungoverned territories in Iran” where Pakistani origin people were taking refuge:
This operation once again in Pakistan’s political timeline brings Pakistan’s military to the driving seat. Imran Khan in the last few years had dented Pakistan’s Military to an unimaginable extent and people of Pakistan had started realizing that Military has done more damage to them then anyone else — Armed forces should take orders from the civilian government and not the other way around. With these strikes and the army of social media tigers is succeeding in generating more than enough sympathy towards the Military regime. This would play its part in the upcoming general elections in Pakistan which are due in February this year, if Military does not take over already.
The hypocrisy of the state is exposed by the fact that it did not make any attempt to deny that there are terrorist organizations still working on its soil. If indeed Iran hit the terrorist hideouts, then why the need to retaliate? Is the country insinuating that the terrorists in Pakistan have protection from the state? Pakistan could have used this opportunity to show to the rest of the world that Pakistan has no tolerance for Terrorism.
Quite interestingly Iran is no different, it supports Hezbollah in Lebanon and Houthis in Yemen but it does not like terrorist acting on its own land. This episode in 2024 shows that concept of Good Taliban and Bad Taliban is still very much at play. According the Pakistan, terrorists who target India or Kashmir are freedom fighters but the freedom fighters who fight for Baloch independence are terrorists. Isn’t that true?
Is Operation Marg Bar Sarmachar another fancy name given to an operation like Operation Searchlight? Operation Searchlight was the codename for a planned military operation carried out by the Pakistan Army in an effort to curb the Bengali Nationalist Movement in former East Pakistan in March 1971. The operation also directly precipitated the 1971 Bangladesh genocide, in which between 300,000 and 3,000,000 Bengalis were killed while around 10 million fled to neighboring India as refugees; reportedly around 400,000 women were raped. This later lead to the liberation of what’s today called as Bangladesh.
India is still reeling under the 1971 refugee crisis, be it Assam Accord or NRC or delimitation issue. It does not matter if these two operation have the same modus of operandi and creates a domino effect leading to a similar fate for Balochistan, what matters is if India would be affected this time too?
The only good thing that provides some sense of relief is that India unlike the 70s today has a clever, proactive and a nationalist party at helm who has closed most of the doors that opened towards Pakistan — the once a porous boarder is now sealed, article 370 has been abrogated, the separatists and the Hurriyat thrown out of Kashmir, even sports and art have boundaries now. Even while hosting the Cricket World Cup, visas weren’t issued to Pakistani origin fans.
As a direct or indirect results of these actions, India hasn’t seen any major acts of terror in the last ten years. Not forgetting the bloody years before 2014 going all the way to the partition where every other year if not every year there was a major terror attack on Indian soil claiming hundreds of lives and injuring hundreds more.
Moreover, looking at the way blood is being shed in the name of wars and conflict all over the world and mostly in middle east, India has done exceptionally well especially with a neighbor who has ostensibly failed at controlling home grown terrorism.
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