Pakistan’s counter-narrative on the targeted killings of India’s most-wanted terrorists on its soil has shifted four times in four years, from denial that the killings mattered, to attribution to internal feuds, to formal allegations against India’s Research and Analysis Wing with claimed credible evidence, to weaponizing those allegations for international sympathy, and each shift tracked Pakistan’s diminishing ability to pretend the killings were not happening.

Islamabad’s evolving response to the shadow war campaign is itself a case study in how states manage narratives when reality contradicts their preferred version of events. Pakistan spent decades denying that designated terrorists lived on its territory. When those same designated terrorists began turning up dead, shot by unknown gunmen in Karachi, Lahore, Sialkot, and Rawalpindi, Pakistan faced a problem no public relations strategy could solve: acknowledging the killings meant acknowledging the targets, and acknowledging the targets meant admitting the very safe haven infrastructure that Pakistan had spent decades denying. The counter-narrative that emerged was not a single coherent story but a sequence of improvised positions, each abandoned when events on the ground made it untenable. Husain Haqqani, the former Pakistani ambassador to the United States and author of a searing critique of Pakistan’s strategic communication patterns, has long argued that Islamabad’s foreign policy narratives are reactive rather than proactive, constructed to manage the immediate crisis rather than to advance a consistent position. The targeted killings exposed this tendency with unusual clarity.

Anatol Lieven, whose fieldwork across Pakistan produced one of the most granular accounts of the Pakistani state’s internal mechanics, observed that Pakistan’s narrative management relies on compartmentalization: different state institutions tell different stories to different audiences, and the contradictions are managed rather than resolved. The killing campaign tested that compartmentalization to its limits. The ISI, the military’s media wing ISPR, the Foreign Office, and the civilian government each produced narratives that overlapped in some places and contradicted each other in others. The result was not a counter-narrative but a counter-narrative ecosystem, a shifting collection of positions that revealed more about Pakistan’s institutional dynamics than about the killings themselves.

The Silence That Spoke Volumes

The first phase of Pakistan’s response was no response at all. When Zahoor Mistry, an accused hijacker of Indian Airlines Flight IC-814, was shot dead in Karachi in January 2022, Pakistani authorities treated the killing as a routine criminal matter. Karachi police registered an FIR against unknown assailants, the standard procedural response to any unsolved shooting in a city that recorded thousands of homicides annually. No government spokesperson connected the killing to any broader pattern. No press conference was held. No diplomatic note was issued.

This silence was deliberate, not accidental. Acknowledging that Zahoor Mistry had been living in Karachi would have confirmed what India had long alleged: that Pakistan provided sanctuary to designated terrorists. Mistry had been released as part of the IC-814 hijacking deal in December 1999, the same deal that freed Masood Azhar, the founder of Jaish-e-Mohammed. India had spent two decades demanding accountability for all three released terrorists. For Pakistan to now acknowledge that one of them had been living quietly in Karachi, operating under an assumed identity, and had been assassinated, would have validated India’s most persistent complaint. The political cost of that acknowledgment, at a moment when Pakistan was already navigating severe economic pressures and internal political instability, was deemed higher than the cost of maintaining silence about a killing that most Pakistani citizens would never learn about through domestic media.

The institutional calculation behind the silence was reinforced by a strategic assessment within the ISI. Senior ISI officials reportedly evaluated the Mistry killing as a possible isolated incident, perhaps the work of criminal elements settling a personal score, or perhaps a one-time Indian operation that would not be repeated. This assessment proved spectacularly wrong, but in early 2022 it was not unreasonable. Pakistan had never previously faced a sustained campaign of targeted killings against its protected assets. Historical Indian operations against Pakistan-based terrorists had been limited to occasional cross-border raids along the Line of Control, not to systematic assassinations in Pakistani urban centers. The ISI’s initial assessment reflected an institutional framework calibrated for historical patterns rather than for the doctrinal shift that was underway.

The silence extended through several subsequent killings in the first half of 2022. Saleem Rehmani, wanted by India as a Lashkar-e-Taiba operative linked to attacks in Kashmir, was shot dead in Pakistan-administered Kashmir in January 2022. Again, local police registered routine FIRs. Again, no Pakistani government official connected the killing to any pattern. Pakistani media, where national security reporting is filtered through military censorship norms, covered these as local crime stories rather than as events with national-security implications.

What made the silence unsustainable was arithmetic. By mid-2023, the body count had crossed a threshold that no amount of routine policing language could contain. At least eight individuals connected to Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed, Hizbul Mujahideen, and the Khalistan movement had been killed by unknown assailants across multiple Pakistani cities. Indian media had begun reporting each killing with barely concealed satisfaction, naming the targets, listing their organizational affiliations, and cataloguing their connections to attacks on Indian soil. Pakistani journalists began asking questions that their government could not answer without admitting uncomfortable truths.

The silence phase revealed a fundamental miscalculation. Pakistan assumed the killings would remain isolated events, each deniable on its own terms. What Pakistan failed to anticipate was that the pattern would become the story. Individual killings could be dismissed as criminal violence. A pattern of killings targeting India’s most-wanted, across multiple cities, using a consistent modus operandi of motorcycle-borne assailants, could not be dismissed without inviting ridicule. The ISI, which tracks every foreign intelligence operation on Pakistani soil with obsessive precision, knew the significance of the pattern long before the Foreign Office was prepared to discuss it publicly. This gap between institutional knowledge and public posture would define every subsequent phase of Pakistan’s response.

The killing of Paramjit Singh Panjwar in Lahore in May 2023 pushed the denial to its breaking point. Panjwar, the chief of the Khalistan Commando Force, had been designated an individual terrorist by India. He had lived openly in Lahore for decades, protected by the ISI as an asset against India’s Punjab. His assassination in broad daylight, by gunmen who escaped on motorcycles through Lahore’s congested streets, was covered extensively by both Pakistani and Indian media. For the first time, Pakistani security officials began speaking to journalists on background, acknowledging privately what they could not yet say publicly: that a hostile intelligence agency was operating on Pakistani soil with alarming impunity.

The Panjwar killing had a specific significance that distinguished it from earlier assassinations. Panjwar was a Sikh, not a Kashmiri, and his organizational affiliation was with the Khalistan movement rather than with the Kashmir-focused groups that had been the campaign’s previous targets. His killing expanded the targeting pattern from a Kashmir-centric campaign to one that encompassed every category of India-designated terrorism, regardless of organizational affiliation, ethnic identity, or geographic origin. This expansion made the internal-feuds theory even more implausible, because Khalistan organizations had no significant feuds with Lashkar-e-Taiba or Jaish-e-Mohammed, and no mechanism existed through which a Kashmiri jihadi group would target a Sikh separatist leader in Lahore. The cross-organizational nature of the targeting pointed unmistakably toward a state actor whose enemy list crossed organizational boundaries, precisely as India’s designated-terrorist lists crossed them.

The silence phase also revealed a secondary institutional dynamic: the tension between Pakistan’s civilian government and its military establishment over how to handle the emerging crisis. The civilian government, led by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif following the disputed February 2024 elections, had limited capacity to drive national security narratives. The military establishment, which controlled the ISI and dominated national security decision-making, preferred silence because any public acknowledgment of the killings would invite scrutiny of the safe-haven infrastructure that the military had built and maintained. Civilian ministers who attempted to raise the issue in cabinet meetings were reportedly told that the matter was being “handled” through intelligence channels, a formula that effectively removed it from political debate while the body count continued to rise.

The institutional preference for silence was reinforced by a calculation about Pakistan’s international standing. Pakistan was, during this period, navigating its relationship with the Financial Action Task Force, which had placed the country on its grey list partly because of the state’s tolerance for designated terrorist organizations. Publicly acknowledging that designated terrorists were being killed on Pakistani soil would have validated the FATF’s concerns and potentially deepened Pakistan’s financial isolation. The silence, from this perspective, was not merely an intelligence strategy but a financial survival tactic: Pakistan could not afford to confirm what the FATF had been alleging.

When Denial Became Untenable

The second phase began in mid-2023, when Pakistan’s security establishment shifted from silence to an alternative explanation: internal feuds. Rather than attributing the killings to Indian intelligence, Pakistani officials floated the theory that the targets were being killed by rival factions within their own organizations, by criminal gangs settling scores, or by the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan pursuing its own vendettas. This was the internal-feuds narrative, and it had the advantage of preserving Pakistan’s core claim that no foreign intelligence agency was operating freely on its soil.

The ISI promoted this narrative through its preferred media channels. Certain Pakistani journalists, known to serve as conduits for military intelligence assessments, published analyses suggesting that the killings reflected the fragmentation of jihadi organizations that had lost state patronage. Lashkar-e-Taiba operatives were being killed by Jaish-e-Mohammed elements, the theory suggested. Khalistan figures were being targeted by Baloch separatists. The criminal underworld of Karachi was consuming its own.

The internal-feuds theory had a specific appeal for Pakistan’s military establishment. It avoided the admission that Indian intelligence had penetrated Pakistani cities, an admission that would have raised devastating questions about the ISI’s own competence. If RAW could identify, locate, surveil, and eliminate designated terrorists living in Lahore, Karachi, and Sialkot, what did that say about the ISI’s ability to protect its own assets? The internal-feuds narrative deflected this question entirely by removing India from the equation.

The problem was that the evidence did not support the theory. The targets shared one characteristic that no internal-feud explanation could account for: every single one was wanted by India. Zahoor Mistry was wanted for the IC-814 hijacking. Shahid Latif was wanted for the Pathankot airbase attack. Paramjit Singh Panjwar was designated by India as an individual terrorist. The targets came from different organizations (Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed, Khalistan Commando Force, Hizbul Mujahideen), operated in different cities (Karachi, Lahore, Sialkot, Rawalpindi), and had no known inter-organizational feuds that could explain their sequential elimination. The internal-feud theory required believing that four separate organizations, in four separate cities, had simultaneously decided to eliminate their own members, and that each of those members happened to appear on India’s most-wanted lists. The coincidence was too precise to be coincidental.

Pakistani analysts who examined the pattern independently reached conclusions that contradicted the official line. The consistent modus operandi across killings, motorcycle-borne assailants, close-range gunfire at predictable locations (outside mosques after Friday prayers, during morning walks, at known shops and residences), and clean escapes suggested professional planning, not freelance score-settling. Internal feuds produce messy killings: drive-by shootings that miss their targets, bombings that kill bystanders, bodies dumped in vacant lots. These killings were precise, targeted, and operationally consistent in ways that pointed to a single coordinating intelligence architecture.

The internal-feuds phase lasted roughly from mid-2023 through late 2023, and it collapsed under the weight of the Shahid Latif killing. Latif, the alleged mastermind of the Pathankot airbase attack that killed seven Indian security personnel in January 2016, was shot dead outside a mosque in Sialkot on October 11, 2023. Latif was not a peripheral figure whose death could be attributed to criminal rivalries. He was one of the most wanted individuals on India’s counter-terrorism target list, a figure whose elimination India had publicly sought for seven years. When Indian media reported the killing within hours, naming Latif, detailing his Pathankot connection, and framing the assassination as the culmination of a seven-year hunt, the internal-feuds theory became unsustainable. No internal feud within Jaish-e-Mohammed would result in the killing of the organization’s most prominent operational commander at the precise moment when Indian media was prepared to celebrate his death.

The speed with which Indian media identified and contextualized the Latif killing was itself evidence that undermined the internal-feuds narrative. Within hours of the shooting, Indian television channels were broadcasting Latif’s photograph, his NIA charge sheet number, his connection to the Pathankot attack, and interviews with Indian security officials who expressed satisfaction that “justice had been served.” This instantaneous response suggested foreknowledge: either Indian media had been pre-positioned to report the killing, or India’s intelligence infrastructure had the capacity to verify a target’s identity and disseminate the information to media outlets within hours of execution. Under the internal-feuds theory, Indian media would have learned about the killing from Pakistani news reports, which would have created a time lag. The absence of that lag pointed toward Indian involvement in the kill chain or, at minimum, Indian intelligence awareness of the operation before it occurred.

The Latif killing also exposed the geographic dimension of Pakistan’s narrative failure. Sialkot is not Karachi, where criminal violence is endemic and individual killings can plausibly be attributed to gang warfare. Sialkot is a Punjab garrison city with a significant military presence and relatively low rates of violent crime. A professional assassination outside a mosque in Sialkot required surveillance, planning, and local assets that exceeded the capabilities of criminal gangs or feuding jihadi factions. Pakistani security analysts who examined the operation noted that the attackers demonstrated knowledge of Latif’s daily schedule, his Friday prayer habits, and the security configuration around the mosque, intelligence that could only have been acquired through weeks of physical surveillance by operatives who blended into the city’s landscape.

Muhammad Riaz, killed in Pakistan-administered Kashmir in September 2023, had already strained the internal-feuds narrative. Riaz was identified by Indian outlets as a senior Lashkar-e-Taiba commander linked to operations in Kashmir. His killing in Rawalakot, deep inside Pakistan-administered territory, extended the geographic reach of the campaign into areas where the Pakistan Army maintained direct control. The combination of Riaz and Latif, killed within weeks of each other in different provinces, forced Pakistani security officials to acknowledge, at least internally, that they were facing a coordinated campaign.

The collapse of the internal-feuds theory had consequences beyond narrative management. As long as Pakistan could attribute the killings to internal rivalries, the ISI’s reputation remained intact; after all, criminal feuds among jihadis were outside the ISI’s responsibility to prevent. Once Pakistan acknowledged that a foreign intelligence agency was responsible, the ISI’s failure to detect and prevent the operations became the central question. Senior military officers reportedly demanded accountability from ISI leadership for the intelligence failure, and several changes in the ISI’s internal counter-intelligence structure were implemented during late 2023, including enhanced surveillance of suspected foreign intelligence meeting points in Islamabad, Karachi, and Lahore. These internal reforms received no public acknowledgment, because acknowledging them would have confirmed the very failure Pakistan was trying to manage.

The January 2024 Pivot

The third phase represented a 180-degree reversal. On January 25, 2024, Pakistan’s Foreign Secretary Muhammad Syrus Sajjad Qazi convened a press conference in Islamabad and formally accused India of conducting “extra-territorial and extra-judicial killings” on Pakistani soil. Qazi described the assassinations as part of a “sophisticated and sinister” Indian campaign involving hired killers, intermediaries based in third countries, and financial networks spanning multiple jurisdictions.

The press conference was choreographed with a specificity that previous Pakistani statements had lacked. Qazi named two specific killings: the assassination of Shahid Latif in Sialkot and Muhammad Riaz in Rawalakot. He presented passport details of two individuals he identified as Indian agents, Yogesh Kumar and Ashok Kumar, who he alleged had orchestrated the killings from a third country. He described a kill chain involving recruitment through social media and fake Daesh accounts, the use of “talent spotters” to identify potential assassins, the funneling of payments through informal banking networks, and the deployment of separate, compartmentalized teams for surveillance, execution, and financial settlement.

The specificity was notable because it contrasted sharply with Pakistan’s previous vagueness. During the silence phase, Pakistan had said nothing. During the internal-feuds phase, Pakistan had offered alternative explanations without evidence. Now Pakistan was naming names, presenting passport photographs, and describing an operational methodology that tracked closely with how intelligence agencies actually conduct denied operations. Qazi claimed Pakistan possessed “documentary, financial, and forensic evidence” linking the named Indian agents to the killings.

The timing of the pivot was not accidental. Three factors converged to make January 2024 the moment when silence became untenable and formal accusation became the preferred strategy.

First, the body count had reached a level that Pakistan’s security establishment could no longer ignore without losing credibility with its own public. By January 2024, at least a dozen individuals connected to India’s most-wanted lists had been killed. Pakistani media, despite the constraints on national-security reporting, had begun connecting the killings into a narrative pattern. Social media, which operates outside the ISI’s traditional media management infrastructure, was filled with speculation and accusation that the establishment could not suppress.

Second, the United States and Canada had, by this point, leveled their own allegations against India regarding assassination plots on their soil. The November 2023 US federal indictment of Nikhil Gupta, an Indian gunrunner accused of plotting to assassinate Khalistan separatist Gurpatwant Singh Pannun in New York, and Canada’s allegations regarding the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Surrey, provided Pakistan with an international framework into which it could insert its own complaints. Pakistan was no longer a lone accuser. It could position itself alongside Western democracies who were raising similar concerns about Indian extraterritorial operations.

Third, Pakistan needed a diplomatic card. The India-Pakistan relationship had deteriorated to its worst point in decades, with trade suspended, diplomatic representation reduced, and the Kashmir dispute frozen in a post-Article 370 reality that Pakistan could not reverse. Formal allegations of Indian assassination operations on Pakistani soil provided leverage, a grievance that could be internationalized, presented at multilateral forums, and used to generate diplomatic sympathy.

Qazi’s press conference revealed as much about Pakistan’s vulnerabilities as about India’s alleged operations. By formally accusing RAW, Pakistan implicitly acknowledged what it had denied for decades: that designated terrorists lived on its soil. Qazi referred to the targets as “Pakistani nationals” and “citizens,” carefully avoiding any reference to their organizational affiliations or India’s designation of them as terrorists. He did not mention that Shahid Latif was accused of masterminding the Pathankot attack. He did not note that Muhammad Riaz was identified by India as a senior Lashkar-e-Taiba operative. This selective framing was essential to the narrative: Pakistan could present the killings as violations of Pakistani sovereignty only if it treated the victims as ordinary citizens rather than as the terrorists India alleged them to be.

India’s response was swift and contemptuous. The Ministry of External Affairs described Pakistan’s allegations as “peddling false propaganda” and stated that Pakistan would “reap what it sows.” The MEA’s statement noted that “Pakistan has long been the epicentre of terrorism, organised crime, and illegal transnational activities,” and that “India and many other countries have publicly warned Pakistan that it would be consumed by its own culture of terror and violence.” The response did not address the specific allegations, did not acknowledge or deny the existence of the named Indian agents, and did not engage with the evidence Qazi claimed to possess. India’s strategy was to dismiss the allegations categorically rather than to contest them point by point, a classic deniability posture that left the factual claims unrefuted while rejecting the narrative framework entirely.

The January 2024 pivot was significant not because Pakistan’s evidence was compelling, but because it marked the moment when Pakistan’s counter-narrative crystallized from improvised reactions into a deliberate strategy. From this point forward, Pakistan would consistently present itself as the victim of Indian aggression, would frame the killings as violations of international law, and would seek to build an international coalition of support by linking its allegations to those made by the United States and Canada.

The pivot also required a recalibration of Pakistan’s domestic media strategy. During the silence and internal-feuds phases, Pakistani media coverage of the killings had been fragmented and inconsistent, with individual outlets reporting each killing as an isolated event without connecting them to any broader pattern. After the January 2024 press conference, the security establishment issued informal guidance to major Pakistani media outlets, directing them to frame the killings consistently as Indian aggression against Pakistani sovereignty. Dawn, The Express Tribune, Geo News, and ARY News shifted their coverage to align with the official narrative, using language like “Indian state terrorism” and “extraterritorial assassinations” that mirrored the Foreign Secretary’s framing. Social media management also intensified, with pro-establishment accounts amplifying the press conference’s key claims and attacking Indian counter-narratives.

The diplomatic groundwork for the pivot had been laid months before the press conference. Pakistani diplomatic missions in Washington, London, Brussels, and Geneva had been instructed to raise the killing pattern in bilateral meetings and at multilateral forums. Pakistan’s permanent representative to the United Nations had referenced the killings in general debates. The January 2024 press conference was not a spontaneous reaction but a coordinated diplomatic offensive, timed to maximize media impact by following the US federal indictment of Nikhil Gupta (November 2023) and preceding the expected publication of investigative reports by Western media outlets.

The careful choreography of the pivot extended to Pakistan’s choice of evidence to present. Qazi focused on the Latif and Riaz cases specifically because these were the cases where Pakistani investigators had developed the most detailed evidentiary chains, including arrested suspects, confessional statements, financial records, and identified handlers. Other killings, where the evidentiary basis was thinner, were referenced obliquely as “cases at various stages of investigation” rather than presented with specifics that might be challenged. This selective disclosure was a deliberate strategy: presenting strong cases in detail while alluding to additional cases without specifics allowed Pakistan to project an image of a comprehensive evidentiary dossier without exposing weaker elements to scrutiny.

The International Amplification Campaign

The fourth phase began in April 2024, when The Guardian published an investigation that gave Pakistan’s allegations their most prominent international platform to date. The Guardian’s report, based on unnamed intelligence operatives from both India and Pakistan, described RAW as having conducted at least twenty killings inside Pakistan since 2020. The investigation detailed operational methods, named Dubai as a coordination hub, and described how Indian handlers recruited local Pakistani criminals and Afghan nationals to carry out the assassinations.

Pakistan’s Foreign Office immediately seized upon the report as validation. Where Pakistan’s own press conferences had struggled to gain traction with international media, The Guardian’s investigation, published by a respected British newspaper with a global readership, provided instant credibility. Pakistani government officials and diplomatic representatives cited the investigation in every international forum available to them. The investigation that Pakistan had hoped for had arrived, and Pakistan leveraged it with the urgency of a state that had been waiting for exactly this kind of external confirmation.

The Guardian report was followed in December 2024 by a Washington Post investigation that examined six specific killings in Pakistan, providing even greater operational detail. The Post described RAW’s use of Dubai-based intermediaries, the recruitment of Pakistani petty criminals and Afghan hired guns, the use of compartmentalized teams for surveillance, execution, and payment, and the similarities between the Pakistan operations and the alleged plots in North America. The Post also revealed that ISI Director General Nadeem Anjum had raised concerns about Indian assassinations with CIA Director William Burns as early as 2022, well before the US and Canadian allegations became public.

Pakistan exploited both investigations to maximum diplomatic effect. The Foreign Office spokesperson Mumtaz Zahra Baloch issued statements connecting the newspaper reports to Pakistan’s January 2024 allegations, presenting the international investigations as confirmation of what Pakistan had been saying all along. Pakistani diplomats at the United Nations and other international bodies referenced the reports as evidence that India posed a threat to international norms, and that the global community needed to hold India accountable.

The international amplification phase also included a new element: arrests. In August 2025, the Sindh Counter Terrorism Department announced the arrest of six suspects in connection with the killing of Abdul Rehman (alias Razaullah Nizamani) in Matli, Sindh, in May 2025. The CTD’s Additional Inspector General Azad Khan held a press conference describing the killing as orchestrated by RAW, naming a handler called “Kumar,” and presenting financial transaction records, travel histories, and phone records as evidence. Khan described the operation as part of India’s “cowardly retaliation” following the May 2025 military confrontation. The arrest represented an escalation in Pakistan’s evidentiary claims: for the first time, Pakistan claimed to have captured the actual “hit team” rather than just peripheral facilitators.

The Sindh CTD’s presentation was notable for its detail. Khan described how the prime suspect, identified only as Salman, arrived in Karachi on May 12, 2025, checked into a hotel in Hyderabad with four accomplices, surveilled the target in Matli for five days, executed the killing on May 18, and then fled to a Gulf country before transiting to Nepal. The CTD claimed to have recovered the pistols used in the killing, the motorcycle, and mobile phones from the arrested suspects. Khan described the financial trail as flowing from RAW through banks and multiple channels to the operational team.

Pakistan’s willingness to present this level of operational detail, at a public press conference rather than through diplomatic channels alone, reflected a calculated decision: the international amplification strategy required evidence that could be reported by global media, not just claims that could be dismissed as diplomatic posturing. The Sindh CTD press conference was designed to provide that reportable evidence.

The international amplification campaign also positioned Pakistan alongside the United States and Canada in a tripartite framework of accusations against India. Pakistan’s argument, which found resonance in some international commentary, was that the killings in Pakistan, the Nijjar assassination in Canada, and the Pannun plot in the United States represented different theaters of the same Indian program, and that the program reflected a fundamental shift in India’s approach to projecting power beyond its borders. The East Asia Forum published analysis describing India as “playing with Pakistan’s poisoned playbook,” a framing that served Pakistan’s narrative interests by suggesting that India was adopting the very tactics that the international community had long condemned when employed by Pakistan itself.

The tripartite framing, linking Pakistan’s allegations with the US and Canadian cases, became the backbone of Pakistan’s international strategy from mid-2024 onward. Pakistani diplomats argued that the convergence of allegations from three separate countries, each with independent evidence and independent motivations, created a pattern too consistent to dismiss. The argument had logical force: if India was conducting extraterritorial operations in Canada (the Nijjar killing), plotting assassinations in the United States (the Pannun plot), and executing targeted killings in Pakistan (the shadow war campaign), the three sets of allegations reinforced each other’s credibility. Each case individually might be attributable to coincidence, fabrication, or misattribution, but the three together, involving different intelligence sources, different investigative agencies, and different national interests, pointed toward a systemic Indian program.

The weakness of the tripartite framing was that it collapsed critical distinctions. The US and Canadian cases involved Sikh separatists, individuals whose activities, while designated as terrorism by India, did not involve mass-casualty attacks and whose status as legitimate political actors was debated in Western democracies. The Pakistan cases involved commanders of organizations responsible for some of the deadliest terrorist attacks in South Asian history: the 26/11 Mumbai massacre, the Pathankot airbase assault, the Pulwama CRPF convoy bombing. The moral and legal calculus differed fundamentally between these categories. Western governments that were outraged about the assassination of a Sikh community leader in Canada were considerably less exercised about the elimination of a terrorist commander who had planned the murder of Indian soldiers. Pakistan’s tripartite framing elided this distinction, treating all Indian extraterritorial operations as equivalent violations of sovereignty, regardless of the targets’ backgrounds.

The media dimension of the amplification campaign deserves separate analysis. Pakistan’s strategic communication apparatus, traditionally focused on managing domestic media and engaging with Gulf-state outlets, expanded its focus to Western media organizations during this period. The Pakistani embassy in London maintained contact with Guardian journalists throughout their investigation. Pakistani diplomats in Washington provided background briefings to Washington Post reporters. The Foreign Office in Islamabad offered access to arrested suspects, investigative files, and security officials to Western journalists who showed interest in the story. This media engagement strategy reflected a sophisticated understanding of how international narratives are constructed: Pakistan recognized that its own press conferences would have limited impact, but that investigations by credible Western media outlets would reshape the global conversation.

The media strategy also involved a calculated risk. By providing access to Western journalists, Pakistan exposed its evidentiary case to independent scrutiny. Both The Guardian and The Washington Post included details that complicated Pakistan’s preferred narrative: acknowledgments that the targets were indeed linked to terrorist organizations, descriptions of Pakistan’s own role in sheltering designated terrorists, and observations that the ISI had failed to prevent the operations despite extensive counter-intelligence infrastructure. Pakistan accepted these complications because the alternative, remaining silent while India’s strategic ambiguity went unchallenged in international discourse, was worse.

What Pakistan Actually Presented

Stripped of diplomatic framing and media amplification, Pakistan’s evidentiary case rested on four categories of evidence: confessional statements from arrested suspects, passport and identity details of alleged Indian agents, financial transaction records tracing payments through informal networks, and the testimonies of Pakistani investigators who claimed to have uncovered Indian operational infrastructure.

The confessional evidence came from arrested operatives at the bottom of the kill chain. Muhammad Umair, arrested in connection with the Shahid Latif killing, reportedly confessed that he had been recruited in Dubai and sent to Sialkot to carry out the assassination after previous attempts had failed. The Sindh CTD arrests produced similar confessions, with suspects describing recruitment by handlers they knew only through phone contacts, payment through hawala networks, and operational instructions transmitted via encrypted messaging platforms. These confessions described a consistent operational architecture: a handler based in a Gulf country (usually Dubai), a local recruitment network, a small team for surveillance and execution, and a financial pipeline using informal banking.

The passport evidence was more controversial. Foreign Secretary Qazi presented passport details of Yogesh Kumar and Ashok Kumar, identified as the Indian agents who orchestrated the Latif and Riaz killings. One of the individuals, later identified in media reports as Ashok Kumar Anand Salian, came forward publicly to deny any connection to RAW, claiming he was a Dubai-based businessman whose Pakistani employee might have acted without his knowledge. The public denial complicated Pakistan’s narrative: it introduced the possibility that Pakistan had misidentified the handlers or that the actual operatives had used stolen or fabricated identities.

The financial evidence, presented in the Sindh CTD case, included records of transactions flowing through banks and hawala channels from Dubai to Pakistan. The CTD claimed to have traced payments from RAW through intermediaries to the operational team. This evidence was the strongest category in Pakistan’s case, because financial trails are difficult to fabricate entirely and can be independently verified through banking records. The weakness was that Pakistan presented the financial evidence selectively, in press conferences rather than in international legal proceedings where it would be subject to cross-examination and independent audit.

The investigative testimony came from Pakistani security officials who described patterns consistent with intelligence operations: the use of compartmentalized teams where each member knew only their specific role, the deployment of cut-outs and intermediaries to maintain deniability, and the use of third-country coordination hubs to prevent direct links between the killings and any state sponsor. This pattern-level testimony was credible in the sense that it described tradecraft consistent with how intelligence agencies actually operate, but it was not evidence of who specifically ordered the operations.

The Evidence Under Scrutiny

The question Pakistan’s evidence raised was not whether targeted killings were occurring, they clearly were, but whether Pakistan’s attribution of those killings to RAW was supported by the evidence presented or driven by strategic inference. The distinction matters, because strategic inference (India benefits from these killings, India has the capability, India has the motive, therefore India is responsible) is not the same as evidential proof (here is the chain of command, here are the orders, here is the money trail leading to an Indian state institution).

Pakistan’s public evidence fell into the gap between these two standards. The confessional statements described a kill chain that terminated at handlers in Dubai. The handlers’ connection to RAW was asserted by Pakistani investigators but not documented through evidence that could independently verify institutional affiliation. A handler named “Yogesh Kumar” operating from Dubai could be a RAW officer, a private contractor, a freelance operative, or a fabrication by either side. Without evidence linking the handler to the institutional structure of Indian intelligence, specifically to RAW’s chain of command, to budgetary allocations, to diplomatic communications, the connection remained an assertion.

The passport evidence was weakened by the public denial of one of the named individuals. If Pakistan had correctly identified a RAW agent, that person’s public denial was expected and proved nothing. But if Pakistan had misidentified a civilian as an intelligence agent, the error undermined the credibility of the entire evidentiary framework. Pakistan did not address this ambiguity in subsequent statements, preferring to let the allegation stand unchallenged.

The financial evidence was the most probative category, because money trails are harder to fabricate than confessions or identity claims. If Pakistan could demonstrate that funds flowed from identifiable Indian government accounts through traceable intermediaries to the operational teams, the case for state sponsorship would be strong. Pakistan claimed to possess such evidence but did not present the full financial trail publicly. The selective presentation, showing transaction records for the final links in the chain without revealing the origin of the funds, left the most important question unanswered: where did the money start?

The complication that Pakistan’s critics pointed to was the structural paradox of Pakistan’s position. Pakistan possessed sophisticated intelligence capabilities through the ISI. If RAW was conducting operations on Pakistani soil, the ISI would have detected indicators: communication intercepts, surveillance of diplomatic facilities, tracking of suspicious financial flows, monitoring of known intelligence meeting points. Pakistan’s claim that it had uncovered evidence of RAW’s operations implicitly confirmed that the ISI had been monitoring the situation. This raised an uncomfortable question: if the ISI knew RAW was operating in Pakistan, why did it not prevent the killings? The answer, which Pakistani officials could not state publicly, was that preventing the killings would have required protecting the targets, and protecting the targets would have meant acknowledging their existence and their organizational affiliations, exactly the admission Pakistan had spent decades avoiding.

A charitable interpretation of Pakistan’s evidence is that classified materials, including communication intercepts, human intelligence reports, and liaison information shared by friendly agencies, provide a stronger evidentiary foundation than what has been presented publicly, but that Pakistan cannot disclose this evidence without compromising sources and methods. This interpretation is plausible. Intelligence agencies routinely possess evidence that cannot be shared publicly, and the gap between classified knowledge and public presentation is a standard feature of state-level allegations.

A skeptical interpretation is that Pakistan’s evidence is primarily circumstantial, assembled from arrested low-level operatives who have strong incentives to tell investigators what they want to hear, and that the attribution to RAW reflects strategic logic rather than evidentiary proof. Under this interpretation, Pakistan knows that India benefits from the killings, knows that India has the capability, and has constructed an evidentiary narrative that connects the operational facts (the killings happened, the handlers were in Dubai, the money came through hawala) to the strategic conclusion (RAW ordered them) without the intermediate evidence that would prove institutional direction.

The honest assessment is that the truth likely lies between these positions. India’s involvement in the killings is supported by a convergence of circumstantial evidence: the exclusive targeting of India-wanted individuals, the consistent modus operandi across cities and organizations, the operational sophistication that exceeds criminal or factional capabilities, the parallel allegations from the United States and Canada regarding Indian operations on their soil, and the investigative reporting by The Guardian and The Washington Post citing intelligence sources from multiple countries. Pakistan’s evidence contributes to this circumstantial case without definitively resolving it, because the evidence connects the operational level (the killers, the handlers, the money) but does not publicly document the institutional level (who in RAW authorized the operations, how the operations fit into India’s national security decision-making, what oversight mechanisms existed or were bypassed).

The evidentiary gap between operational and institutional attribution is not unique to Pakistan’s case. It is a structural feature of intelligence-directed operations designed for plausible deniability. When Israel’s Mossad conducted targeted killings, the operational attribution (who pulled the trigger, who provided intelligence, how the operation was financed) was often reconstructable from forensic evidence and witness testimony. The institutional attribution (that the Israeli government directed the operation through official channels) was established through the cumulative weight of pattern evidence, defector testimony, and eventually through semi-official acknowledgments by retired intelligence officials. Pakistan is in the early stages of this attribution process: the operational evidence is strong, the institutional link remains circumstantially supported but formally unproven, and the definitive confirmation may come years from now through defector testimony, declassified documents, or semi-official retrospective accounts.

Christopher Clary, a professor of political science at the State University of New York at Albany who has studied the alleged Indian operations, observed that RAW’s methods bore similarities to Mossad’s targeted killing methodology. The comparison was analytically productive: Mossad operations were also conducted with plausible deniability, relied on local assets and third-country coordination, and were eventually acknowledged through a process that took decades rather than years. If the India case follows a similar trajectory, Pakistan’s evidentiary frustration may be resolved not through its own investigations but through the gradual erosion of India’s deniability as retired officials, investigative journalists, and academic researchers accumulate enough evidence to make the deniability implausible. The question is whether Pakistan can wait for that process to unfold, given that the killings are continuing and the diplomatic urgency grows with each assassination.

The Washington Post investigation introduced an additional evidentiary dimension that strengthened the circumstantial case while complicating the institutional attribution. The Post reported that ISI Director General Nadeem Anjum had raised concerns about Indian assassinations with CIA Director William Burns as early as 2022, before either the US or Canadian allegations became public. This detail, sourced to a former Pakistani official, suggested that the ISI had detected the pattern early and had sought to address it through intelligence-liaison channels before Pakistan went public with accusations. If accurate, the Anjum-Burns conversation would indicate that the ISI’s institutional assessment, shared privately with an allied intelligence service, attributed the killings to India well before the Foreign Office’s January 2024 public accusation. This early private attribution, if verifiable, would significantly strengthen Pakistan’s case by demonstrating that the attribution was not a post-hoc diplomatic construction but a contemporaneous intelligence assessment.

The evidentiary landscape was further complicated by the behavior of the named alleged agents. Ashok Kumar Anand Salian’s public denial created a factual question that Pakistan has not resolved: was Salian a RAW agent operating under commercial cover in Dubai, or was he a legitimate businessman whose identity was either stolen by intelligence operatives or incorrectly identified by Pakistani investigators? Both scenarios are plausible. Intelligence agencies routinely use business cover for operatives working abroad, and the Dubai business community includes numerous individuals with connections to South Asian intelligence services that are not apparent from their commercial activities. Equally, intelligence investigations conducted under pressure to produce results sometimes misidentify individuals, and Pakistan’s investigators, working on cases with significant political stakes, may have made attribution errors. Pakistan’s failure to address Salian’s denial publicly suggested either that the identification was correct and the denial was expected, or that the identification was uncertain and Pakistan preferred to avoid scrutiny.

Pakistan’s Structural Trap

Pakistan’s inability to mount an effective response to the targeted killings was not primarily an intelligence failure or a diplomatic failure. It was a structural failure, rooted in a contradiction that Pakistan has never resolved: the contradiction between maintaining terrorist organizations as strategic assets and presenting itself to the international community as a victim of terrorism.

For decades, Pakistan’s military establishment controlled, protected, and deployed terror group commanders as instruments of state policy against India. Lashkar-e-Taiba operated training camps in Pakistan-administered Kashmir. Jaish-e-Mohammed maintained its headquarters in Bahawalpur. Khalistan separatist leaders lived openly in Lahore. Hizbul Mujahideen’s supreme commander Syed Salahuddin gave interviews to Pakistani television from Islamabad. This was not a secret. India had documented it. The United States had documented it. The Financial Action Task Force had placed Pakistan on its grey list partly because of the state’s tolerance of designated terrorist organizations.

The targeted killings exposed this contradiction by forcing Pakistan to choose which version of reality it wanted to defend. If the killed individuals were innocent citizens, as Pakistan’s official framing implied, then Pakistan needed to explain why India had designated them as terrorists, why international bodies had sanctioned them, and why Indian courts had issued charge sheets against them. If the killed individuals were, as India alleged, operational commanders of designated terrorist organizations, then Pakistan needed to explain why they were living freely on its soil under state protection.

Pakistan attempted to navigate this contradiction by employing language that acknowledged the killings without acknowledging the targets’ identities. Foreign Secretary Qazi referred to “Pakistani nationals” and “citizens.” The Sindh CTD described Abdul Rehman Nizamani as a “prominent welfare worker.” Pakistani media, under guidance from the security establishment, avoided reproducing Indian designations or organizational affiliations. This linguistic strategy was transparent to anyone familiar with the targets’ backgrounds, but it preserved the formal deniability that Pakistan’s diplomatic position required.

The linguistic discipline extended to Pakistan’s engagement with international organizations. When Pakistani representatives raised the killings at the United Nations Human Rights Council and at OIC meetings, they consistently described the targets as Pakistani citizens murdered on Pakistani soil, without mentioning that these citizens appeared on India’s NIA charge sheets, held UNSC designations, or were accused of planning attacks that killed hundreds of Indian civilians. This omission was not accidental; it was essential to the legal framework Pakistan was constructing. Under international law, the sovereignty violation argument rests on the principle that every state has exclusive jurisdiction over its territory, regardless of the character of the individuals residing there. Acknowledging the targets’ terrorism connections would have weakened the sovereignty argument by inviting counter-arguments about Pakistan’s obligation to extradite designated terrorists under UN Security Council resolutions.

The structural trap also manifested in Pakistan’s inability to pursue legal remedies. International law offers several avenues for states to address sovereignty violations: bilateral diplomatic protests, referral to the International Court of Justice, appeals to the UN Security Council, and engagement through international criminal law mechanisms. Pakistan explored the diplomatic protest route through the January 2024 press conference and subsequent statements. The ICJ route remained unattempted, for reasons that illuminate the trap: an ICJ proceeding would require evidentiary disclosure that might expose more about Pakistan’s safe-haven infrastructure than about India’s alleged operations. The UN Security Council route was blocked by India’s close relationships with the United States, France, and the United Kingdom, three permanent members with veto power. The international criminal law route was inapplicable because the targeted killings, whatever their attribution, did not fit neatly into existing legal categories: they were not war crimes (no armed conflict was underway during the covert phase), not crimes against humanity (they lacked the systematic civilian targeting element), and not terrorism by the customary definition (states cannot commit terrorism against designated terrorists under most legal frameworks).

Pakistan’s security establishment responded to the structural trap with operational measures that complemented the diplomatic ones. The ISI reportedly enhanced protection for remaining high-value potential targets, relocating some from exposed urban residences to military compounds, providing security details, and restricting their public movements. These measures reduced the targets’ vulnerability but also reduced their operational effectiveness as jihadi commanders. A Lashkar-e-Taiba cell leader who cannot move freely through Lahore, who cannot meet with recruits, who cannot attend mosques for fear of assassination, is a diminished asset. Pakistan’s protective measures thus imposed costs on its own proxy-warfare capabilities, an unintended consequence that further illustrated the structural trap: defending the safe haven required degrading the very assets the safe haven was designed to protect.

The structural trap extended beyond language to operational response. If Pakistan genuinely wanted to prevent further killings, it would need to provide security to the remaining targets on India’s most-wanted list. But providing security would require identifying those targets, which would mean acknowledging their existence and their locations, which would confirm the safe haven that Pakistan denied maintaining. Pakistan could not protect what it claimed did not exist.

The ISI’s own relationship with the targeted organizations compounded the problem. Many of the killed individuals were ISI assets, recruited, trained, and handled by Pakistan’s intelligence service as part of its proxy warfare strategy against India in Kashmir. Their elimination represented not just a security breach but an operational loss. The ISI’s inability to protect its own assets from a foreign intelligence operation raised questions about the agency’s competence that the military establishment could not afford to have asked publicly.

Pakistan’s response to this structural trap was compartmentalized. The Foreign Office handled the diplomatic dimension, presenting Pakistan as a victim of Indian aggression and seeking international support. The ISI handled the intelligence dimension, attempting to identify RAW’s networks in Pakistan and to harden the security of remaining potential targets. The military’s ISPR handled the media dimension, managing domestic coverage to minimize questions about the ISI’s competence. Each institution operated within its mandate, but no institution could address the underlying contradiction, because the contradiction was built into Pakistan’s national security architecture itself.

The trap was further tightened by the Pahalgam attack of April 2025 and Operation Sindoor that followed. The military confrontation between India and Pakistan in May 2025, during which Indian strikes targeted locations across Pakistan including Bahawalpur (Jaish-e-Mohammed’s headquarters), demonstrated that India’s willingness to act against terrorist infrastructure on Pakistani soil extended beyond covert killings to conventional military force. Pakistan’s counter-narrative, which had focused on the covert killings as violations of sovereignty, now had to contend with overt military strikes that India defended as legitimate self-defense under international law. The expansion from covert to overt rendered Pakistan’s diplomatic strategy even more difficult, because the same international community that might sympathize with allegations of extrajudicial killings was significantly less sympathetic when the targets were terrorist organizations that had attacked Indian civilians.

The FATF dimension compounded Pakistan’s structural difficulties in ways that have received insufficient analytical attention. Pakistan’s struggle to exit the FATF grey list, which lasted from 2018 through 2022, required Islamabad to demonstrate that it had taken action against designated terrorist organizations operating on its soil. Pakistan’s compliance with FATF requirements included freezing assets of designated groups, restricting their leaders’ movement, and shutting down front organizations. These actions, undertaken to satisfy international financial regulators, implicitly confirmed the existence of the very terrorist infrastructure that Pakistan simultaneously denied when responding to the targeted killings. The contradiction was visible to any informed observer: Pakistan could not simultaneously tell the FATF that it was cracking down on designated terrorist organizations and tell India that no such organizations existed on its soil.

The structural trap extended to Pakistan’s relationships with key allied states. China, Pakistan’s most important strategic partner, provided diplomatic cover for Pakistan at international forums but did not publicly endorse Pakistan’s allegations against India. Beijing’s reluctance reflected its own interests: China maintains significant economic ties with India through the BRICS framework and bilateral trade, and endorsing Pakistan’s assassination allegations would have escalated a crisis that China preferred to manage rather than inflame. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, traditionally supportive of Pakistan, were similarly circumspect. The UAE, identified in Pakistan’s own allegations as the coordination hub for the alleged RAW operations, faced the awkward implication that its territory was being used for intelligence activities that UAE authorities had either failed to detect or chosen to ignore. This made the UAE reluctant to amplify Pakistan’s narrative, despite the countries’ close bilateral relationship.

Turkey emerged as Pakistan’s most vocal international supporter, with Turkish media outlets and commentators amplifying Pakistan’s allegations in international discourse. Turkish support, however, carried limited diplomatic weight outside the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, and even within the OIC, the member states’ willingness to confront India on behalf of Pakistan was constrained by their own economic and diplomatic interests in maintaining relationships with New Delhi.

India’s Denial Strategy in the Mirror

India’s response to Pakistan’s allegations followed a consistent pattern that mirrored Pakistan’s own decades-long approach to accusations of sponsoring terrorism: categorical denial, deflection to the accuser’s record, and strategic ambiguity about capabilities.

When Pakistan’s Foreign Secretary presented his allegations in January 2024, India’s Ministry of External Affairs did not engage with the specific claims. The MEA did not confirm or deny the existence of the named agents. It did not address the passport evidence. It did not contest the operational details. Instead, the MEA redirected the conversation to Pakistan’s record as a state sponsor of terrorism, noting that “Pakistan has long been the epicentre of terrorism” and warning that Pakistan would “reap what it sows.”

This response was calibrated with precision. By refusing to engage with specific allegations, India avoided creating a factual record that could be used against it in international forums. By redirecting to Pakistan’s terrorism record, India reframed the conversation from “India is killing people in Pakistan” to “Pakistan is the global hub of terrorism that is now experiencing consequences.” The reframing was effective with India’s domestic audience and with international observers who had long been frustrated by Pakistan’s support for terrorist organizations, but it did not address the legal and normative questions that Pakistan’s allegations raised.

India’s strategic ambiguity was perhaps the most revealing element of its response. Indian officials, when speaking on background to journalists, neither confirmed nor denied involvement in specific killings but signaled comfort with being associated with the operations in Pakistan. Michael Kugelman of the Wilson Center observed that India’s public messaging indicated “more comfort with being associated with the hits in Pakistan than the alleged plot in the US,” because being linked to the Pakistan killings projected strength against a bitter rival, while the US plot raised uncomfortable questions about operating on an ally’s soil. Defense Minister Rajnath Singh, in an interview broadcast the day after The Guardian’s investigation, stated that India would “enter Pakistan and kill” any terrorist who attacked India. The statement was not a confirmation of specific operations, but it was a signal that India viewed cross-border counter-terrorism action as legitimate.

India’s denial strategy differed from Pakistan’s in one crucial respect: India did not need the denial to be believed. Pakistan’s denial of hosting terrorists required credibility because it was directed at international institutions (the FATF, the UN, Western governments) whose assessments affected Pakistan’s economic and diplomatic standing. India’s denial of conducting the killings did not require credibility because the denial was, in practical terms, redundant. If India was responsible, the operations were succeeding. If India was not responsible, the killings were still eliminating India’s most-wanted targets. Either way, India’s strategic position improved. The denial existed to preserve formal deniability in international law, not to persuade anyone of its truth.

India’s domestic discourse on the killings operated in a register entirely separate from its diplomatic denial. Pro-government Indian television channels ran programs openly celebrating the targeted killings, describing them as evidence of India’s growing strategic capability, and framing the campaign as the fulfillment of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s promise to hold Pakistan accountable for terrorism. Anchors referenced specific killings by name, identified the targets’ organizational affiliations, and connected each killing to specific attacks on Indian soil. Indian social media accounts, including those aligned with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, amplified each killing as a demonstration of national strength. This domestic celebration coexisted, without apparent contradiction, with the MEA’s formal denial at international forums. The Indian state maintained two simultaneous narratives: diplomatic denial for foreign audiences and nationalist celebration for domestic ones.

The dual-narrative strategy was possible because the two audiences operated in separate information ecosystems. International diplomats and journalists who covered India’s formal denials rarely consumed Indian television’s triumphalist coverage, and vice versa. The information asymmetry allowed India to project different messages to different audiences without the contradiction becoming politically costly. Pakistan attempted to bridge this gap by compiling clips of Indian media celebrating the killings and presenting them at international forums as evidence that India was claiming credit while formally denying involvement. This strategy had limited impact, because international audiences understood the distinction between government media and official government statements, even when the distinction was, in practice, largely cosmetic.

Srinath Raghavan, an Indian military historian cited in the Washington Post investigation, observed that Modi’s government had actively promoted covert operations to project strength both for Pakistan’s consumption and for domestic audiences. The observation pointed to a dimension of India’s denial strategy that went beyond mere deniability: the strategic ambiguity itself was a weapon. By neither confirming nor denying, India created a space in which the operations could be simultaneously denied (for international-law purposes) and celebrated (for domestic-political purposes). The ambiguity also created uncertainty in Pakistan about the scope and trajectory of the campaign, because Islamabad could never be certain which killings were RAW operations and which were genuinely unrelated violence, forcing the ISI to treat every killing of a designated terrorist as a potential Indian operation, straining its counter-intelligence resources.

The mirror effect between India’s denial strategy and Pakistan’s decades of denying safe havens produced an irony that both sides recognized but neither could articulate without undermining their own position. Pakistan, which had spent decades telling the international community “we do not host terrorists” while hosting terrorists, was now hearing India tell it “we do not kill people on your soil” while people were being killed on its soil. The symmetric deniability created a situation where both states were lying about the same set of facts from opposite directions, and both understood that neither denial would be taken at face value.

What the Shifting Counter-Narrative Reveals

Pakistan’s four-phase counter-narrative, from silence to internal feuds to formal accusation to international amplification, was not a strategy that evolved toward greater coherence. Each phase was abandoned not because a better strategy was developed but because events on the ground made the current phase untenable. The silence became untenable when the body count grew too large to ignore. The internal-feuds theory became untenable when the targets were too clearly connected to India’s most-wanted lists. The formal accusation became untenable as a standalone strategy because Pakistan’s evidence, while suggestive, was not compelling enough to force international action. The international amplification phase represented Pakistan’s current position, leveraging Western media investigations and parallel US/Canada allegations to build a case that Pakistan’s own evidence could not make alone.

The reactive nature of Pakistan’s counter-narrative is itself the most significant analytical finding. States with proactive intelligence strategies prepare their narratives before events occur. The United States, for example, had a pre-planned narrative framework for its drone campaign: targeted killings were legal under the Authorization for Use of Military Force, proportionate under international humanitarian law, and necessary because the targets posed imminent threats. Whether one accepted the US framework or not, it was prepared in advance and deployed consistently. Pakistan had no equivalent framework for responding to the shadow war, because Pakistan did not anticipate the shadow war, and could not develop a coherent response without first resolving the contradiction at the heart of its national security architecture.

The counter-narrative also revealed the institutional dynamics within the Pakistani state. The Foreign Office, which handled the formal accusations, operated within the constraints of diplomatic language and international-law frameworks. The ISI, which possessed the most detailed knowledge of the killings, operated within the constraints of classification and operational security. The military’s ISPR, which managed domestic media coverage, operated within the constraints of maintaining public confidence in the armed forces. These institutions did not coordinate a unified narrative, because coordination would have required resolving disagreements about what Pakistan should admit and what it should deny.

The four phases tracked Pakistan’s diminishing options rather than its increasing capability. In Phase One, Pakistan could maintain silence because the killings were few and the targets were obscure enough to avoid sustained media attention. In Phase Two, Pakistan could float alternative explanations because the pattern had not yet been documented systematically. In Phase Three, Pakistan could present formal allegations because the US and Canada had created an international framework of Indian accountability. In Phase Four, Pakistan could amplify its allegations through international media because Western newspapers had conducted their own investigations. At no point did Pakistan drive the narrative. At every point, Pakistan responded to developments that it had not anticipated and could not control.

The complete timeline of targeted killings provides the clearest illustration of why Pakistan’s narrative kept shifting. The timeline shows an accelerating campaign: scattered killings in 2021 and 2022, a sharp increase in 2023, and a dramatic surge in 2025 and 2026. Each acceleration forced a narrative recalibration, because the explanatory framework that worked for two or three killings could not accommodate twenty or thirty. Pakistan’s counter-narrative was always playing catch-up to an operational reality that was evolving faster than Islamabad’s strategic communications apparatus could adapt.

The comparison with India’s well-documented parallel between the shadow war and historical Mossad operations further illuminated Pakistan’s dilemma. Israel’s targeted killing program, documented by Ronen Bergman and others, operated with a degree of strategic ambiguity that allowed Israel to neither confirm nor deny specific operations while building an international reputation as a state willing to reach its enemies anywhere. India appeared to be constructing a similar posture: strategic ambiguity about specific operations combined with a general signal that cross-border terrorism would generate cross-border consequences. Pakistan, by contrast, had no comparable strategic communication framework for responding to such a posture, because Pakistan had never anticipated being on the receiving end of targeted killings.

The Dhurandhar film’s portrayal of India’s covert operations added a cultural dimension to Pakistan’s narrative challenge. Bollywood had popularized the shadow war before Pakistan’s diplomatic establishment had developed a vocabulary for discussing it. By the time Foreign Secretary Qazi held his January 2024 press conference, Indian popular culture had already established a narrative framework in which cross-border killings were acts of patriotic justice rather than violations of international law. Pakistan was contesting not just diplomatic claims but cultural narratives, and cultural narratives are far harder to dislodge than diplomatic positions.

The deepest revelation of Pakistan’s shifting counter-narrative was not about India’s operations but about Pakistan’s own institutional limitations. A state that had perfected the art of plausible deniability, that had maintained terrorist organizations for decades while telling the world they did not exist, that had developed sophisticated media management strategies for deflecting international criticism, found itself unable to construct a coherent narrative when it became the target of precisely the kind of denied operations it had long sponsored. The institutional relationship between Pakistan’s military and the targeted groups was both the cause of the killings and the reason Pakistan could not respond to them effectively. Pakistan built the safe haven. The safe haven attracted the shadow war. The shadow war exposed the safe haven. And Pakistan’s counter-narrative, shifting and reactive and never quite coherent, was the sound of a state trying to explain a problem it had created for itself.

The counter-narrative evolution also carried implications for deterrence theory as applied to the India-Pakistan relationship. Pakistan’s inability to construct a stable response to the killings suggested that the shadow war was achieving one of its presumed objectives: imposing costs on Pakistan’s decision to shelter designated terrorists without triggering the full-scale military confrontation that both states wished to avoid. The covert campaign existed in a space between peace and war, below the threshold of conventional military response but above the threshold of ignorable provocation. Pakistan’s shifting narrative was itself evidence of a state struggling to find the appropriate response to an adversary’s strategy that was designed to be difficult to respond to.

The deterrence dimension extended to the behavior of the targeted organizations themselves. As the body count rose and Pakistan’s counter-narrative failed to generate protective international action, remaining potential targets began modifying their behavior. Reports from Pakistani media indicated that senior leaders of Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed had retreated to more fortified locations, reduced their public movements, changed their daily routines, and in some cases moved their families to safer areas. This behavioral adaptation, which Pakistan’s security establishment facilitated by providing enhanced protection to selected figures, represented a form of success for the shadow war campaign even in cases where the targets were not eliminated. Forcing senior terrorist commanders to live in hiding, to restrict their movements, and to abandon the open lifestyles they had previously enjoyed under ISI protection degraded their operational effectiveness and imposed psychological costs that accumulated over time.

Pakistan’s counter-narrative must also be understood in the context of domestic public opinion, which evolved independently of official framing. Pakistani citizens, exposed to both official narratives and independent reporting through social media, developed their own assessments of the killings. Some Pakistanis, particularly in areas affected by terrorism, expressed quiet satisfaction that individuals linked to violence were being eliminated, even if the agency doing the eliminating was a hostile intelligence service. Others viewed the killings as a sovereignty violation that demanded a forceful response. The public opinion landscape was fragmented along regional, ideological, and class lines, and Pakistan’s government could not shape domestic perception with the same tools it used to manage international discourse. The gap between official narrative and public sentiment further complicated Pakistan’s strategic communication challenge.

One analytical question remains unresolved and may define the next phase of Pakistan’s counter-narrative: will Pakistan’s evidentiary case strengthen or weaken as time passes? On one hand, additional arrests and investigations could produce evidence that more clearly links the operational kill chain to institutional RAW direction. The Sindh CTD’s August 2025 arrests represented an escalation in evidentiary specificity, and Pakistani investigators may develop similar cases for other killings. On the other hand, the passage of time erodes operational trails: handlers move, financial records are obscured, and witnesses become less reliable. Pakistan’s window for building a compelling evidentiary case may be narrowing even as the killings continue to accelerate.

The international community’s response to Pakistan’s allegations has been measured rather than urgent. Western governments, which have their own grievances about Pakistan’s terrorism infrastructure, have not embraced Pakistan’s victim narrative with the enthusiasm Islamabad sought. The US and Canadian allegations against India, while genuine, were motivated by concern for their own sovereignty rather than by solidarity with Pakistan. The European Union has treated the allegations as a bilateral India-Pakistan matter rather than as a systemic threat to international norms. This tepid international response has frustrated Pakistan’s amplification strategy, because the strategy depended on generating enough international pressure to force India into accountability, and that pressure has not materialized.

Pakistan’s counter-narrative continues to evolve. Each new killing triggers a recalibration. Each international investigation provides fresh ammunition for diplomatic statements. Each arrest of a suspected agent generates a press conference. But the fundamental structural trap remains unresolved: Pakistan cannot effectively protest the killing of terrorists whose existence it denied, on soil it claimed was free of safe havens, by an agency whose operations it cannot prevent without acknowledging the targets it was supposed to have eliminated years ago. The counter-narrative shifts not because Pakistan is developing a more sophisticated strategic communications strategy, but because reality keeps changing faster than any narrative can contain it.

The final dimension of the counter-narrative worth examining is its relationship to Pakistan’s broader foreign policy trajectory. Pakistan’s alliance network has contracted significantly since 2020, with traditional partners like Saudi Arabia and the UAE diversifying their relationships toward India, Western nations losing patience with Pakistan’s terrorism infrastructure, and even China’s support becoming more conditional. In this context, the targeted-killing allegations serve not just as a response to specific events but as a diplomatic tool for relevance. By positioning itself as a victim of Indian aggression, Pakistan seeks to maintain international attention and sympathy at a moment when its strategic significance is declining. The counter-narrative, in this reading, is as much about Pakistan’s place in the international order as about the specific killings that trigger it.

The evolution of Pakistan’s response also reflects a generational shift within the country’s strategic establishment. The officers and diplomats who managed Pakistan’s narrative during the Musharraf era, when plausible deniability about terrorism support was the default posture, have largely been replaced by a younger cohort who recognize that the old formulas no longer work. The January 2024 press conference, with its specific evidentiary claims and its multimedia presentation of passport photographs and financial records, represented a departure from the vague denials that had characterized earlier Pakistani diplomacy. Whether this generational shift will produce more effective narrative management or simply more sophisticated versions of the same structural contradictions remains to be seen.

The shadow war and Pakistan’s counter-narrative to it have produced one outcome that neither side anticipated and neither fully controls: the normalization of targeted killings in South Asian strategic discourse. Before 2021, the idea that India would conduct systematic assassinations on Pakistani soil belonged to the realm of thriller fiction. By 2026, it has become an accepted feature of the bilateral relationship, debated openly on television, analyzed in academic journals, and incorporated into both countries’ strategic planning. Pakistan’s counter-narrative, by drawing international attention to the killings, has paradoxically contributed to this normalization: what was once unspeakable has become, through extensive media coverage and diplomatic discourse, simply another dimension of the India-Pakistan confrontation. The question is no longer whether targeted killings are occurring, but whether they represent a sustainable strategy, whether they will escalate or plateau, and whether the international community will develop norms to constrain them. Pakistan’s shifting counter-narrative has not answered these questions. It has merely confirmed that they are the right questions to ask.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What evidence has Pakistan presented against India for the targeted killings?

Pakistan’s most detailed evidentiary presentation occurred at two press conferences: Foreign Secretary Qazi’s January 2024 briefing in Islamabad and the Sindh CTD’s August 2025 briefing in Karachi. Qazi presented passport details of two individuals identified as Indian agents (Yogesh Kumar and Ashok Kumar), described the operational methodology of the killings (recruitment through social media, payment through hawala networks, compartmentalized teams for surveillance and execution), and claimed to possess documentary, financial, and forensic evidence linking the agents to the Shahid Latif and Muhammad Riaz assassinations. The Sindh CTD presented arrested suspects, recovered weapons (two pistols), a motorcycle, mobile phones, and financial transaction records tracing payments from a handler known as “Kumar” to the operational team that killed Abdul Rehman Nizamani in Matli. Pakistan has also claimed to have raided a safe house in Dubai used by Indian operatives, though the two Indians allegedly residing there had left before the raid.

Q: Has Pakistan’s narrative on the killings changed over time?

Pakistan’s narrative has shifted through four distinct phases across roughly four years. The first phase, covering 2021 through early 2023, was characterized by silence, with each killing treated as an isolated criminal incident. The second phase, from mid-2023, involved attributing the killings to internal organizational feuds, criminal rivalries, or TTP operations. The third phase began with Foreign Secretary Qazi’s January 25, 2024 press conference, when Pakistan formally accused RAW of orchestrating the killings. The fourth phase, from April 2024 onward, involved amplifying the allegations through international media investigations (The Guardian and Washington Post), parallel US and Canadian accusations, and increasingly detailed press conferences by Pakistani security officials. Each shift was triggered by developments that made the previous narrative position untenable, rather than by proactive strategic planning.

Q: Did Pakistan initially deny the targeted killings were happening?

Pakistan did not explicitly deny the killings occurred but treated them as routine criminal matters unworthy of national-security attention. Local police registered FIRs against unknown assailants following each killing, but no government spokesperson connected the killings to any broader pattern or attributed them to any foreign intelligence agency during the first phase (2021 through early 2023). This silence functioned as implicit denial: by refusing to acknowledge the pattern, Pakistan avoided acknowledging the targets’ identities and organizational affiliations, which would have confirmed the safe haven infrastructure that Islamabad had long denied maintaining.

Q: What did Pakistan’s Foreign Secretary say in January 2024?

Foreign Secretary Muhammad Syrus Sajjad Qazi held a press conference in Islamabad on January 25, 2024, formally accusing India of conducting “extra-territorial and extra-judicial killings” on Pakistani soil. He described the assassinations as part of a “sophisticated and sinister” campaign by India involving “killings-for-hire cases” conducted through a “sophisticated international set-up spread over multiple jurisdictions.” He specifically addressed the killings of Shahid Latif (killed in Sialkot in October 2023) and Muhammad Riaz (killed in Pakistan-administered Kashmir in September 2023), presented passport details of two alleged Indian agents (Yogesh Kumar and Ashok Kumar), and claimed Pakistan possessed “credible evidence of links between Indian agents and assassination of two Pakistani nationals on Pakistani soil.” He also indicated that “a few other cases of similar gravity” were under investigation.

Q: Why does Pakistan blame RAW for the killings?

Pakistan attributes the killings to RAW based on several categories of evidence and inference. The circumstantial evidence includes the exclusive targeting of individuals wanted by India, the consistent modus operandi across killings (motorcycle-borne assailants, close-range fire, clean escapes), and the operational sophistication exceeding ordinary criminal capabilities. Pakistan also cites confessional statements from arrested suspects who describe being recruited and paid by handlers based in Gulf countries, financial transaction records tracing payments through informal networks, and the parallel allegations by the United States and Canada regarding Indian intelligence operations on their soil. Pakistan’s attribution connects these operational facts to the strategic conclusion that RAW directed the campaign, though the intermediate institutional evidence linking specific operations to RAW’s chain of command has not been presented publicly.

Q: Has Pakistan arrested anyone for the targeted killings?

Pakistan has announced arrests in connection with several killings. The most publicized were the Sindh CTD’s August 2025 arrests of six suspects connected to the killing of Abdul Rehman Nizamani in Matli, Sindh. CTD officials described these as the first arrests of an actual “hit team,” as previous arrests had only captured surveillance operatives. In the Shahid Latif case, Muhammad Umair was arrested and reportedly confessed to being recruited in Dubai to carry out the assassination. In each case, the arrested individuals were local operatives at the bottom of the kill chain, recruited and paid by handlers in Gulf countries. Pakistan has not arrested any individuals it identifies as Indian intelligence officers or their direct handlers, as those individuals operated from outside Pakistani territory.

Q: Does Pakistan’s evidence against RAW hold up under scrutiny?

Pakistan’s evidence is suggestive but not conclusive regarding institutional RAW direction. The strongest category is financial records showing payments flowing from Gulf-based handlers to operational teams in Pakistan, as financial trails are difficult to fabricate entirely. The weakest category is the passport evidence: one of the named alleged agents, Ashok Kumar Anand Salian, publicly denied any RAW connection and claimed to be an ordinary Dubai businessman. The confessional evidence from arrested suspects describes the operational kill chain but terminates at handlers in Dubai rather than documenting the connection to RAW’s institutional command structure. A fair assessment is that the circumstantial case for Indian involvement is strong (the targeting pattern, modus operandi consistency, and parallel international allegations all point toward state-directed operations), but the specific attribution to RAW as an institution remains unproven in the public record. Classified Pakistani intelligence may contain stronger evidence that cannot be disclosed without compromising sources and methods.

Q: Why did Pakistan’s narrative shift from denial to accusation?

Three factors converged to trigger the shift. First, the accelerating pace of killings through 2023 made silence untenable: the body count exceeded what could plausibly be dismissed as isolated criminal incidents. Second, the United States and Canada had leveled their own allegations against Indian intelligence (the Pannun plot indictment in November 2023 and Canada’s Nijjar allegations from September 2023), providing Pakistan with an international framework of credibility into which it could insert its own complaints. Third, Pakistan needed diplomatic leverage in an increasingly hostile bilateral relationship with India, where the post-Article 370 reality, suspended trade, and reduced diplomatic representation had left Islamabad with few bargaining tools. Formal allegations of Indian assassination operations provided a grievance that could be internationalized.

Q: How did India respond to Pakistan’s allegations?

India responded with categorical denial and aggressive counter-framing. The Ministry of External Affairs dismissed Pakistan’s January 2024 allegations as “peddling false propaganda” and stated Pakistan would “reap what it sows.” The MEA described Pakistan as “the epicentre of terrorism” without addressing the specific evidentiary claims. India’s response followed a deliberate pattern: refuse to engage with specific allegations (avoiding the creation of a factual record), redirect the conversation to Pakistan’s terrorism record (reframing from victim to perpetrator), and maintain strategic ambiguity about capabilities (neither confirming nor denying operational capacity). This strategy preserved legal deniability while signaling, through defense officials’ public statements and background briefings, that India viewed cross-border counter-terrorism action as legitimate.

Q: Why is Pakistan reluctant to publicly acknowledge the identity of the killed individuals?

Pakistan’s reluctance to acknowledge the targets’ organizational affiliations stems from its decades-long denial that designated terrorists live on its soil. If Pakistan acknowledged that Shahid Latif was a Jaish-e-Mohammed operative who masterminded the Pathankot attack, it would confirm India’s longstanding allegation that Pakistan provides sanctuary to anti-India terrorist commanders. Pakistan’s diplomatic framework for the allegations requires treating the killed individuals as ordinary “Pakistani nationals” and “citizens” whose sovereignty rights were violated, rather than as designated terrorists whose presence on Pakistani soil constituted a violation of international counter-terrorism obligations. This linguistic strategy is transparent to informed observers but necessary for maintaining the formal posture that Pakistan requires at international forums.

Q: Did The Guardian and Washington Post investigations validate Pakistan’s claims?

The Guardian (April 2024) and Washington Post (December 2024) investigations provided independent reporting that aligned with several of Pakistan’s allegations: that targeted killings of India’s most-wanted were occurring in Pakistan, that the operations bore hallmarks of intelligence-directed campaigns, that Dubai served as a coordination hub, and that the methodology shared similarities with alleged Indian operations in North America. Both investigations cited unnamed intelligence sources from multiple countries, including India, who described RAW’s role in the operations. Pakistan leveraged these investigations as external validation of its January 2024 accusations. The investigations did not, however, independently verify all of Pakistan’s specific evidentiary claims, and both relied on unnamed sources whose motivations and accuracy could not be independently assessed.

Q: Why does Pakistan struggle to respond effectively to the targeted killings?

Pakistan faces a structural dilemma rooted in the contradiction between maintaining terrorist organizations as strategic assets and presenting itself as a victim of Indian aggression. Protecting the remaining potential targets requires acknowledging their existence and locations, which confirms the safe haven Pakistan denies maintaining. Investigating the killings thoroughly requires admitting that designated terrorists were living freely on Pakistani soil, which validates India’s core complaint. Prosecuting the cases internationally requires presenting evidence that the killed individuals were “innocent citizens,” which conflicts with their well-documented organizational affiliations. This structural trap means that every response Pakistan undertakes creates new vulnerabilities in its existing narrative positions.

Q: Is Pakistan the only country accusing India of extraterritorial killings?

Pakistan is not the only country to level such accusations. The United States indicted Nikhil Gupta in November 2023 in connection with an alleged plot to assassinate Khalistan separatist Gurpatwant Singh Pannun on American soil, with prosecutors identifying a RAW officer named Vikram Yadav as the alleged handler. Canada accused Indian intelligence of involvement in the June 2023 killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Surrey, British Columbia, leading to a severe diplomatic crisis that included the expulsion of diplomats. Pakistan has consistently framed its allegations alongside these Western accusations, arguing that the killings in Pakistan, Canada, and the United States represent different theaters of the same Indian extraterritorial operations program.

Q: What role did the ISI play in Pakistan’s response to the killings?

The ISI’s role in Pakistan’s response has been largely invisible but consequential. As Pakistan’s primary intelligence agency, the ISI is responsible for detecting and countering foreign intelligence operations on Pakistani soil. The ISI reportedly tracked the killing pattern before the Foreign Office was prepared to discuss it publicly, and ISI Director General Nadeem Anjum reportedly raised concerns about Indian assassinations with CIA Director William Burns in 2022, well before Pakistan’s formal public accusations. The ISI also conducted intelligence operations against suspected Indian networks in Pakistan and in third countries, including the reported raid on a safe house in Dubai. The ISI’s operational role, however, exists in tension with its institutional embarrassment: the fact that RAW was conducting operations in Pakistan represented a significant intelligence failure for the ISI, and the agency’s inability to prevent the killings raised questions about its competence that the military establishment could not afford to have debated publicly.

Q: How did Pakistan’s internal politics affect its response to the killings?

Pakistan’s internal political instability during the period of the killings (2021-2026) complicated the government’s ability to mount a coordinated response. The ouster of Imran Khan in April 2022, the subsequent political turmoil, the disputed February 2024 elections, and the tensions between the military establishment and civilian government all consumed institutional bandwidth that might otherwise have been directed toward the national security challenge posed by the killings. The civilian government’s dependence on military support for its survival meant that the narrative response was driven primarily by the security establishment rather than by elected officials, limiting the diplomatic creativity available to Pakistan’s Foreign Office.

Q: Could Pakistan take the case to international courts?

Pakistan could theoretically pursue the case through the International Court of Justice, filing a claim that India had violated Pakistani sovereignty through extraterritorial killings. This option has been discussed in Pakistani strategic commentary but not pursued, for reasons that illuminate the structural trap. An ICJ case would require Pakistan to present its evidence in a forum where it would be subject to cross-examination and independent assessment. It would also require Pakistan to identify the killed individuals, which would force public acknowledgment of their organizational affiliations. India could counter-file, presenting evidence that the killed individuals were designated terrorists sheltered by Pakistan in violation of UN Security Council resolutions. The risk that an ICJ proceeding would expose more about Pakistan’s safe haven infrastructure than about India’s alleged operations has deterred Islamabad from pursuing the legal route.

Q: Did Pakistan change its approach after Operation Sindoor in May 2025?

Operation Sindoor, the Indian military strikes against targets in Pakistan following the Pahalgam attack, represented a qualitative shift in the confrontation that reshaped Pakistan’s counter-narrative. Before Sindoor, Pakistan’s allegations focused exclusively on covert killings by unknown assailants. After Sindoor, Pakistan faced the reality that India was willing to use both covert (targeted killings) and overt (military strikes) force against terrorist infrastructure on Pakistani soil. This expansion from covert to overt complicated Pakistan’s diplomatic strategy, because the international community’s tolerance for Indian action against terrorist organizations was generally higher when that action involved conventional military operations responding to a terrorist attack (Pahalgam killed 26 people) than when it involved deniable assassinations with ambiguous legal status.

Q: What is the significance of the Dubai connection in Pakistan’s allegations?

Dubai features prominently in Pakistan’s evidentiary presentations as the coordination hub for the alleged RAW operations. Pakistani investigators describe a model in which Indian intelligence handlers based in Dubai recruited Pakistani workers or Afghan nationals, provided them with funds through hawala networks, and directed them to carry out surveillance and killings in Pakistan. The Washington Post investigation corroborated the Dubai connection, describing how RAW officers used Dubai-based businessmen as intermediaries. Dubai’s significance reflects its geographic position (between India and Pakistan), its large South Asian diaspora (providing cover for intelligence operatives), its financial infrastructure (including both formal banking and informal hawala networks), and its permissive regulatory environment for international business activities. Pakistan has also claimed to have raided an operational safe house in Dubai, though the suspected Indian occupants were not present during the raid.

Q: How does Pakistan’s counter-narrative compare to India’s denial of state-sponsored terrorism?

The parallel is structurally revealing. Pakistan spent decades denying that it hosted terrorist organizations, despite overwhelming evidence that Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed, and others operated freely on Pakistani soil with ISI support. India now denies involvement in targeted killings on Pakistani soil, despite circumstantial evidence pointing to state-directed operations. Both denials employ similar techniques: categorical rejection of allegations, deflection to the accuser’s record, strategic ambiguity about capabilities, and willingness to absorb international criticism without changing behavior. The symmetric deniability creates an analytical situation where both states are understood to be dissembling about the same set of facts from opposite directions.

Q: What has been the international community’s response to Pakistan’s allegations?

The international response has been measured and differentiated. Western governments have not endorsed Pakistan’s allegations with the urgency Islamabad sought, partly because these governments have their own frustrations with Pakistan’s terrorism infrastructure and partly because they do not view the elimination of designated terrorists as equivalent to the assassination of civilians or political dissidents. The US and Canadian allegations against India are motivated by concern for their own sovereignty (operations on American and Canadian soil) rather than by solidarity with Pakistan. The European Union has treated the matter as a bilateral India-Pakistan issue. The UN has not taken formal action. Pakistan has found more receptive audiences in the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation and among commentators in Turkey and some Middle Eastern states, but this support has not translated into substantive diplomatic pressure on India.

Q: Why did Pakistan emphasize the Shahid Latif and Muhammad Riaz cases specifically?

Pakistan chose to highlight the Latif and Riaz cases in its January 2024 formal allegations because these were the two cases where Pakistani investigators had developed the most detailed evidentiary trails. In the Latif case, the arrested operative Muhammad Umair provided a confessional account of the operation, including his recruitment in Dubai, travel to Sialkot, and execution of the killing after previous attempts failed. In the Riaz case, Pakistan claimed to have identified the financial trail and the handlers involved. The strategic choice to focus on two cases rather than presenting a comprehensive dossier reflected a calculation that detailed evidence on specific cases would be more credible than general allegations about many cases. Pakistan indicated that other cases were under investigation but withheld details, likely because the evidentiary basis for those cases was less developed.

Q: Has any Pakistani official publicly acknowledged the targets’ terrorist affiliations?

Pakistani officials have carefully avoided publicly acknowledging the organizational affiliations or terrorism designations of the killed individuals in the context of the formal allegations. Foreign Secretary Qazi referred to them as “Pakistani nationals” and “citizens.” The Sindh CTD described Abdul Rehman Nizamani as a “prominent welfare worker.” This linguistic discipline is maintained across all official communications related to the allegations. Separately, Pakistani media, including Dawn and The Express Tribune, have reported on the Indian designations and organizational affiliations of the targets, but these media reports exist in a different register from official government statements. The gap between media reporting and official framing is itself an indicator of the structural contradiction: Pakistani institutions know who the targets were but cannot say so within the diplomatic framework they have constructed.