The attack on the Khadija Tul Kubra Mosque in Tarlai Kalan, a suburb on the outskirts of Islamabad, Pakistan’s federal capital, is more than a heartening tragedy. It is a stark, bloody indictment of a broken security paradigm and a political order crumbling under the weight of its own contradictions.
The loss of nearly three dozen lives, with hundreds injured, is a national shame. Yet, the public response - marked not by grief alone but by overwhelming skepticism and anger - signals a deeper malaise: a near-total erosion of trust between the Pakistani people and the powers that claim to protect them.
The ‘Foreign Hand’ Conspiracy
For years, the official narrative following such atrocities has followed a wearisomely predictable script. A swift, often hazy, attribution is made, frequently pointing to external actors like India’s premier spy agency RAW. The Afghan Taliban has been recently added to this, since they stopped aligning with Pakistan’s preferences, and their recent pursuit of a balanced and gainful bilateral relation with regional giants like India.
So, in their rush to score a point of blame, the Pakistani authorities quickly described the atrocity as the product of RAW and Taliban collusion. Before the claim by Islamic State (IS), Pakistani Defence Minister Khawaja Asif suggested India and Afghanistan had been behind the attack.
Khawaja Asif, the country’s defence minister in name, rushed to blame the neigbhours in a social media post as he suggested the bombing “revealed collusion between India and Afghanistan”. Later, the Islamic State claimed the attack with a picture of the bomber along with his nom de guerre.
However, this could not stop the damning public derision for official statements of sympathy or their renewed commitment to safeguard public. Many commentators online sarcastically noted, it is astonishing how a mastermind in Afghanistan is identified, and a foreign intelligence agency implicated, within hours of an attack, while the massive logistical operation to smuggle explosives into the federal capital somehow went entirely undetected.
This credibility gap is now a chasm.
The public’s cynicism is not born in a vacuum. It is the product of a security apparatus that appears meticulously geared towards monitoring politicians, journalists, judges, and civilians—collecting “sensitive footage” for political leverage, as military commanders have brazenly boasted—while seemingly incapable of intercepting genuine terror plots.
When the state’s immense surveillance capability is directed inwards to control dissent rather than outwards to ensure security, citizens draw their own conclusions.
The recent, dismissive claim by Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi—that terrorists are so insignificant they could be handled by a local Station House Officer (SHO) - had less shelf life than a carton of milk as the Baloch insurgents from BLA caused a public spectacle, both in awe and fear, as they launched coordinated attacks across a dozen cities.
The war-like situation lasted for days amid public curfew and blanket ban on reportage from the ground. With the latest terror attack in Islamabad, Naqvi’s boastful comments not only ring hollow but sound insulting as well.
The criticism is broadening and striking at previously sacrosanct institutions. From Maulvi Fazlur Rehman’s direct call for the military to leave politics and focus on its constitutional duty, to the searing sarcasm of activists recalling Asma Jehangir’s description of the generals as “duffers,” a new boldness is evident.
The Pashtun community, which has borne the brutal brunt of both terrorism and counter-terror operations for decades, offers particularly cogent analysis. Figures like Qasim Khan Suri, the former deputy speaker of parliament, openly called the so-called anti-terrorism war as the “dollari jang” (war for dollars). This articulates a widespread belief that the cycle of violence has been perpetuated to secure foreign funding, US dollars to be precise, not to establish genuine security but to grease the wheels of corruption that is run methodically by the army.
There is an overwhelming consensus among Pashtun public, activists and intellectuals that the anti-terror operations that have been going on for the past two and a half decades is being fought deliberately to attract the US funds. That is why in the street speak, it is being called the 'dollari jang'”, Suri said in his Urdu tweet that he issued from the US where he is currently working as an Uber driver as the military back home has ceased his properties and agricultural lands.
Some Pashtuns are even making calls for an “operation in Islamabad” is a bitter satire, highlighting the disproportionate, collective-punishment tactics often employed in their own regions. Bilal Khan Afridi @TirahWalMama in his tweet demanded that the public in the federal capital city should be treated like the people of Tirah and Kurram, and subjected to a military operation for giving refuge to the terrorists.
Skirting Security Lapse Questions
The recovery of the bomber’s ID card—a Pakistani from Peshawar—has only deepened the questions. As the Afghan commentator Burhan Uddin pointedly asked, if borders have been sealed for months, how did this attacker arrive? If he was already here, how was he not on the radar?
The questions are logical, and the state has no convincing answers. Aina Dukhanai, a London-based Pashtun commentator, in her Urdu tweet, wonders how every suicide bomber’s ID card in Pakistan is recovered timely and in good condition after every suicide bombing incident. She ends with a sarcastic question addressing the army: "Ek hi script kitni bar istimal karogay, duffers"? How many times would you use the same script, duffers?
This crisis is no longer merely about terrorism. It is about a fundamental failure of governance and a catastrophic loss of legitimacy. The ruling elite—an uneasy fusion of military-backed factotums and the khaki establishment itself—is seen as a self-serving cabal, more invested in political engineering and personal enrichment than in the welfare of the citizenry.
The demand, growing louder by the day, is simple yet revolutionary: the military must retreat to the barracks and focus exclusively on providing the security for which it consumes a lion’s share of national resources. The political space must be ceded to genuine, accountable stakeholders.
Army Chief General Asim Munir stands at a precipice.
The path of continued political manipulation and scripted blame games leads only to further division, violence, and the potential unravelling of the state’s fabric. The other path requires a humbling but necessary retreat: to allow a legitimate political process to restructure a system that currently benefits only a few who “assemble monies and then leave for their islands,” abandoning the people to the disaster they created.
The latest blood spill in the Islamabad mosque demands more than the usual thoughts, prayers, and recycled scripts. It demands a fundamental reordering of Pakistan’s priorities—from controlling its people to securing them, from managing narratives to upholding truth, and from serving the interests of a powerful few to answering the desperate calls of its many. The nation’s future stability depends on which choice is made.
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