logo
Pakistan General Ridiculed For Claiming Islamabad Used Own Resources During Conflict With India

Pakistan General Ridiculed For Claiming Islamabad Used Own Resources During Conflict With India

India.com03-06-2025

ISLAMABAD: Even as leading warfare experts across the world have exposed Pakistan's massive strategic failures, at the same time also giving a detailed account of failure of Chinese systems during India's decisive Operation Sindoor last month, a Pakistani four-star General has claimed that the country fought the recent 96-hour conflict with India using only its own resources.
"Pakistan has purchased some military equipment from other countries, but apart from that, in real time, the country relied solely on its internal capabilities and did not receive any help from any other state," General Sahir Burkabal Shamshad Mirza, currently serving as the 18th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee (CJCSC), told a foreign broadcaster in a recent interview, details of which appeared in the Pakistani media on Tuesday.
He also mentioned that the weapons used by Pakistan in the recent conflict were "certainly similar" to those available to India. Mirza was ridiculed over his comments with analysts reiterating that Pakistan has an old habit of spreading lies and even present doctored clips to prove a point.
"Pakistan lies to another State, as well as to its own people with deleterious consequences. The whole world knows now how Osama-bin-Laden was kept in a secured house in the Abbottabad Military Cantonment just 1.3 kms from Pakistan Military Academy in Kakul," said one expert.
Last week, in his extensive analysis titled 'India's Operation Sindoor: A Battlefield Verdict on Chinese Weapons — And India's Victory', top urban warfare expert John Spencer reckoned that Operation Sindoor wasn't just a military campaign but a technology demonstration, a market signal, and a strategic blueprint.
"Operation Sindoor pitted India's indigenously developed weapons systems against Chinese-supplied platforms fielded by Pakistan. And, India didn't just win on the battlefield — it won the technology referendum. What unfolded was not just retaliation, but the strategic debut of a sovereign arsenal built under the twin doctrines of Make in India and Atmanirbhar Bharat," Spencer mentioned.
According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), Pakistan gets 81 per cent of its weapons from China. Pakistan operates Chinese origin HQ-9 long range and the HQ-16 medium range Air Defence Systems (ADS).
During Operation Sindoor, Spencer wrote, the JF-17 Thunder aircraft - produced in Pakistan but designed and built by China's AVIC - failed to gain air superiority or contest Indian strikes.
Similarly, the LY-80 and FM-90 air defence systems, also Chinese-made, were unable to detect or stop India's low-flying drones and precision munitions. Several reports indicated that China was providing real-time reconssaiance data to Pakistan during the conflict, thereby putting Chinese arms in a live combat setting.
In recent years, Turkey has emerged as a reliable supplier of defence equipment to Pakistan, sending the MILGEM-class corvettes, T129 ATAK helicopters, Bayraktar TB2 and Akinci drones. Pakistan also imports weapons from countries like South Africa, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Belgium.
"Reports emerged that Turkish drone operators had to be brought in to manage UAVs — revealing both equipment and personnel dependency... Pakistan's key airborne early warning platform, Swedish Saab 2000 AEW&C, was destroyed — likely by an S-400 system — crippling Pakistan's airspace awareness and blinding command and control functions," said Spencer.

Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

EAM Jaishankar gives firsthand account to refute Trump's claims on ceasefire
EAM Jaishankar gives firsthand account to refute Trump's claims on ceasefire

Hans India

time21 minutes ago

  • Hans India

EAM Jaishankar gives firsthand account to refute Trump's claims on ceasefire

New York: With his firsthand account of the talks between New Delhi and Washington, External Affairs Minister (EAM) S. Jaishankar has dismissed the claims of US President Donald Trump that he used trade to force India and Pakistan to accept a ceasefire. He said on Monday that he was with Prime Minister Narendra Modi when US Vice President J.D. Vance spoke to him by phone, and there was no linking of trade and ceasefire as far as India was concerned. "I can tell you that I was in the room when Vice President Vance spoke to Prime Minister Modi on the night of May 9, saying that the Pakistanis would launch a very massive assault on India," he said. "We did not accept certain things," he said, "and the Prime Minister was impervious to what the Pakistanis were threatening to do." "On the contrary, he (PM Modi) indicated that there would be a response from us," he said, giving the chronology of interactions. "The Pakistanis did attack us massively that night, (and) we responded very quickly," he recalled. The next contact with Washington was between the EAM and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio. "And the next morning, Mr. Rubio called me up and said the Pakistanis were ready to talk," he said. Pakistan's Director General of Military Operations, Major General Kashif Abdullah, directly called his Indian counterpart, Lieutenant General Rajiv Ghai, that afternoon to ask for a ceasefire. "So, I can only tell you from my personal experience what happened," Jaishankar said while speaking at a fireside chat here with Newsweek's CEO Dev Pragad. He was asked about Trump's repeated claims that he used trade to get the neighbours to agree to a ceasefire after the escalation of India's Operation Sindoor in May. Last Wednesday, at a news conference in The Hague, Trump said again, despite India's denials, "I ended that with a series of phone calls on trade." "I said, 'Look, if you're gonna go fighting each other ... we're not doing any trade deal,'" he said. They responded that "You have to do a trade deal," the US President asserted. Jaishankar said that was not what happened, and diplomacy and trade were not interlinked and operated independently of each other. "I think the trade people are doing what the trade people should be doing, which is negotiate with numbers and lines and products and do their tradeoffs," he said. "I think they're very professional and very, very focused," he added. Operation Sindoor was launched by India against terrorist bases in Pakistan in retaliation for the Pahalgam terrorist attack by The Resistance Front, an outfit linked to Pakistan-supported Lashkar-e-Taiba.

Pakistan suffers violence of its own making. West's refusal to learn is even more tragic
Pakistan suffers violence of its own making. West's refusal to learn is even more tragic

The Print

time26 minutes ago

  • The Print

Pakistan suffers violence of its own making. West's refusal to learn is even more tragic

This incident – one of the deadliest single-day attacks on Pakistani security forces in recent months in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa – is emblematic of the persistent instability that has gripped North Waziristan, a region long regarded as a stronghold for militant groups such as the TTP. Claimed by the suicide bomber wing of the Hafiz Gul Bahadur faction of Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), the attack, at first glance, is but another episode in the grim ledger of the subcontinent's senseless bloodletting; yet to treat it as such is to miss the deeper, tragic direction of Pakistan's politics. This is the latest manifestation of a fatal logic that has long guided Pakistan's suicidal statecraft and self-delusion In the arid valleys of North Waziristan, where the dust hangs heavy and silence is often broken by the thud of helicopter blades or the distant crackle of gunfire, a convoy of Pakistani soldiers met their tragic end. Sixteen men, extinguished in a single assault by a suicide bomber's calculated violence. Despite repeated counterinsurgency operations and government pledges to restore peace, the area remains a flashpoint for insurgent violence. The latest assault reflects not only the resilience and adaptability of these militant networks but also the enduring challenges faced by Pakistan's security apparatus since the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan. Also read: India didn't create Bangladesh. Shehbaz Sharif forgets how Pakistan sowed the seeds Pakistan: a study in contradiction The cycle of militant violence in North Waziristan is the reverberation of a deeper, historical dissonance – snowballing because of strategic miscalculations and unresolved grievances – that continues to shape, and perhaps distort, Pakistan's trajectory. Pakistan has always been a study in contradiction – a nation forged in the fires of British India's Partition, steeped in trauma and displacement, yet perpetually seeking coherence through the manipulation of identity and enmity. It is a militarised polity defined less by what it is than by what it is not – not India, not secular, not reconciled. In this desperate search for national cohesion, the architects of the state turned to the expedient tools of religious fundamentalism and proxy warfare. The attack in North Waziristan is thus the harvest of seeds sown over decades: a policy of nurturing militant groups as instruments of strategic depth, first against the Soviets in Afghanistan, then against India in Kashmir. Once tactically useful, these groups now turn upon their erstwhile patron in Rawalpindi with the cold logic of history's recurring ironies. Folly in governance is not merely an error; it is the deliberate pursuit of policies contrary to self-interest, even when their consequences are manifest and mounting. The Pakistani military's double game – proclaiming itself a victim of terror while abetting its architects – has produced a landscape where the boundaries between state and non-state, between friend and foe, have been blurred to the point of absurdity. The North Waziristan suicide bombing is thus not a rupture, but a fulfilment. The Pakistani state's own monsters, having tasted blood, now feast upon their creators without any shame or restraint. If Pakistan's duplicity is the proximate cause of its turmoil, the West's strategic myopia is its indispensable enabler. The American embrace of the Pakistani military during the Cold War and again during the War on Terror was animated not by trust, but by expedience – a willingness to overlook Islamabad's flirtations with jihadist ideology so long as those ideologies bled in directions favourable to Washington. Western diplomacy often operates on the dangerous assumption that alliances of convenience can be sustained without moral or strategic cost. It is this blindness – this transactional hubris – that allowed the Pakistani military to thrive in duplicity, to wear the mask of an ally while undermining the very goals it pretended to pursue. Also read: Pakistan's attempt to mobilise anti-Taliban leaders is misguided, dangerous Confront the monsters within The March 2025 attack by the Baloch Liberation Army on Jaffar Express, killing scores of innocent passengers, also offers a grim counterpoint to the North Waziristan carnage – a reminder that Pakistan's crisis is not merely religious or ideological. It is also ethnic, economic, and political. Long marginalised and brutalised, the Baloch have found in violence the only language Rawalpindi seems to understand. The grievances are not obscure: decades of resource extraction without benefit, political exclusion from the corridors of power, and the suffocating embrace of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), which transforms Balochistan into a logistical backyard for Beijing while its people remain dispossessed. And yet, the state responds not with reform, but repression; not with dialogue, but with drone strikes and disinformation. The narrative of external enemies – India, the West, Zionists – is cultivated like a national crop, while the internal rot deepens. Amid this maelstrom, the promotion of anti-India hatred remains the Pakistani elite's most dependable tool of social control. As exemplified by the Pahalgam attack, proxy terror against India is not merely a matter of policy – it is the glue that binds a fractured polity, the narcotic that numbs the masses to their own dispossession. A nation that defines itself by perpetual grievance can never know peace, only escalation. What emerges from this picture is not simply chaos, but folly – of a state that, in seeking security through duplicity, has rendered itself insecure; of a society manipulated into perpetual mobilisation against imagined enemies, while the real threats fester within. Instead of confronting the internal rot, Islamabad went to ridiculous lengths to accuse New Delhi of orchestrating the attack through a proxy outfit – a claim India swiftly and contemptuously rejected. Pakistan's persistent attempts to externalise blame on every internal security failure only serve to expose its duplicity in combating terrorism. And as demonstrated by India's refusal to sign the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) joint statement after Pakistan and China blocked strong language on terrorism, the world remains complicit through its silence and convenience. India, ever the target, is vindicated in its warnings. Pakistan's tragedy is not that it suffers violence, but that it suffers violence of its own making. And more tragically, the West – having seen this play before – refuses to learn anything. The ghosts of past alliances, broken promises, and abandoned morals now haunt the corridors of global power, yet the lessons remain unread. Pakistan's present agony is the fruit of choices made in defiance of prudence and morality. For the West, especially the United States, the refusal to confront this duplicity will haunt them still – as surely as the ghosts of Kabul now haunt Washington. India, for its part, must remain vigilant. It faces not merely a hostile neighbour, but a neighbour at war with itself – a far more unpredictable, unreasonable, and dangerous adversary. The reckoning, when it comes, will not be confined to the mountains of Waziristan or the treacherous passes of the Hindu Kush. It will echo through the capitals of the world, a thunderclap of warning. In geopolitics, as in life, the wages of folly are always paid with interest. Vinay Kaura is Assistant Professor, Department of International Affairs and Security Studies, at the Sardar Patel University of Police, Security and Criminal Justice in Rajasthan. Views are personal. (Edited by Zoya Bhatti)

'There will be framework': Dalai Lama hints succession plan ahead of 90th birthday
'There will be framework': Dalai Lama hints succession plan ahead of 90th birthday

First Post

time27 minutes ago

  • First Post

'There will be framework': Dalai Lama hints succession plan ahead of 90th birthday

Ahead of his 90th birthday this week, Tibetan leader the Dalai Lama has said that there will be some kind of a framework for the continuation of the institution after his death. He is expected to outline his succession plan around his birthday. read more Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama greets devotees as he arrives at the Tsuglakhang temple in Dharmsala, India, Tuesday, Aug. 29, 2017. (Photo: AP) The Dalai Lama will address a major three-day gathering of Buddhist religious figures this week ahead of his 90th birthday, as his followers wait for the Tibetan spiritual leader to share details about his succession in a move that could irk China. Beijing views the Dalai Lama, who fled Tibet in 1959 after a failed uprising against Chinese rule, as a separatist and says it will choose his successor. The Dalai Lama has said his successor will be born outside China and urged his followers to reject anyone chosen by Beijing. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD Tibetan Buddhists hold that enlightened monks are reborn to carry forward their spiritual legacy. The 14th Dalai Lama will turn 90 on Sunday and has said he would consult senior monks and others at this time to share possible clues on where his successor, a boy or a girl, could be found following his death. 'The rest of my life I will dedicate for the benefit of others, as much as possible, as extensive as possible,' the Dalai Lama told a gathering of his followers on Monday as they offered prayers for his long life. 'There will be some kind of a framework within which we can talk about the continuation of the institution of the Dalai Lamas,' he said, without elaborating on the framework. He has previously said he could possibly reincarnate in India, where he lives in exile near the northern Himalayan town of Dharamshala. He was identified as the reincarnation of his predecessor when he was two. Dolma Tsering Teykhang, the deputy speaker of the Tibetan parliament-in-exile in Dharamshala, said it was important for the world to hear directly from the Dalai Lama on the issue because while China 'tries to vilify him at every chance … it is trying to frame rules and regulations on how to have the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama in their hand'. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD 'China is trying to grab this institution … for its political purpose,' she said. 'We want the incarnation of the Dalai Lama to be born not only for the survival of Tibet as a distinct culture, religion and nation, but also for the well-being of the whole humanity.' Thupten Ngodup, Tibet's chief state oracle, said typically such discussions on the reincarnation do not take place when a monk is still alive but things are different now mainly because the 'Chinese government is interfering'. Beijing said in March that the Dalai Lama was a political exile who had 'no right to represent the Tibetan people at all'. China has said it is open to discussing his future if he recognises that Tibet and Taiwan are inalienable parts of China, a proposal the Tibetan government in exile has rejected. 'As if he's not there' The religious conference this week, being held for the first time since 2019, will be attended by more than 100 Tibetan Buddhist leaders and will feature a video statement from the Dalai Lama. Hollywood star Richard Gere, a long-time follower of Tibetan Buddhism, will be among those attending, organisers have said. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD The Dalai Lama will attend prayers called by the Tibetan government in exile on July 5 and participate in his birthday celebrations a day later, according to a schedule shared by the organisers. He will speak at the celebrations for about half an hour. India's parliamentary affairs minister, Kiren Rijiju, and some other Indian officials are expected to attend. Tibetans have been praying for his long health, especially since knee surgery in the U.S. last year, although the Dalai Lama told Reuters in December that he could live until he was 110. The previous Dalai Lama died earlier than expected at 58. The Dalai Lama and Tibetan officials say there is a system in place for the government-in-exile to continue its political work while officers of the Dalai Lama's Gaden Phodrang Foundation search and recognise the next Dalai Lama. The current Dalai Lama set up the foundation in 2015 and its senior officers include several of his aides. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD Teykhang and other Tibetan officials said the Dalai Lama has been preparing his people for the day when he is gone, especially through his 2011 decision to hand his political role to a democratically elected government, ending a 368-year-old tradition of being both spiritual and temporal head of Tibetans. 'Since he has come in the form of a human, we have to agree that there will be a moment when he is not with us,' said Teykhang. 'His Holiness has really prepared us for that day, he made us act as if he's not there.' (This is an agency copy. Except for the headline, the copy has not been edited by Firstpost staff.)

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into a world of global content with local flavor? Download Daily8 app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store