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Captured Pakistani national in J&K identified as terrorist guide, interrogation on

Captured Pakistani national in J&K identified as terrorist guide, interrogation on

The Hindua day ago

A Pakistani national arrested along the Line of Control (LoC) near Jammu and Kashmir's border districts of Poonch and Rajouri while attempting to infiltrate into India is a terrorist guide, officials said on Monday (June 30, 2025).
Mohammed Arif was leading a group of four Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) terrorists into India when he was overpowered and arrested by alert Army troops on Sunday (June 29) afternoon. The terrorists with him jumped from a steep cliff and returned to the Pakistani side with injuries, the officials said.
Arif, a resident of Datote village in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK), was arrested from the forward Hajura post in Gambhir area under the Army's Ace of Spades division, they added. Recapping the events of the day, they said vigilant troops, maintaining an aggressive surveillance posture in the rugged terrain, detected suspicious movement of a group of suspected terrorists attempting to exploit the difficult terrain and dense foliage in order to infiltrate.
While Arif, in his late 20s, was "tactfully captured", the four terrorists jumped off the cliff when they noticed the Indian Army. They landed in 'No Man's Land' and returned to Pakistani side under the cover of thick foliage and adverse weather conditions, the officials said.
Army troops could not open fire on the terrorists due to the presence of Pakistani posts nearby, they said. Drone footage of the area showed a blood trail, indicating that the terrorists had suffered injuries due to the fall.
Arif was in possession of a mobile phone and some ₹20,000 in Pakistani currency and told his interrogators he was aware of the topography of the area as he is a resident of the Line of Control on the Pakistani side and working at the behest of Pakistani Army to help the terrorists to infiltrate into the Indian side, the officials said.
They said the terrorist guide is undergoing detailed interrogation and crucial intelligence is being extracted. This will help in further strengthening the counter-infiltration grid.
The successful counter-infiltration operation underscores the unwavering resolve and professional prowess of the Indian Army in safeguarding the national borders, the officials said, adding that the swift detection, effective response, and successful apprehension of a guide speak volumes about the high state of operational readiness and coordinated efforts of the troops deployed along the LoC.
They said the Indian Army remained committed to thwarting all attempts by inimical forces to disturb peace and tranquility in the region.

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Vendetta Republic: Minorities, women, justice under siege in Yunus's Bangladesh

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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)

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