PAKISTAN and India are closer to war than ever before despite a fragile ceasefire, PPP Chairman Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari has warned, calling the situation in the region “incredibly perilous” and the threshold for full-scale conflict “dangerously low”.
Mr Bhutto-Zardari, also a former foreign minister, said that on the final day of last month’s deadly clashes, India deployed a dual-use cruise missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead, forcing Pakistan to make a split-second decision on whether it was under nuclear attack.
“In that atmosphere you’ve got only a few seconds to decide looking at an image: is this missile going to be used within the nuclear connotation or not? And in those split seconds, decisions are made,” he told The Sunday Times during a visit to London.
“We’ve achieved a ceasefire, but we haven’t achieved peace. And that’s problematic because following this recent conflict, we have lowered the threshold for full-blown military conflict to the lowest it has ever been, to what I believe are dangerously low levels,” he added.
Mr Bhutto-Zardari’s warning came as the United States entered Israel’s war with Iran while managing another potential conflict in South Asia.
Last Wednesday, Mr Trump hosted Chief of the Army Staff (COAS) Field Marshal Asim Munir for a closed-door lunch at the White House — the first time a US president has hosted a Pakistani military chief who was not also head of state.
“The reason I had him (COAS) here was that I wanted to thank him for not going into the war [with India],” said Mr Trump. “And I want to thank PM [Narendra] Modi as well, who just left a few days ago.”
Pakistan has said that although outright war between the two nuclear-armed rivals was narrowly averted by US intervention last month — after the deadliest fighting in decades — the conflict is far from resolved.
The PPP chairman arrived in London at the head of a nine-member parliamentary delegation sent by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif to “pitch for peace” and push for international talks to resolve the Kashmir dispute.
He said Pakistan agreed to the ceasefire because it was promised such a summit, which has yet to take place.
“At a time where the Pakistani army believes that we had a military upper hand in the conflict, we agreed to a ceasefire because we believed there was a commitment from the United States that we’d go on to have a dialogue in a neutral location on all friction points,” he said.
“Now that isn’t happening. We don’t want the international community to get a false sense of ease as a result of the ceasefire. There’s still a very real threat,” he added.
Mr Bhutto-Zardari also insisted Pakistan had no role in the Pahalgam attack, which was initially claimed — then retracted — by a little-known group, the Resistance Front, which India claims is linked to Lashkar-e-Taiba. “To this day, they [the Indian government] haven’t provided the Indian public, their allies, or us, or the media, with names of the individuals involved in this attack,” he said.
He admitted Pakistan has “a credibility problem” but argued things have changed. “This credibility and perception problem is rooted in deep biases, tainted by Islamophobia, and obfuscates our actual effort to combat terrorism,” he said.
He also accused the West of worsening Pakistan’s security situation by abandoning Afghanistan and “leaving a vacuum” there.
“The rest of the world may have moved on from Afghanistan and exited Kabul, but we’re fighting terrorism from there,” he said. “The single largest number of terrorist attacks anywhere in the world is in Pakistan.”
